"For a long time I didn't tell anyone about any of the things that I had done - it was always 'mystery ... mystery'. But there was really a point behind it, and that was if people heard about what I had done before then they wouldn't take an interest in the music. I didn't even tell Stiff anything: Andy (Murray - Stiff's press officer) kept screaming at me because I wouldn't say anything in the biogs, and everybody wants to know. I don't mind saying it now because I think that now people will listen to the music."
Thus it seemed appropriate that for this article we should concentrate on the music of Lene Lovich, merely referring to her background as and when it appears relevant to the lady's music. We began by discussing 'Say When', which a lot of reviewers seemed to think had been re-recorded:
"It was remixed. A lot of people have said it was completely re-recorded, but that's not true. A lot of the reviews have slagged me off, saying, 'Now, this is really commercial.' But, in fact, all those things were there all the time, it was just that you could never hear them. All the synthesiser riffs which sound a bit 'space-aged fairground-ish' were there all the time. It's just that when we did the album we didn't know anything about mixing - we really didn't. Les, myself and Roger Bechirian (the engineer) did it all ourselves. I guess the engineer didn't really know what we wanted and we didn't know anything about it, so we whammed all the faders up. Everything is there all the time and, consequently, the sound is like one unit rather than hearing each individual thing at a particular moment. Now we know that, and I think we've learned so much in the last few months that we really wanted to try and let people hear these things that were on the record. Dave Robinson warned me when he heard the mix, he said, 'Well, a lot of people aren't going to like that', and I just said, 'But I like it'. Music seems to be supposed to be so serious, but I think you can be serious and still enjoy it - I really do. And I want to, I want to have a good time. But I think it suits the number, so it's very up-front."
On the flip side of the 12" version of the single are two new tracks by Lene which are otherwise unavailable. The first is 'One Lonely Heart', a slow ballad full of all those Eastern European echoes which writers strain to find in almost all her work. Acoustic guitar is mated with a synthesiser bass line and little flurries of trilling electronics. There is a timeless quality to it; it is at once completely contemporary and yet harks back to older musical ideas with its pre-war echoes. 'Big Bird' follows; over a synthesiser bass part melody lines rise are answered by rhythmic distorted saxophone figures. It's an instrumental which points, perhaps, to new areas of activity for Lene. This side of the record seems to highlight two contrasting aspects of her music: the ongoing instrumental and a ballad that seems to epitomise the image that has been built around her ... perhaps it's a little tongue-in-cheek.
"They're brand new songs. As you know we've been nipping backwards and forwards to places in Europe doing TV shows and things like that. Then Stiff said, 'We should really release another single now', so I said, 'Well, OK, but if you're going to take another one off the album I think we should have something special on the B-side.' So they said, 'Yeah, but we've got all these things organised', and I said, 'So, we'll do it now', 'But you've only got two days', and I said, 'We'll do it'. So we did it. One is a real song and the other is perhaps more experimental, and perhaps it has more potential in the future when we get a band together.
"Those tracks were just done by Les and myself. There are no other musicians. It was recorded at Alvic Studios in Wimbledon, which is an eight track studio and really good. We just went in there, we had a fair idea of how the first one should go because we'd worked mostly on that, and the second one we more-or-less developed as we went along.
"I think people will only think of 'One Lonely Heart' as tongue-in-cheek because most people don't do that kind of music. But it's not like that at all - it was completely serious. I know a lot of people think a lot of my ideas are a little bit jokey, but they're not, they're not at all. I'm completely serious about it. It's really just melodies that I have in my head. You see, I really don't believe in controlling your imagination so much that you say, 'Oh, I can't do that, it's too silly'. If you have an idea it comes to your head so you do it. It's like having the courage to try and do my real ideas, not my real ideas toned down by my fear of what other people might think of them. I think it's a good idea to be like that.
"Kids, when they're walking down the street, if they feel like running then they run, or if they come to a wall they might jump on it and walk along the wall ... And yet you wouldn't necessarily see a forty-year-old man suddenly running down the street - people would think he was crazy. But I think it's a shame because we're so trapped within our own conditioning.
"Of course, you can't be totally free all the time. I don't think that it's right to be free to hurt other people. But when you can be a little bit free, why not?
"Most songs come from a spontaneous idea, which can be anything: a word, a riff Les plays on guitar, I can hear something, see something or experience something which just triggers off the chain of events. But that chain is always different, so it's very difficult to explain how songs happen. What always does happen is that the idea is very small and it gradually gets built up into a song."
The B-side of the latest single provides examples of both methods of working, but does Lene generally have songs worked out beforehand or are these ideas usually worked up in the studio?
"A little bit of both really, to be honest. I like to think that I'm almost in control, but that there's always that element of 'who knows?' ... somebody might play something a little bit different to how I imagined it in the first place, but if I think it's better then I'll use it."
Since the Be Stiff tour Lene had been working more-or-less non-stop. The Be Stiff tour itself was a very extended tour and then she went straight into her own headlining tour followed by various other promotional trips; how has this affected her songwriting?
"I'd like to be able to say that I can still do it, but I only really come up with good ideas when my brain is fresh. I know I'm the opposite to a lot of people, but first thing in the morning is the best time for me. Especially, I think, before your consciousness takes over too much and puts those little stops in the way. I think that's the best time to do it; it's not the only time, of course."
'Stateless', Lene's only album to date, gives a good indication of her main attributes as a songwriter, with its wide range of subjects and moods. It is, in fact, an album of great control and diversity. Both top ten singles (plus the initial release 'I Think We're Alone Now') are widely enough known to not warrant further comment here. Elsewhere the music ranges from the shifting musical densities of 'Sleeping Beauty' which frame a central slow section where the emphasis of the song is more clearly revealed to revolve about the idea of reincarnation, to the gurdy transparency of 'Home'. 'Too Tender (To Touch)' is another of those mid-tempo songs which immediately takes hold of you, and you feel that you've known the song forever, complete with its sinuous melodic line and chattering castanets; this is one of her real strengths, the ability to both stimulate and transmit this feeling that her songs are forgotten classics that have been perched in the back of the listener's mind since you can't remember when (it's an ability that was also part of Kevin Ayers' appeal and that of Slapp Happy's first two albums). It's a feeling that is also generated by 'Momentary Breakdown', with its haunted vocal. 'One in 1,000,000' is a celebration of found love with ecstatically chirruping choruses whilst 'Writing on the Wall' is the reverse side of the coin.
At this point, to avoid the danger of doing the man a disservice, it should be pointed out that Les Chappell clocks in with co-writing credits on all their self-penned material. I asked Lene what the main influences on her writing had been.
"It's funny, I never really thought about it until people asked me this question. I suppose growing up in Detroit was quite an influence on me. People say, 'Ah, Detroit - Motown', but actually Motown was Detroit and Detroit was Motown, as far as the musical scene goes. Everyone in my neighbourhood and in my school was very pro-Motown. It was our music: I mean, when Stevie Wonder first came out we really wanted him to succeed because he was like one of us. And we really wanted Motown to do well, we liked all the songs and we used to sing them on the bus on the way to school. We'd play games with the songs and things like that. It gets very hot in Detroit in the summertime and everyone just hangs around outside because you can't sleep, and we used to mock impressions of these vocal groups (which was great fun, but it must have sounded horrendous). That obviously had an initial influence on my music because that was really the first music I understood as a person who just listens to the radio.
"The other thing is that my father was very keen on classical music, mostly Slavic and Russian composers, which he used to play very loud. So we used to have the 'March Slav' by Tchaikovsky, which he used to play over and over again. I know all of it by heart even now although I haven't heard it for a while. Classical music is great because you can imagine so many things - I use to stand on the chair and pretend to be the director - and there's all these heavy themes that come thundering along. In his nicer moments my father would make up a story as he went along of what the music was about. But most of the time it was pretty horrific; my father was a little bit unbalanced (I mean, that's the kindest thing I can say about it because we had real difficulties at home) and eventually my mother ran away. So I suppose that gets embedded in your mind, but I never actually sat down and listened to anything with the idea that I wanted to be a musician. It was all subliminal really.
"Also, quite strangely, there were show tunes from 'South Pacific', and things like that ... it used to get blasted out really loud."
However, songwriting in earnest seems to have a comparatively recent activity for Lene and Les; for example, it has been reported that 'I Think We're Alone Now' was put out as the first single because there wasn't any original material available.
"That's true, but it wasn't really the reason.
"After I'd been in this soul/pre-disco band (The Diversions) for about two years we'd had a lot of messing about by record companies and it was pretty horrendous so I just took off. I was still under contract but I could see that nobody could do anything for us; the band's morale had shot right down. It was a shame, but there you go. It wasn't really my band anyway, but I was enjoying learning and being involved in a working band, and I believe that we deserved more than we actually got.
"I took off, I went to Europe, working with a dance band mainly, touring around. It was quite interesting but it was also very hard to take because you were totally ignored as an individual on stage. You could have done anything: take all your clothes off and stand on your head - and still no-one would notice. It was a unit formed in England, but it had two Swedish people in it as well. But we worked very hard, we worked five hours a night (until three o'clock in the morning) with a ten minute break every hour. We did tangos, waltzes, rock 'n' roll, disco, pop, and ... everything; including anything anyone requested. But we did have an interesting time observing the activities on the dance floor! I learned a lot, but I came back and I was really out of touch. I didn't know anybody, but I wanted to get into another band. I'd saved some money, Les and I got together, we bought a tape recorder and we just started to write our own stuff. Up until then I wasn't really that confident that I could do anything. I'd written lyrics for things but I'd never written songs with the idea that they were for me to sing, mostly because I'd been told that I couldn't sing and nobody liked anything that I did anyway. But I thought, 'Well, we've got the money now to make some demos.'
"And I rang up the Charlie Gillett show: he used to have a programme called 'Honky Tonk' and he had this place on the show where anyone could ring up. A lot of musicians listened to the show and maybe I thought that there might be a band out there that could use a little sax.
"So I left my telephone number, and then nobody rang up; I thought that at least I'd get a few rude phone calls! So I wrote Charlie a letter, and he was getting a band together for a songwriter that he'd found (Bobby Henry). So I got together with Charlie and it was his suggestion that I did 'I Think We're Alone Now', because I think that it had always been one of his favourite pop tunes. He'd never heard a girl do it before and he thought that it might be an interesting idea. We'd formed this big band with three singers and varying numbers of guitarists (I'd got Les and Bobby Irwin from the Strutters into the band) and it was basically to do this songwriter's ideas. But also, in order to make up the set, we put in some old soul hits and I sang 'I Think We're Alone Now'. We rehearsed together and it sounded awful. Not because people were playing badly but because there were three different ways in which the band was being pulled. Bobby, Les and I were pulling it in one direction - quite unconsciously, it wasn't a nasty effort to control the band or anything; it's just that people's ideas were naturally different. So, in the end, we decided the most sensible thing to do was to split the project three ways.
"We finished the demo that I'd started and I guess that when Charlie heard it he really thought that I should be with Stiff. He took me to see Dave Robinson and we played the demo and Dave said he liked it a lot so they took me on. About the same time that it was released they had the idea of doing the Be Stiff tour so it wasn't really worked on and promoted in the way that normal records are here at Stiff. We didn't want to take attention from the fact that I was doing an album and that maybe something more interesting would come out of it. We had to get this song together for the B-side really quick, so we wrote 'Lucky Number'; it was a very primitive version of it, but I think that the potential was there."
Eventually, of course 'Lucky Number' had another verse added to it, was re-recorded and released as an A-side in its own right. Had Lene been surprised when it turned out to be a hit single?
"Yes - I was surprised really. I was never sure how the etablished music people - the radio people and that - would take it. I never really thought about it because it happened so quickly, although it didn't happen quickly as far as my career was concerned because I'd been learning and trying and experimenting for some time. This was the first time that I'd really done my own music and I thought that it might take a bit longer for people to accept it.
"But I think that the idea of the Be Stiff tour was a really good way of getting through to a lot of people. I know we all only played for half-an-hour each, but we did play in a lot of different places around the country. Then we put what we thought were the strongest live tracks on the record, which was 'Lucky Number' on the A-side and 'Home' on the B-side, because we thought the two together might be interesting to people who saw the gigs.
"The idea of the train was really marvellous - it really did take the strain off us. And we were all really different artists whereas on the first tour the plane of music that they were into was very, very similar. Then, the tendencies to be jealous and very competitive in a very personal way comes to the fore because they were too close to each other musically. But we were all wildly different, for example Rachel (Sweet) and I were totally opposite.
The other thing was - all joking aside - that we had respect for each other and people were more concerned with the show as a whole. We knew that if we didn't make it then Stiff and everything would go down the drain because there was such a lot of money invested in it."
At present Lene has no regular band; after the Be Stiff tour the band she had then went its own way and another was enrolled for her own tour. Why had she not, as yet, settled on a fixed line-up?
"The first band that I had together was not my band, it was people that we'd known for a long time in London. They were a band that used to be called the Strutters, but they've reformed and they're now called the Sinceros. I knew it wouldn't be too difficult on the rhythmic side of things even though I was sometimes having to ask them to do totally the opposite of what they would normally do. I knew that I could communicate with those guys really well, and it was convenient because they were just getting their project together but they weren't quite ready to get involved full-time in their own thing. So I did the Be Stiff tour and went to America (for the couple of Be Stiff tour dates) with them.
"Then for the next tour I got a new band together (but still always with Les) and they were all very good individuals but as a unit they were really on different wavelengths rhythmically. And that was difficult. The gigs were good but I knew there was that hesitancy in the rhythm and that we couldn't quite make as strong an impression as we should have done. So we finished the tour, and I had one more live-to-air show to do in Germany [Note: "Bio's Bahnhof", 08-Mar-1979] (which is always a horrendous occasion: a totally live hour-and-a-half variety show with opera singers, ballet dancers, disco singers ... everything) and the one number that we'd not been doing so well live was 'Lucky Number', and that was the number that they wanted us to do. I began to get more and more worried about the idea and well, I told the band straightforwardly that I didn't think that we could come over so well in Germany. We'd just finished the tour and we left it like that. I'd still use them all as individuals in the future, but together it wasn't the right combination. I'm not angry or upset with them in any way.
"We had Germany to do, and the final gig at the Lyceum a little bit later, so I got the Sinceros to do that one for me."
It will be apparent to anyone who has seen Lene Lovich working live that she brings to her performance a zest which betrays the fact that she enjoys the live experience: how does she feel that it compares with working in the studio?
"It's just different. I believe that personal contact is important, and that's one thing that you can get on gigs which you obviousy don't in the studio. But being in the studio is interesting from, perhaps, a more creative point of view, to experiment with sound and see what happens.
"When I'm on tour I don't necessarily do the same things every night. But I do the same numbers and in my music there isn't so much room for improvisation because there's no space; we don't have long solos or long winding instrumental passages. The action is the thing that's usually different, I may approach things slightly differently, introduce numbers differently, but the music is more-or-less set."
Plans are also currently afoot for Lene to record her second album, though at present nothing has really been finalised.
"We plan to do one in August. We don't know where we're going to do it exactly, but we're going to work with the same engineer who did the first one. We talked about the idea of getting a professional producer, but I think that could take a little bit of the fun out of it for me and Les. However, I think it could be interesting to put ourselves totally in somebody else's hands. I don't know whether I'd like it all that much, but the outcome might be quite interesting and I'm not really opposed to the idea. But, on the other hand, I think that the only way to get something that's likely to be original to yourself is to do it yourself. I think I'd be more prepared if it was a one-off idea: just a little experiment to see what happens. I'd like it to be someone who doesn't have quite such a conventional mind, maybe someone who's open to using different ideas. I'd hope that it was someone who was at least on a similar wavelength to me.
"In fact we're meeting up with the Mael brothers (from Sparks) today. They got in touch with me because I kept saying all these things where articles kept saying that I was ripping off Sparks ... which is funny because all I ever knew about Sparks was their singles, which I liked at the time. By pure coincidence we did a show in Germany together, and now they're in London we're going to see them. It's just for one of those experimental ideas of getting together because people have said we're so similar maybe we should try and see what happens.
"People had been approached when we did our first album, but no-one was really available at the time. In the end we just thought, 'Well, we'll do it ourselves'. We've done alright so far, we've learned a lot and I'd quite like to do my own album myself."
What direction is her writing and songs likely to take on the next album?
"I don't really know so much because I haven't really got started. There's a couple of songs that we may put up on the album.
We may do 'Monkey Talk' because it's never been properly released, also we might do a song called 'Joan (Like Joan Of Arc)' which we did on tour and which hasn't been recorded.
"I think all the songs will have a similar principle to those on the first album in that they will all be short songs - there won't be any long ramblings! They'll probably all be distinct songs, it won't be a concept album with everything tying in ... although I do think that's an attractive idea."
'Monkey Talk', particularly, seems to be a more unusual song, it seems quite a bit heavier than most of the material on the first album; was that indicative of a direction her writing was taking her in?
"I think since the album we have got a little bit heavier - probably as a result of working on stage; the adrenalin runs a bit thicker and you get a bit more intense. That song was written between doing the album and the Be Stiff tour. It was actually inspired by two writers: Charles Darwin and Pierre Boulle who wrote 'Planet of the Apes'. I'd just finished reading 'Planet of the Apes' (I'd always liked the movies) and I just had this idea of the 'circle of events'. It's all fragmented in the films, but in the book it's the whole idea of astronauts going to this planet where the apes are the top race and humans are the under-race, they think this planet is an advancement of what might happen on Earth, but they escape and get back to Earth. But when they get back, because of the time-warp involved, they are now in the future and they see that the monkeys are now in command. So, in fact, the same thing has happened on Earth. So 'Monkey Talk' was the idea of a whole circle of events; you start at one point, you progress, you begin to become complacent, then you lose control and someone else takes over, but the same things happen to whoever takes over.
"It was actually a very optimistic song: 'When the stars come tumbling down' - that was when the end of the world happens - 'And we find ourselves once more upon the ground' - when we start our lives over again ... and I believe in reincarnation, so it means when we start out again. Then we might have a lot to do and be the underdogs because the other person's taken over, but it doesn't matter because we can build ourselves up again. But, just be careful because once you're up there there's always someone creeping up behind you."
Lene, never content - it appears - with standing still, has recently added another sphere of activity to her already bulging catalogue: she has just returned from some film work in Holland.
"I've been in Amsterdam this last week making a film; I don't know what it's going to be like. There's a Dutch singer called Herman Brood, a German singer Nina Hagen (Nina and myself are quite close in many ways - in fact she's done a version of 'Lucky Number' with completely different German lyrics to it. On one occasion we both sing backing vocals to Herman, and on another occasion we just sing sounds not words), some Dutch bands: Gruppo Sportivo, and a few others you probably won't have heard of, The House Band, and Phoney & The Hardcore. It's basically a promotional film for Herman; we worked together on TV in Brussels and we were talking, he said that he was going to do this film and what part would I like to play. So I play a terrorist.
"We didn't talk about it too much before it started; I don't know what the continuity is going to be like, or if things will be explained that well. I don't even know whether there will be an actual story line to it. There's at least three different languages in it all the time!
"Sometimes I'm like me and sometimes I'm not a person like me at all. So people shouldn't take it as being fact at all. The film's going to come out in Holland in December. I don't know if it will come out here."
There are also plans afoot to send Lene to America for her own tour:
"It was planned to be this month, but Stiff have taken a little bit longer to organise their distribution over there because they've just changed everything. So I think it will be June now. We were there in December with the Be Stiff tour and I was surprised by the interest around at the time because I didn't think anyone knew about Stiff over there. Although I was born in America I've lived over here for more than half of my life, so I'm not really clued in to the American scene. I think some of the people missed the point of my half hour show and just thought I was a bit eccentric or something. So I think the thing to do is to do a real tour over there, doing a real show.
"If all goes as we've planned it at the moment we'll probably tour here at the end of October or the beginning of November. First we're going over to the continent for a couple of weeks, then go to America and then come back in time for Christmas. We'll be doing a lot of gigs at the end of this year and the beginning of the next year. I do like live work."
The immediate future is obviously already clearly mapped out in front her, but to conclude I asked Lene how she would like to see her career progress from here to more general terms.
"Music is my main concern now, so really I suppose it's to write songs that are interesting to me. I want to do that, but there's so many other activities that you could be involved in, for instance I'd like to write a novel, I'd like to visit places that I haven't been so far, I'd like to go to the East, and Australia. And I really want to play these gigs in America because although I was born there I've never played there (except for those Be Stiff tour dates). Well, anything interesting that turns up I'd like to try, there's so many things I haven't done - although I've done a lot of things...."
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