New wave rock's 'high priestess' follows no one
By Steve Morse, Boston Globe
Lene Lovich doesn’t dwell on trivialities. She has been around and she
disdains living a shallow, unexamined life. At only the slightest
urging, she jumps right into topics like karma, age regression,
telepathy and psychic premonitions — hardly the concerns of most pop
singers.
A true individualist, Lovich has been labeled the “high priestess” of
new wave rock ‘n’ roll. Some call her a nut case — she sings in an
eccentric, warbly style and wears gothic Transsylvanian costumes — but
she prefers to see herself as simply living life the way she wants to,
and phooey on her detractors.
About the cover picture on her new album, “Flex,” which shows her in a swirling white dress that could pass as a Transsylvanian wedding gown, she says, “Oh actually, it’s just a lot of old curtains tied together. I just wear what I like. I don’t want to follow fashions that other people follow, that’s all.”
A Detroit native who has spent most of her life in England, Lovich recently talked about her fast-blooming career and, most of all, about her psychic interests. These interests crop up in her music, which is a progressive, masterfully-woven blend of her assertive, throaty vocals and high-tech electronics and sound effects. She has recorded songs about telepathy and ESP, and as a child — the daughter of a Yugoslav father and English mother — she was possessed by visions. As she says, “I had many unusual encounters with my mind... seeing all kinds of pictures and even on a couple of occasions, premonitions. I had a very, very active imagination. But the thing that worried me was the lack of control: I would see pictures when I didn’t want to see them. They were sort of like daydreams and normally they were quite fun, but I just didn’t like the idea that I would be suddenly taken over by them.” Her strongest span of mental activity, she says, occurred between the ages of 7 and 11 in Detroit, where she lived in a low-income neighborhood until her parents split and she moved with her mother to England at age 13.
She cites one particular premonition that she hasn’t forgotten. “Where I lived there was a field in the next block, where three or four houses had been knocked down and nothing else had been built on them. It was just a big overrun field with trees and big weeds. There was no other place for us to play. We used to spend all our spare time in that field, just playing there. I had a dream one night about tractors coming in and cutting it down. I was standing at the side and I was crying. I woke up feeling very sad about it, but I didn’t think any more about it until I went downstairs and my friends were all waiting on the front porch for me to come out. Their faces were all very long, and I said, ‘What happened?” They said, ‘They’ve cut down the field. We have no place to play.’“
Not all of Lovich’s childhood visions were benign, however. “A few things happened quite regularly,” she says, “that I didn’t like, mainly when I was about to open a door — any door. Just as soon as I put my hand on the handle of a door I would see the most horrible, gruesome sights behind it. This I had no control over and would make me ill. It wouldn’t be the same every time, but there’d be mutilated bodies and strange things like that. I just didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t in control, that I would suddenly find myself at the bottom of stairs when two minutes ago I was at the top and I didn’t know how I’d gotten down there. It was almost like I had fallen down the stairs. I didn’t know.”
Plagued so long by insecurities, Lovich never thought she could sing. She didn’t really take up music until she attended art college in London, where she shared a sculpture class with Les Chappell, who triggered her interest in violin and saxophone. She performed on the streets with Chappell (who is now her boyfriend and co-songwriter) and later played sax in various soul bands. She still plays sax — it is an earthy counterpoint to her eerie vocals — but her singing poise was to come slowly.
About the cover picture on her new album, “Flex,” which shows her in a swirling white dress that could pass as a Transsylvanian wedding gown, she says, “Oh actually, it’s just a lot of old curtains tied together. I just wear what I like. I don’t want to follow fashions that other people follow, that’s all.”
A Detroit native who has spent most of her life in England, Lovich recently talked about her fast-blooming career and, most of all, about her psychic interests. These interests crop up in her music, which is a progressive, masterfully-woven blend of her assertive, throaty vocals and high-tech electronics and sound effects. She has recorded songs about telepathy and ESP, and as a child — the daughter of a Yugoslav father and English mother — she was possessed by visions. As she says, “I had many unusual encounters with my mind... seeing all kinds of pictures and even on a couple of occasions, premonitions. I had a very, very active imagination. But the thing that worried me was the lack of control: I would see pictures when I didn’t want to see them. They were sort of like daydreams and normally they were quite fun, but I just didn’t like the idea that I would be suddenly taken over by them.” Her strongest span of mental activity, she says, occurred between the ages of 7 and 11 in Detroit, where she lived in a low-income neighborhood until her parents split and she moved with her mother to England at age 13.
She cites one particular premonition that she hasn’t forgotten. “Where I lived there was a field in the next block, where three or four houses had been knocked down and nothing else had been built on them. It was just a big overrun field with trees and big weeds. There was no other place for us to play. We used to spend all our spare time in that field, just playing there. I had a dream one night about tractors coming in and cutting it down. I was standing at the side and I was crying. I woke up feeling very sad about it, but I didn’t think any more about it until I went downstairs and my friends were all waiting on the front porch for me to come out. Their faces were all very long, and I said, ‘What happened?” They said, ‘They’ve cut down the field. We have no place to play.’“
Not all of Lovich’s childhood visions were benign, however. “A few things happened quite regularly,” she says, “that I didn’t like, mainly when I was about to open a door — any door. Just as soon as I put my hand on the handle of a door I would see the most horrible, gruesome sights behind it. This I had no control over and would make me ill. It wouldn’t be the same every time, but there’d be mutilated bodies and strange things like that. I just didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t in control, that I would suddenly find myself at the bottom of stairs when two minutes ago I was at the top and I didn’t know how I’d gotten down there. It was almost like I had fallen down the stairs. I didn’t know.”
Plagued so long by insecurities, Lovich never thought she could sing. She didn’t really take up music until she attended art college in London, where she shared a sculpture class with Les Chappell, who triggered her interest in violin and saxophone. She performed on the streets with Chappell (who is now her boyfriend and co-songwriter) and later played sax in various soul bands. She still plays sax — it is an earthy counterpoint to her eerie vocals — but her singing poise was to come slowly.
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