Judging from her new album and her successful shot at playing Mata Hari on stage, Lene Lovich remains the quirky godmother of the new wave.
"I don't have any one face really. My face is complicated, but it's also very plain. So it's easy for me to look different ways."
It was just a casual comment she tossed off about a photo of herself, but Lene Lovich's description of her face goes more than skin-deep. As time wore on, the artist and the person behind the costume became more and more apparent, and harder to pin down. Meanwhile, her music continued to grow, striking an agreeable balance between originality and accessibility.
After a hiatus of nearly two years, Lovich returned to the public eye last year with No Man's Land, her first full-length LP since 1980's Flex. The record places Lovich's throaty, evocative vocals in a musical setting that is perhaps her most diverse to date. Expanding on the sound of the New Toy mini LP, No Man's Land boasts an impressive array of synthesizer textures and places the guitar playing of Lovich's long-time partner Les Chappell even more squarely in the forefront.
"In the past, we used more piano and organ," the singer explains in a precise, gentle accent which reflects her mixed Anglo/American/European background. "We aren't using them so much now. We - Les in particular - are getting more into electronics. There is not more guitar actually, but it is more featured. Before, it was more a part of the orchestra."
Had Lovich had her way, the album would have come out much sooner, around the time the mini LP appeared. "That's when No Man's Land *should* have come out," she says, "but I was having a few problems with Stiff Records in England - over my musical direction, over me . . . everything." Without going into details, she indicates that these difficulties have since been resolved. Perhaps the stunning DOR success of New Toy [Note: DOR = dance oriented rock], which reached the Top 20 of Billboard's dance chart before it was even released in America, convinced the record company that Lene Lovich must be doing something right after all. [Note: Wrong; Stiff Records were not convinced by anything.]
As it turns out, these problems were something of a blessing in disguise. They opened up some new avenues of expression for Lovich: she became co-author and star of Mata Hari, a musical play which had a long and successful run at London's Lyric Theatre. Why did she make the leap from rock to the stage?
"There were a lot of reasons, really, that made the show come about," she answers. "I suppose the basic reason was that I was looking for an alternative way to present music. Not wanting to completely rearrange myself to suit the record company - that's not a very attractive idea to me - what I needed to do was find an alternative until things became resolved."
The alternative materialized through old friend Chris Judge Smith, founder of the seminal art-rock band Van Der Graaf Generator and contributor of several songs to Flex. A playwright and journalist as well as musician, Smith had been commissioned to write a treatment for a film about the turn-of-the-century dancer/adventuress/suspected spy, Mata Hari. The film was never made, but Lene became interested in the story. And when the Lyric Theatre offered to front the money for a stage production of the story, Lovich, Chappell and Smith decided to collaborate on the play.
Acting in a starring role was a first for Lovich. Naturally, it took some getting used to. "I found the politeness of the audience disarming," she says, "their passiveness. I don't mean that in a bad way at all, but at a rock gig, the audience is very strongly participating - dancing, shouting things out. The lights are very big, and the stage is usually elevated from the audience. But this being a very small theatre, I was very close to the audience. It required quite a different type of stamina. Leaving the stage and coming back was something I had never had to deal with before. To keep within the character, remember where you left off, come back, pick it up and carry on - that required a tremendous mental effort for me. The way I'm used to working, in a rock band, I feel the momentum building up throughout the entire show. I didn't know how to work another way. That was a bit hard, but I did enjoy it. It's actually given me more confidence."
While there are no definite plans yet, Lovich would like to bring Mata Hari to the United States and also release an album of music from the show - a blend of synthesizers with Indonesian gamelan, metallic xylophones and gongs. Rather than just transplant the current version of the show to American stages, though, she would like to let it evolve into something different.
"I would like to do it in a less literal way, perhaps make it more universal. Because, actually delving into the life of Mata Hari, you can see so many parallels that are relevant today to attitudes toward women and their role in the world - apart from that, all the parallels between a creative artist in that time and a creative artist in this time. So I would like to take a little bit away from the sensationalism of her being a strange character - flamboyant, elaborate - and make it relevant on a universal plane."
It's not hard to see some parallels between Lene Lovich and the character she had created in Mata Hari. The extravagantly costumed figure that for so many people is Lene Lovich may seem at first to contradict the emotional directness of many of her songs. But the image for her is not an image at all, but rather just a natural expression of personality and taste. "I don't really know how to orchestrate an image," she confesses. "I just do what I like and that's about it, really. I'm sure I've put a lot of people off, but then it would also be false for me to dress up in jeans and a T-shirt or whatever other bands wear . . . whatever is acceptable. That would be more weird. It would inhibit me a great deal to wear somebody else's uniform. I would be very uncomfortable."
As one of the first "rock women" fostered by late-Seventies new wave, she stood out from what was then a very select group. Never relaying on overt sexuality to get over, and penning such anthems as "Joan" on the Flex album and "Maria" on No Man's Land, Lovich seems a prime candidate for rock's leading female role-model. But such easy formulas never seem to work for her.
"I don't really think about this male and female type stuff very much at all," she explains. "Although I do have a lot of strong feelings about things not being fair for women, I don't direct myself to that position because I find it can narrow your vision so much. Maybe it's a very selfish attitude, but I've always found a way to express myself fully without many drawbacks as far as being female. I realize that in other professions, there is a certain amount of stereotyping that needs to be surpassed; but so many women use these stereotypes as vehicles to get themselves noticed that it makes it very difficult to progress sometimes.
"Sometimes I direct things toward girls during a show because there are a lot of females that come to our concerts. I really like that, because when I go to see other bands, I don't see so many girls. So I'll usually direct a song to them, but in my mind it's directed toward everybody."
Talking about compositions like "Joan" and "Maria," her concern with universality again comes across. "In 'Joan,' I just try to encourage people to follow their intuition - their innermost creative spirit. If there's something directing you which seems in opposition to the outside world, if it matters to you, then you should do it. I don't always feel confident myself and writing songs like that helps lift me out of these low periods."
"When I was writing, 'Maria,' in fact, I was trying to think of a name that was universal for both men and women. But there was something in my mind that kept saying 'Maria, Maria' all the time, and I had to listen to it. And of course, apart from the subject matter, I do think of the sounds of the words when I'm writing a song. That's important, and it can sway me to pick one word over another." [Note: The words "Maria, Maria" already appeared as male background vocal at one spot in the song "Joan".]
It's usually Lovich who comes up with the lyrics, but beyond this she finds it hard to make generalizations about how she writes songs with Les Chappell. "We're an inspiration to each other," she ventures. "I do usually write the words, but they're almost always inspired by some personal experience, or sometimes they're inspired by sound. Les is very often experimenting, playing something in some other room, and I can be some distance away and hear something in or around what he's doing. It can be anything, really . . . a few notes strung together that actually trigger off a picture in my mind. We rely totally on impulse. We never sit down to write a song, although I've had to do that in the past working with other people. All the songs were created because we wanted them to be there - not because we were looking for them, but because the songs seemed to want to exist themselves and we liked them enough to develop them. We have hundreds of little bits of music that we've recorded and later turn into songs. [Note: This does not mean that each recorded bit will eventually evolve into a song; it means that a certain amount of these little ideas recorded will go into one particular song in the end (Source: Other interviews).] Sometimes that can take a long time. Developing songs is where the actual songwriting technique comes in.
"I don't even know how we write songs. In a way, I'm only trying to thrill myself initially. If I'm thrilled by something, there's a fair amount of chance that other people will be thrilled by it as well. It's a selfish activity, really. I'm not thinking about the outside world in the initial stages."
"Lovich and Chappell have for some time now been working to complete a recording studio in their home in Norfolk, outside of London. Their home is a former vicarage which the church decided to sell. "When the new vicar came to our village, he didn't want to live in the house," Lene laughs. "He said it was an icebox; there was no heating."
Work on the studio has come along rather slowly, obviously a source of great frustration for Lovich. "There's still a long way to go," she sighs. "This whole business of not having a record out has had so many repercussions along the way. There was no income from either publishing or recording. It meant that we were very short of cash. But what we have done is get the space ready. We have a little bit of equipment, but we don't have the big, expensive equipment yet. That's the next step. We have a few ideas how to organize this and perhaps there's a possibility of borrowing somebody else's equipment for a time."
What the couple are aiming for is a 16-track studio primarily for themselves but large enough to accommodate the entire group. They would like to make their records there in the future, but Lene is just a little apprehensive about it. "We might have to mix somewhere else because some of the equipment that we've used in the past is quite expensive; and at the moment, I think we're going to spend our money on the tape machine and basics."
Had things gone differently, No Man's Land could have been recorded at Lovich and Chappell's home studio. But as it was, the record was done piecemeal at a number of English studios. "We did tiny little pieces whenever we could grab studio time," Lovich says. "I didn't want it to sound patchy. I wanted it to have one positive impact. I have to thank Bob Clearmountain; he remixed the whole album and made it sound like a single project. He was able to do that without taking away or adding anything. I like him so much and I'd like to work with him again; he's a real artist."
The consistency of No Man's Land can also be attributed to Lovich's regular ensemble of players - bassist Mark Hayward-Chaplin, drummer Justin Hildreth and pianist Dean Klevatt, who form the nucleus of the band on the record. She's been working with these musicians for some time now, and surrounding herself with the right people is something she values highly. "There's a style of playing that you like," she says, "and who you can work with personality-wise is also very important. Something I've found about working in an outside studio, especially if the engineer is not on your wavelength, is you wear yourself out a lot trying to relate your ideas to the musicians and the engineer. Quite often, you spend a lot of time justifying your ideas. What you want to do may be a load of rubbish, but until you hear it, it's no good for them to say it's not going to work. I can't deal with that. They must try it. I find that to be one of the most frustrating things about working in the studio."
By the same token, she's not really interested in using obedient studio musicians who will contribute nothing of their own style. "You've got to try to find a sort of compromise," she explains, "where the musicians feel confident about their ideas and they like your music so they want to contribute their ideas. That's great. Sometimes their ideas might be better than mine. That's how it is when you work with a band."
One musician whose collaborations with Lovich have been especially fruitful is Thomas Dolby, who wrote "New Toy" and occasionally plays keyboards for Lovich both live and on record. The two artists have actually known one another for quite a while now.
"About three years ago, I did a tour here in America," Lovich recalls, "and there was a band called Bruce Woolley and The Camera Club who were on the same label. Thomas played keyboards for Bruce Woolley, and that's where I first met him. Sometime after that, I was looking for a keyboard player and I got a letter from Tom. At first, I didn't recognize his name. He just said he had a dream about me. I was curious enough to follow it up, and I was glad to get in touch with Tom again. We did a bit of rehearsing together and he brought me a tape of a song he'd written called 'New Toy,' which I related to straightaway and wanted to record. He became involved in recording with us then and came to America with us when we did that mini-tour."
Dolby also plays on one track on No Man's Land, "Rocky Road," and turned up on keyboard during a gig at New York's Ritz during Lovich's most recent tour. She's returned the favor by appearing on a few of Dolby's own projects. "I recorded with him on his album," she says, "backing vocals mainly. I appeared in his videos, too. There's a video for a song called 'Radio Silence' that I'm in, but I'm looking different. I have a blond wig on and look like quite a different person. Not many people know it's me."
Lovich is quite pleased at her friend's recent American success with "She Blinded Me with Science," but admits to being a bit perplexed as to why it happened when it did. "A lot of people don't realize Tom had a record out before," she says. "They think it's a new album. So it seems his record company has reissued his original album. So much depends on timing here in America. It has nothing to do with the quality of the music. It's just whether things are right for the time."
And what about her own progress in the U.S.? Her records have won her a substantial cult following here, but except for the DOR success of New Toy, she has yet to score a major hit. How does she feel about that?
"I suppose I'm probably most pleased with things in America than anywhere else. I seem to have a fair amount of respect here as an artist, which is very important to me. It's more important than actually having a hit record. A little while ago, I came to New York to work on Tom Verlaine's album Words from the Front. I've always admired and respected Tom Verlaine, and now he's a friend of mine. To be able to be respected in that way that people want to work with you, that's the biggest compliment you can receive. And that's very important to me."
