LENE LOVICH SAYS WHEN
"I don't speak at all from the American side of the company," Lene qualifies before citing her grievances, "but in England, Stiff is very much a Top 10 record company, which is fine in a way, but sometimes it's a little difficult trying to please everybody and at the same time please yourself. And I'm extremely stubborn I suppose when it comes to my creative freedom in music. So it's just taken a very long time to find something that they're happy with and that I'm also happy with."
It is impossible to classify Lene, because she refuses too succumb to anything quite so tangible. "I see myself as very much of an international person," she declares. I don't really concern myself with (creating an image) because here I am and this is what I do. There are certain things about my past that I don't really wish to discuss. So for this reason I suppose I remain slightly vague. It's a little bit like the presentation of my songs really in that I don't wish to spell everything out to people. It lessens the audience participation in what you do. I don't know, I've never made a real secret of the basic facts of my life. They are there if anyone cares."
[...] Lene first picked up her reputed saxophone around this time, as well, which she leaned to play under the tutelage of a friend, Bob Flag. She also had a burning desire to sing, but found that her unique falsetto met with much opposition.
"I used to go to auditions with bands and I never got the gig," she recalls. "You see, people have a preconceptive idea of what they think a singer should be. And I just didn't measure up to their expectations."
Although she laughs now, it's apparent that Lene Lovich, the aspiring performer, did not laugh at her rejection. But the fire that burns from her cobalt eyes likewise burns within. It drove her. It still drives her. "There was a little voice inside me that wouldn't be quiet. It was desperate to get out and it made me do it," she says, half mockingly, of her determination. "I was very unconfident and yet I wanted to do it. What I did is that I went off and for five years did all sorts of jobs. Anything I could to get close to music. All sorts of stupid cabaret gigs. Put up with all sorts of abuse just to be close to music. And just to gain experience."
Now as her long-overdue third album is being readied for shelf life, Lene is in England testing her talents in yet another untried area: the theater. In a musical account of the most fantastic treason trial of World War One, which she composed in collaboration with Les and Chris Judge Smith, the upwardly mobile exotic dancer who convicted of spying died before a French firing squad in the early 1900's.
Like Mata Hari, the middle class Dutch girl who created her own legend as mysterious Indian dancer, Lene Lovich writes the script to her own life. "The thing that's most important to me," she decrees, "is the freedom to be myself. I don't want to be silenced. I think I've every right to do what I want to do."
