A.M. (about paranormal experiences) (UK; March 1980)

[See also Gazette Telegraph interview (31 March 1980), also about this subject.]

Born again Lene: again and again.
Born again Lene: again and again.

The reincarnation of Lene Lovich

Lene Lovich learned very early that it wasn't a good idea to let on that you thought you were from another planet. No martyr she, to suffer at the hands of the ignorant. Instead she chose to suppress such thoughts, however spontaneously they entered her mind, and to rationalise the visions that she could more or less turn on and off at random, as the product of a fertile imagination.

Not bad thinking for an eight-year-old. Survival is the key and Lene knew instinctively that people would not take kindly to a child who dreamt the future in panoramic full-colour. Even as an adult she's aware that reincarnation and allied topics have their pitfalls if, in conversation, you're prepared to be specific about your own experiences rather than just theorise, wide-eyed, about the possibilities.

Still, it's an important part of her life and she has managed to find her way into a world where her extra-sensory experiences need no longer be denied. She inhabits the pop world with flair and dignity and if a touch of madness has helped her to be the true original that she is - well, so far, no one is complaining.

Mind you, if Lene Lovich is mad then insanity should be handed out by the welfare state along with the child allowance and social security. Pleasant, articulate and possessed of a truly winning smile she recounts what must have been devastating experiences with no sense of wonder so that the true effect of what she is saying can really only be gained with hindsight.

The fact of her powers, some of which are at her beck and call while others can be frighteningly spontaneous, she accepts wholeheartedly. It is the questions that they raise and the theories that they produce which are not so readily welcomed.

"I change my theories about every six months," she says, smiling. She's aware that it's an area with no black and white, mostly because orthodox science has yet to give the subject its stamp of respectability, even as a topic for serious discussion.

"It's really only in the past 10 years that people have tried in any serious way to document experiences. Mostly when you talk about mysterious experiences you are regarded as fantasising, exaggerating.

"There are behavioural restrictions which society imposes and even if you step slightly outside of them - saying hello to a stranger or singing in the street, for instance - people think you are silly. I went to see a doctor once, after a particularly disturbing experience, and his sympathy gave me confidence enough to tell him about other things which had happened to me. He wrote everything down in the form of a letter, sealed it in an envelope and suggested I take the letter along to a psychiatrist that he recommended.

"When I got home my curiosity got the better of me so I steamed the envelope open and read the letter. I thought: 'If they read this they're going to put me away'. I decided not to go, my freedom's worth more to me than anything and in any case I don't have much confidence in the way that they would handle a situation like that."

The experience that precipitated the visit to her doctor was one which shook her badly. "One day I just found myself sitting on a window ledge, like a cat. I wasn't going to jump or anything but it was frightening because I don't know how I got there or what I was there for. I thought 'This is getting out of hand'."

It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened completely outside her control. During her days at Art College, towards the end of her stay, she spent more and more time outside the college. One day she visited the British Museum to make drawings, ideas for her sculpting. "I was leaving, walking down the stairs. I had a whole load of junk with me which I needed to rearrange because it was falling all over the place.

"I put my bags down on the stairs for a few seconds and when I looked down I noticed something odd, like something materialising. It was very hazy at first, and then I saw I was wearing sandals - which I hadn't been seconds before.

"But what really freaked me was that I became aware of something yellow flapping around my ankles, which disturbed me immensely because I had developed an almost passionate hatred of the colour and wouldn't have been seen dead in it. And yet there I was wearing this yellow dress, a flowing garment, like a robe.

"Then a really, really loud noise came thundering in and I looked over the staircase and there was a marketplace - people were shouting and screaming, there were animals: total confusion. I remember seeing huge sacks of grain, as big as table tops, and people carrying baskets.

"But the thing that really affected me was the feeling that I had gone to that place to meet somebody, it could have been a boyfriend or a lover. I knew that it was a secret meeting and that we had chosen this crowded place so as not to be noticed.

"And then I realised that this other person was not going to turn up. I was totally shattered. As soon as I realised it I felt this stab of dreadful disappointment and everything just started to fade away. I don't think all this can have taken very long because in a place like the British Museum I would have drawn attention to myself. I don't even know what I was doing while it went on, it was like time had stood still for a few seconds.

"Even now, when I think about it, that dreadful feeling of having been let down comes over me."

As she sits, hands on lap, recounting this extraordinary experience, there is not the remotest temptation to think of Lene Lovich as even mildly dotty. She is a calm, very pretty girl, softly Germanic to look at. Her appearance is, of course, eccentric and only an inveterate betting man would put money on whether she was fat, thin or voluptuous under the bulky clothing she tends to wear.

She speaks very precisely, often with the intonation of a little girl, her thoughts organised, her sentences cohesive. In an age where sex appeal seems to depend on saying as little as possible and wearing a similar amount of clothes, Lene Lovich doesn't just ignore the rules - she doesn't even seem aware that the game is in progress. The upshot is that she is very, very attractive.

Part of her appeal, of course, is the mystery which surrounds her. Unlike others, hers will not go away in the fullness of time because it is not the result of some PR man's imagination. It has been with her since she can remember and is even now helping to feed her creativity. Sometimes the childhood dreams and the adult reality link.

"I remember when I was eight having a really vivid dream, you know the kind when you really believe it is happening and it still seems real when you wake up. I was very excited at that age about the prospect of space and space travel and in my dream I was on a space ship and there was a party going on - balloons, crackers, streamers, all the usual party stuff.

"When I thought about it later I was really disgusted with myself. I told myself: 'Don't be an idiot, you wouldn't really have balloons and crackers in space. It's a serious business handling a space ship.'

"Then about three or four years ago we were in a studio over Christmas time and we decided to hold a surprise party for the engineer. While he was out to dinner we completely decorated the control room and then turned out all the lights and hid behind the desk so we would surprsise him with 'Happy Christmas' when he walked back.

"While we were waiting I looked at the control desk with all its lights and buttons, looked around the room at all the balloons and streamers and realised that that had been my dream. I saw how the technology of a modern recording studio would seem to an eight-year-old child all those years ago just like the inside of a space ship."

It was about the age of eight that she began to articulate, to herself at least, certain strange things which were going on in her mind. "I had a few premonitions, often very tiny things, nothing significant. What you might call extraordinary mental activity."

Other things were not so easily explained. "We lived in Detroit, a very run-down area. There weren't many places to play - the river was quite a walk away and as a child you didn't want to venture too far because it wasn't very safe.

"The place to play was this field nearby where there had been some houses knocked down and it had just grown wild, a flat place to play jungle and those sort of games.

"We weren't long into one of our summer holidays when I had a dream about the field being levelled and dug up. I was crying about it when I woke up and I thought: 'This is stupid, what does it matter if they cut it down?' When I went outside all my friends were sitting on our porch looking very sad. 'They cut the field down', they told me. The lawnmowers and tractors had come in that very morning."

"Sleep dreams were one thing, but there were also the waking ones, images which could sometimes get quite frightening. "It's all right when they were nice pictures but one thing which used to happen regularly was that whenever I would put my hand on a door handle a scene would flash through my mind. It didn't matter where the door was, even to my own room. I would see the most horrible, gruesome things behind the door, almost like tuning in to a movie on the television, and the images were specifically of scenes in the room I was about to enter.

"Eventually, through practice, I learned to suppress that, although of course it could be quite entertaining. After regular school (she came to Britain at the age of thirteen) I went to art school and began to release the stops on my imagination.

"But while I was at school I knew that there were things I should not talk about." Now she is looking for words, not sure that her next admission won't get her certified. "I had the idea, I don't know, er, but I thought that, maybe, I was from another planet." A nervous laugh punctuates this confession. She knows it was an irrational concept. All it proves, though, is that children are just as capable of clutching at straws as adults in a tight situation. Grown-ups don't have an exclusive hold on foolishness.

"It didn't last terribly long, a couple of years on and off. I used to look around, because I felt sure I couldn't be the only one. I even used to look at trees or other inaminate objects for signs that I wasn't on my own."

The logic was simple. "Certain things were happening in my mind which I had tried to talk about to my friends, but all I got was strange looks. They didn't understand, so I felt I was different."

It was at art school that she began to see the potential for using these previously unwelcome mind-pictures. Fully aware that she didn't know anything about Art - as contained in galleries - she had really only entered the school to get away from home. "I was really very keen, though, to understand what this Art was." Very quickly she realised that, whatever it was, it wasn't for her.

"I didn't have problems in the beginning because I was keen to learn and was doing more or less what the teachers wanted. I had it down to a pretty neat formula, what was good and acceptable to make for happy days.

"Then I began to think: 'This is really silly. Art is a form of self-expression and the ideas should be your own.' That's when the trouble really started because I realised that the only thing I could be really honest about was my own imagination. We'd had a few lectures about William Blake and he had seemed to listen to his imagination. He may have suffered in his lifetime but at least his Art was true."

She was mostly sculpting by now and took to entering the classroom devoid of concrete ideas and with the intention of allowing her mind to take over. "I wouldn't know what I was going to make, just let my mind be completely open, almost trance-like. It was very exciting and I would work very fast."

Around this time Lene began to think about what these mental interventions represented. Fellow-students would come to look at her work and point out aspects of it which were familiar to them. She realised that she was incorporating into her sculpture images of people or places which actually existed but which were outside her own physical experience.

Hard on the heels of this revelation came the British Museum incident. "The idea of seeing something centuries old and being a part of it didn't really affect me very much. I wasn't terribly surprised although I knew that it wasn't one of my usual imagination things and it wasn't for my entertainment.

"What concerned me was that it was something totally out of my control. My imagination I could switch on and off practically at will. You know, if I'm on a tube train and I'm bored I can entertain myself by seeing monkeys swinging on the hand grips. But this thing in the British Museum had happened completely spontaneously."

Although, as she has said, she entertains different theories in a faddish way, the underlying theme of her belief in reincarnation is her reluctance to accept the finality of death. It's a powerful argument which has been used by some influential people. Benjamin Franklin firmly believed that he had lived before: "When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot expect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist and put Himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in this world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."

Of course it's easy to read ego in that statement, a desire on Franklin's part to believe that the world couldn't go on without his illuminating presence. But, as Lene Lovich says: "It's difficult to rationalise that someone can be walking along the street, thinking, controlling a large part of their environment, then walk off the curb, get hit by a car, and that's the end of that.

"We can't be something one minute and nothing the next."

In support of such doubts Heber Curtis, an American astro-physicist, said: "With energy, matter, space and time continuous, with nothing lost or wasted, are we ourselves the only manifestation that comes to an end, ceases, is annihilated at three score years and ten?"

If it is true that we live before and will live again, why is it that we don't remember past lives. Lene Lovich believes, although it could be one of her passing theories, that between lives we may go through some form of deprogramming and that the memory is then stored in some far corner of our minds.

Scientists have already declared that we only use about 10 per cent of our brains [Note: wrong] and that even a genius is only using about another three or four per cent, so the deprogramming idea is not so far-fetched. It also provides an easy answer to the problem of child prodigies such as Mozart: how else to explain a four-year-old writing complex symphonies except that he carried the knowledge with him from a former life?

"Some people you meet," says Lene, "even quite young children, have much deeper understanding of things than they could possibly have learned in their young lives, or even just one previous life."

There is no room in her life for organised religion; too many rules, too much restriction. But there is comfort to be had from her own beliefs, and she does accept the existence of a Deity, although she can't or won't put a name to it. "I don't fear death itself, only the possibility that it might be painful. There is a worry, of course, about the future because I don't always see it in a beautiful way.

"But I am disturbed by these people who insist on freezing themselves," she says, laughing. "I wouldn't want to come back as myself, I can't think of anything more dull.

"Whatever the world will be like in the future, I think that you need to be introduced to a society gradually, to be born into it and grow up in it so you can accept its hardships.

"Nor would I want to live forever. Much as I am enjoying this life my belief and curiosity about future lives is, I guess, greater than my interest in continuing this one indefinitely."

Melody Maker (UK; 17 March 1979)

Number two with a bullet
Lene Lovich talks to Melody Maker. Les Chappell stays strong and silent.


She is only a slip of a thing, but when Lene Lovich and her bald young escort enter the great motorway cafes of this country, people freeze momentarily over ther hamburgers and chips, a jaw or two drops, a sauce bottle is poised mid-air.

Almost everything about Lene Lovich's appearance is dark, but not her face, a pale, red-lipped oval which rightly belongs to a Poe heroine. Each finger ends in a black-painted nail, bright hoops of steel are in her ears, and the long, close-fitting dresses, worn in shades of maroon, dark blue, black and purple, contribute to a complex style that is somewhere between Romany extravagance and the kinky severity of a Victorian governess.

Lene Lovich is actually in Charles Addams territory. She and her bald companion, who is a long-standing boyfriend named Les Chappell, are a couple straight out of Addams' Nightcrawlers, two enchanted characters in a perverse, somewhat camp fairytale. He is a gentle, taciturn eunuch; she a weird, comic vamp, freshly risen from the tomb and cruising for laughs and lost souls. "This one is for people who've recently died," she always announces before one song, "Sleeping Beauty", which is about reincarnation. That's a sample of her style.

It's a look, too robust to be fey, to win prizes; it may even catch on with the Tie & Dye's Set. They stand and gape as she alternates between singing and a tenor saxophone, an instrument that makes her seem only more kooky. So she will wave to them - "This one is for the girls" - and dedicate to her fans a new number called "Joan".

She is mistress of the beguiling effect. Her famous cuckooing hiccough on "Lucky Number" is as utterly novel and individual as Daltrey's stutter on "My Generation" or Buddy Holly's hiccup. On "Say When" she leads the band, who are named the Nancy Boys, in a Devo choreography of arm movements. Her hands make shapes, her eyes roll dramatically, she whinnies like a stricken horse.

Other times, when the tempo slows, she is pathos itself. She strokes a version of Nick Lowe's "Tonight", and on her own "Too Tender (To Touch)" she beseeches and wrings from her audiences a big, silent tear. "My mother's favourite," she declares.

After a gig is finished, and the band has sunk dully in the precarious safety of a dingy dressing-room, she will welcome all those who wish to talk to her: to find about the next record, or learn the secret of her ingenious hairstyle. Her white cheeks still suffused with her exertions, she signs the pictures and record sleeves of every hopeful punter. Her constant lament is for the fans who have not managed to get into her shows, whose pleas are heard through the dressing-room window as she prepares to go onstage.

Right now she is honouring old commitments to play the clubs and the small polytechnics, although a less scrupulous artist might have blown them out on the strength of a Top Ten single. The next tour will be better because she will be playing town halls and then everyone can see her. The punk ideal still grips her.

So, as the corridors echo emptily, she packs away her own sax, grasps a battered green suitcase that moulders with the old stickers of shipping lines, and heads wearily in the direction of the group van. It's the ritual of every band on the road: as it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, a world without end. She always travels with the band.

Tonight they have played Portsmough Poly, a scene of celebration, but the drive on to next town or back to London is invariably for private, exhausted thoughts. As they pull out through deserted streets, a tape of War is on the eight-track, the keyboard player is rolling a spliff, and the bassist has already lain down in the back seat.

Five months ago, before the second of Stiff Records' promotional train tour, Lene Lovich and Les Chappell had had no band of their own and were completely unknown. Two months later they were playing in New York, within a few more weeks Lene Lovich had been hailed as another of Stiff's great finds, in direct line of descent from Elvis Costello and Ian Dury. At the age of almost 30 - no Siouxsie Sioux or Pauline Murray, and certainly no Rachel Sweet - she had become a rock star, doing interviews with the BBC and Daily Mirror, posing for a fashion spread in the London Evening News, being plugged every week on TOTP. The media loves a girl singer, particularly if she has something new to sell: there are just tons of them.

Lene didn't talk of this, however; the conversation was of reincarnation, a subject which apparently much preoccupied her. Her greatest wish was to set down a dream she had once had. It had come to her complete, like a motion picture: the story of a vampire Western.

She spoke softly: "I've seen dead people in a mortuary - grandfathers dying and things - and when you're looking at a dead person, you know that there's absolutely nothing there. It's like a radio set that's been switched off."

We turned off the road and onto the forecourt of a petrol station. Someone was playing music for night owls.

The people most suspicious of Lene Lovich mistrust her relationship with Stiff, and maybe one can understand their fears.

The cover of her album is a brilliant example of Stiff's opportunism and ability to conceptualise; it realises all the strange suggestions of her East European name. [Note: Not the reason for the cover art; see albums discography for notes on "Stateless".]

Called "Stateless", the album employs the typography of computer print-out to evoke an image of alien bureaucracies. And, in a blurred black-and-white photo, a double exposure, she seems to be disappearing like ectoplasm through a high brick wall: her fingers are pressed to her temples in a feat of concentration, her face dissolves, she is going, going, gone. To the West, presumably.

It's no surprise to learn that Dave Robinson, the head of Stiff, was once a photographer. But later one finds out that "Stateless" was chosen because she was in between passports at the time. Lene Lovich turns out to be an American citizen.

She and Stiff understand each other very well, in fact. Quietly, but with great independance, she manages herself, although she is signed to a production deal with Oval, the small, South London company part-run by former writer and broadcaster Charlie Gillett.

Her appearance, just like the sound of her records, which Gillett felt she could produce herself with Chappell, is of her own invention. There is a spoof Christmas EP, recorded for Polydor in 1976 when she was a member of the Diversions soul band, and on the cover she has the same fantastic plaits. She says that her hair was first braided when she was at art school studying sculpture; it was practical, to avoid the plaster and cement. And then, when she joined bands, the Slavic look she had achieved made her stand out.

Charlie Gillett, who also recorded Ian Dury when he was with the Kilburns, recalls her entering the studio of Honky Tonk, the show he used to broadcast for Radio London, late in 1977: "She walked into the room and she looked like a star, with that amazing long hair. A tremendous sense of herself. But always a person, not a sex symbol.

"The problem was, how do you market it? The tendency is always to make something that is unusual like something else that has already been marketed. Ian Dury's success broke down a lot of scepticism. But Ian has to disguise the fact that he's not really a singer; she has a very good range."

She had gone to see Gillett about an appeal he had read on the air for a sax player. The appeal was hers, and she was miffed at having had no response. He, however, recruited her and Chappell for a band of his own, the Oval Exiles, which revolved around the songwriters Bobby Henry and Jimmy O'Neill [Note: not quite true. See upcoming chronology.] (now a member of Fingerprintz, a Gillett band which has been supporting her on a recent tour).

Stiff, says Gillett, were not interested in Bobby Henry, but they did like the demo of a Tommy James song, "I Think We're Alone Now," which he had cut with Lene. A B-side had to be quickly written, and this was "Lucky Number"; a limited edition of this single came out. Of course, "Lucky Number" eventually became the A-side and was completely re-recorded with an extra verse.

Insecure, she says, unless working, Lene had hung about for years on the fringes of music and theatre since leaving London's Central School of Art. She was incurably restless, willing to take any job that came along. And there has been a great variety.

Through the influence of a London session fixer, she made the acquaintance of French disco star Cerrone [Note: Not quite correct; see upcoming page about Lene's lyric writing for other artists.], and wrote the lyrics to "Supernature" and other tunes. When the Diversions supported the Trammps on a British tour, playing Birmingham Town Hall and the Hammersmith Odeon, she was invited to join their sax section. And the first time she played tenor (she is also proficient on violin and alto) was as a member of a three-girl cabaret group, the Sensations, performing for rich Scandinavian tourists on Rhodes.

"That's the stimulus I like - being thrown in at the deep end," she says.

As a jewelled dancer in London, her hair was dark and unplaited. An agent's photograph of her as such preceded the Sensations, much to her fury, at the hotel in Rhodes. She had to steal her contract back from the Greek agent, who had compelled her to sign on the Athens ferry. And then the Greek Orthodox Church threatened to excommunicate the manager of the hotel when the Sensations sang excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar. She laughs at it all now.

"It was easy for me to get jobs that were slightly risqué. I mean, the number of times I had to leave a job after a few weeks 'cause I didn't wanna take what they considered were the fringe benefits going with it!" Her voice tinkles with amusement.

"But I did manage to gain experience at an early age, because they thought they could use a girl for a bit of decoration. I was fully aware of it, and I didn't like it one bit. I always tried to make sure that I learned something with each job I did so the next one I could have a bit more respect. And I did a lotta very crazy jobs."

Are all these stories about her, like the screams on French horror soundtracks, really true, I ask innocently?

"Yeah!" she replies, slightly amazed.

She is sitting, waiting before a show, in another drab room: it's walled with such pungent graffiti as Stukas Wank Monkeys. On her lap is balanced a plate of congealing steak and chips. The dimple in her chin makes her unexpectedly girlish, but under the harsh dressing-room lighting her face yields up the strain of touring.

"I've lived five years in the last six months," she says, and briefly droops. "But now I think I'm in a situation where I can be creative. I've been in plenty of situations where it was not very creative, but then it was only a means to an end."

As she talks, members of the band wander in and out. The bassist, Lennie Meade, and the keyboard player, Phil Ramocon, are both black; drummer Ben Overhead is a scrappy-looking white kid. All three of them have been drafted in since the Stiff shows in New York. From the adjoining room the sound of tuning-up is discordant thunder.

She comes from Detroit, and her accent has remained pronouncedly American, even though she left when she was 13. It was a tough, mostly black part of Detroit, she says, by the East river; a little awe is left in her voice.

"I was one of only about five or six white families in the whole street. I remember, we had a police station at the end of the road, and they moved it, and we swore it was because the cops didn't want to come down." She giggles. "They would never turn up until at least half-an-hour after somebody had called them, and they were only five minutes away.

"People got shot on the street, and the folks next door were running a still. There were two black families who were feuding with each other, the two grandmothers in the family. They'd send the little kids around with bricks to throw through the window."

She grew up liking Motown, naturally. This was in the day before Berry Gordy moved operations to Los Angeles.

"Everybody felt very proud," she says; she still feels proud. "I can remember Stevie Wonder when he made his first record, he was about the same age as me, and we were really excited about it. We really hoped he'd get to the charts."

For all the excitement of Tamla's music, family life in Detroit was highly disturbed. Her father, the son of a Yugoslavian immigrant to America, had met her Yorkshire mother during the last war when he was in the U.S. Merchant Navy. They had married and returned to the States; she has two sisters and a brother, all living in America now.

The father, however, had a history of mental instability. Lene's grandmother had put him in a home following the death of her husband in a hunting accident, and his treatment of his own children was violent and erratic. "I could not bring other kids home because of my dad," she recalls.

Her mother finally ran away and brought the kids to live in Hull, where Lene continued her schooling and met Les Chappell.

Later on, she says, her father came over and tried to kidnap her sisters. "One sister managed to escape, but I haven't seen the other one now for 13 years." Nor her father since the marriage broke up. And the mother also returned to Detroit after Lene left home at 15. Until she performed at New York's Bottom Line last December, Lene had not set foot on American soil again.

Art college in London, where she shared a sculpture course with Les Chappell, was not a success, either. She found herself rejecting what she saw as the rigidity and selfishness of fine art, with its intellectual halo, attitudes that she couldn't square with her growing interest in pop culture.

She taught herself to play violin, and she and Chappell would go busking in tube stations and around the West End. They joined up with a fringe theatre group, Bob Flag's Balloon & Banana Band, and during Christmas 1973 appeared at the Roundhouse in a medieval rock musical, A Feast of Fools.

For this she had learned alto. Flag was a former army band-boy who had gone on to play with David Bowie in an early rock band, the Riot Squad, and he encouraged her on this old alto she picked up. "He told me what notes to play and when. So really I got the job without knowing how to play saxophone."

It was around this time that Chappell shaved off his hair and eyebrows. She reserves an affectionate memory for his once-long hair. "But he'd cut it, kind of spiky on top, and dyed it sort of an orange colour, and just purely by coincidence Bowie at the same time had that hairdo. I don't think he liked the idea, so off it all went. It's stayed like that ever since."

Now Stiff, wouldn't you believe it, are trying to set up a promotional deal with a razor-blade manufacturer. "I've tried 'em all, and Gilette are the best," was Chappell's only rueful comment.

But in 1975, he and Lene, after further adventures in fringe theatre, threw in their lot with the Diversions, and their prospects improved a little. She played sax and sang some leads, he was on rhythm guitar.

They cut a version of "Fattie Bum Bum" for Gull; and then, early in 1976, the band signed to Polydor. In London they were now playing the main rock haunts: the Nashville, the Speak, the Dingwalls, the Rock Garden. Out of town it was small clubs with a disco audience.

She says she looked then much as she does now, but she liked to wear party dresses.

"It was a party sort of band," she reflects, "and I always wore onstage what it would be like to go to a party in.

"Les had his sharp suits, dinner suits, things like that. The others used to wear what they liked. We looked like we'd landed from another planet; we were a bit different to the rest of them."

The Diversions never did quite break through, however. In a year spent with Polydor they got barely any press. A couple of singles went nowhere. She says that the A & R man who had signed them left not long afterwards.

"No one knew what to do with us. We made an album and they didn't release it. We found ourselves running out of money."

They hatched schemes to get more money out of Polydor. Chiefly, they cut records under different names and were paid a separate advance.

As the Commandos they made "The Bump". They recorded one of her songs, an early attempt at writing called "Funny Girl," which later she was to play to Charlie Gillett. And she and Chappell cobbled up a Christmas maxi-single of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "The Christmas Song," which they released with a B-side of their own: "Happy Christmas," a jokey studio throwaway of the kind that the Beatles used to record as flimsidisc messages to their fans. This was wholly schlock. She sounds appallingly like Bonnie Langford on "I Saw Mommy": her chirruping, adolescent vocal drives one up the wall. The record stands in relation to what she is now doing as "Laughing Gnome" does to "Heroes" in Bowie's career.

Inevitably, the Diversions quickly parted; and so, just as abruptly, did she and Chappell. For part of 1977 she worked in Europe. She says she travelled to Finland with a carnival, wrote for Cerrone, screamed in French. It was through Gillett and the success of "Lucky Number" that they reunited.

She remarks of the song, "It's about a person who is very self-contained, and everything is fine until they meet someone else. Then they realise, 'this is much better'".

In an interview on Portsmouth's Radio Victory, Lovich and Chappell are allowed to play a selection of their favourite records. Their choice is wide, from Moondog to Kraftwerk. Chappell asks for "Soul Man" by Sam & Dave; she comes up with "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" by the Baboons.

And yet, when she's asked afterwards what has influenced her own music, she stumbles in thought.

"I remember that my father used to play Tchaikovsky records as loud as he could," she replies at last. "And show tunes".

In New York, she was infuriated that critics compared her to Patti Smith; she just couldn't see it. But though she has shown herself capable of handling her own career, she still struggles to explain its meaning. "Lucky Number" is a far cry, so to speak, from "Supernature", which she describes as a science-fiction lyric about man's disastrous meddling with nature.

"I like to involve mental images," she attempts. "Mental images are real to people. When people get angry or sad, their mind is full of pictures. I try to piece together a story that contains these pictures."

I tell her that she cuts a rather unreal figure upon a stage. "I don't think so, no." She shakes her head, and considers very seriously.

"If I am removed from reality, it's only a baby step, only a small step. I'm sure that the music we do is not just a visual thing, not just a gimmick, a theatrical experience. It's clear to the people out there that it's not just that, but something real. They can get close, they can see that I'm involved; they can feel without having any bombs or special effects."

Still, one day she will indulge her fantasy life. She will make movies; maybe that vampire Western that so obsesses her. She loves movies. Her eyes go dreamy.

"I once spent about three hours on a set watching somebody hailing a taxicab in a thunderstorm. It was a gigantic hose in the air which fell down like rain. I thought it was fascinating."

Soho News (New York; 02 April 1980)

LENE LOVICH AIN'T SO STRANGE

It's a bleak day, full of uneasy coincidences. The low-budget rigors of Lene Lovich's first real U.S. tour have caught up with her in a series of mishaps. It's been a successful five-week swing; Lene's growing cult audience - many of them bought her records as imports after "Lucky Number" became a British hit - hasn't seen her in person since the Be Stiff Tour in 1978, and this time around she's hitting most cities for the first time. The demand for tickets caused shows to be added around the country, and the band has barely had a day off. Now, three days from the end of the tour, Lene's nearly flat with exhaustion - when she isn't up on stage.

In Philadelphia the other night a balky microphone caught her in the mouth; yesterday at the Mudd Club - where hundreds of fans queued outside in the rain - she stepped through a hole in the makeshift stage extension. Today she's fighting the flu and a quick-march schedule - thus the helicopter, an extravagant one-shot. "It was outrageous," murmurs Lovich, "totally unreal...." Sitting at a table in an acoustic-tiled classroom, Lovich holds herself with dancing-school correctness; exact, shoulders-back posture, hands folded in her lap. She coughs politely into a fist, dabs with a tissue at her blue-green eyes. Dark purple makeup - to match her mouth - makes her eyebrows stand out like bruises.

Touch-Tone of Quality

Like her appearance, Lene's songs (written with guitarist/boyfriend Les Chappell) are the perfect blend of intuition and construction. Whimsical but not random, crafted but not gimmicky, they stack up musical signposts around what Lene calls a "pure idea." On Stateless, Lovich's 1979 debut eventually picked up by Epic Records in the States, the smart, adult love songs augured a thousand different kinds of romance by piling up recognizable pop touches, doubling and tripling them into musical puns - like Lene's own Touch-Tone beeping on "Lucky Number." The songs on Flex, her new album, still use production touches - and the whoop and sway of her voice - to convey ambiguity, fanning out possible interpretations like a peacock's tail.

But where the first LP held stories, Flex offers lessons and exhortations; if Stateless showed Lene quivering on the brink of actions, Flex shows her halfway there - wherever there is - extending a hand to stragglers and confidently pointing out obstacles like an Alpine guide. With romance no longer the central metaphor, the songs have a different feel - less hooky than textural, less pop than seductively rhythmic (a sound, I realized while watching her in concert, that's perfectly designed for her new, young band).

It's still the small touches that count in Lene's songs, the telling details. By changing just one word, she turns "The Night" (a 10-year-old Frankie Valli song so rare, she laughs, that the publisher didn't remember it) into her song. Instead "beware of his promise," Lene sings "beware of their promise," giving the song a characteristic tinge of ambiguity and a three-quarter turn into darkness. Seduction becomes abduction, mistaken conversion, or just a self-deluded cast of mind.

A lot of Lovich's songs are concerned with misleading temptations - the apple, the stranger, the lure of complacency, the inviting path that twists into shadow. In "Home", you were never sure whether she was running to or from something; in "Angels," the single off her new album, the burst-of-faith chorus, "the Angels watch my every move," has overtones that are almost sinister. "Many people have taken that song totally superficially," Lene says, "and not seen the ominous side to it. There is a scary side, as far as I'm concerned. A lot of people find themselves in that situation - and not just with the literal angels. You could talk about the police in the same way... or," she adds, "you could talk about your parents. Anything that's meant to be protective but at the same time is constricting and could strangle you."

Motown Menace

Lene herself left home at 15 after a turbulent, traumatic childhood. Raised on the south side of Detroit (her accent is British-clipped with American vowels) she has a British mother and an American father, the son of a Yugoslav immigrant. Her father - who had a history of mental troubles - was given to outbreaks of violence that made home life intolerable; when Lene was 13 her mother left him and took the children to live in Yorkshire. "I had to be fairly good on survival generally," says Lene soberly. "I was quite a tough little kid - but at the same time, there was a lot of mental torture at home which left me insecure, quite unconfident, and I had to gain a bit of confidence. You have to be tough to survive school life and things like that and also the emotional ups and downs at home. I think because I survived those two things, I'm OK. I mean, if I hadn't I'd probably be some psychopath." She gives a laugh. "Really, I'd probably be a menace to society."

When her family returned to the United States, Lene enrolled in art school, where she met Les Chappell. She quickly grew disillusioned with sculpture ("fine for therapeutic reasons") and, before finding her niche in music, ran through a staggering set of oddball jobs: she played in a series of bands with Les, dabbled in movies, dubbed screams into a French horror film ("it's hard to scream on cue"), wrote the lyrics for a disco album, played sax in an all-girl trio and worked as an Oriental dancer. "It's such a long list because I was always experimenting," says Lene. "I never did any of those things very long; it was always in an effort to come to a better understanding of what I really wanted to do."

Now that she knows, her songs reflect the search, praising self-sufficiency, differentness and the courage of conviction. "Joan" is an explicit statement of purpose: eerie verses with scourging-of-Christ moans in the background alternate with a chorus fanfare (from Lene's own tenor sax, double-tracked).

"It's meant to be thrilling," states Lene. "It's meant to be inspiring. I just want to encourage people to be brave enough to trust their own ideas. Sometimes even your best friend will try to dissuade you from doing something that may seem a little illogical. I think that 75 percent of the time you know what's good for you. And you've got to go through those things in order to sort yourself out. You can't just sit in your room all the time and say, "I'm not going to do that because it might be a bit dangerous." I'm against negative attitudes, basically on principle.

"You could take the story of "Joan" literally," she adds, "and say that's me talking to myself. I had so many knockbacks about my voice - so many people told me I couldn't sing - that if I had really listened to them, I'd be working at Woolworth's now."

The fact that she'd stayed strong without growing cynical - even in the face of the music business - has a lot to do, says Lene, with "having a partner to work with. Les and I care enough about each other that there's never any ulterior motive in what we do. What we do is for the good of each other. Sharing that, the problems you come across are not that hard." Lene shifts in her seat, smooths out her skirt. "I'm lucky, I'm very lucky," she admits. "I don't know if it's just natural greed in people, that they always think they have to find something better.

"I suppose that my feelings towards finding partners," she adds thoughtfully, "were distorted in many ways by my family life. I guess I always looked beyond conventional good looks for some kindness in the heart, some kind of sincerity. I think I've always kind of ignored appearance - I just get a feel from people. Quite often appearance is a distraction. That's why I like to do shows - maybe people get a strange feeling, a strange idea of me if they just see a photograph." Lene's face turns quizzical, then indignant. "I get a lot of stupid song tapes sent to me - things I would never do in a million years. They're on weird subjects - about chopping up your parents or something - or some kind of deliberately spooky thing. I never sing about anything that I don't have personal experience with. I hate it when bands to that - it's obviously very shallow." She sighs.

"It's difficult to convince people that - you know - not everybody is the same. It appears to be quite logical to me: people are different. But they think, if you're different, there must be some motive behind it. They can't believe that you're just normally like you are. But if people come to see the concerts, I think they get an understanding of what I'm trying to say - a feel for what I am."