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."
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