Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success: Rough Trade Book of the Year

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But frequent relocation, parental neglect and the dark presence of her abusive grandmother resulted in crippling shyness, mental-health issues and a vulnerability to exploitation. But at the heart of the story are Miki’s internal battles: the conflict between her mouthy public persona and her thin-skinned private identity; the trials of being a woman in an infuriatingly male world; and the struggle to find a middle ground between ‘safe’ indie obscurity and ‘sell-out’ international success. In a way, I admired her, because so many musicians plug away at the music business even after it has become intolerable and the results can be tragic. PRIMAVERA: THE BLAG INTRODUCTION It’s a massive understatement to say a lot has changed since we bought our ‘early bird’ tickets for Barcelona Primavera 2020 within a couple of weeks. Centre stage with bright red hair, she had a striking and recognisable image, but never let this put her off mingling with the crowd at gigs and festivals.

She tries very hard not to paint Chris as a ‘tragedy waiting to happen’ and concentrates on the talent, kindness and sense of humour of this very complicated man. I’m a big fan of the music of Lush, so singer and guitarist Miki Berenyi’s autobiography Fingers Crossed was long-anticipated by me and was a book that I was always going to get something out of, even if it had been a bit rubbish. It instils in you the thing most necessary from a musician's memoir: the urgent need to play the records again.

Yasuko Nagazumi had more of a clue than Ivan Berenyi but lived thousands of miles away, doting on her new partner, another sub-prime catch. But you don’t need to know a thing about Lush to love Fingers Crossed — Berenyi makes her story so relatable, so poignant, so emotionally intense, it’s an irresistible rush of a book.

We learn how Berenyi’s parents split when she was four, after which her mother, Yasuko, a Japanese actor, began a relationship with the TV and film director Ray Austin. I don’t want to be a drama queen but reliving the 30-year span of this book… let’s just say it’s been emotional. Balancing out the fun and hijinks are simmering tensions with Anderson and Berenyi’s reflections on an industry that fails to value creativity, treats female musicians as eye candy and habitually defers to the men in the room. Information was sparse, but it was clear that she had not had a good time in the closing days of Lush, eventually leaving the music business altogether and getting a ‘proper job’.

Despite the trauma at the heart of her story, Berenyi’s writing is characterised by arch humour and a delight in the absurd.

Although written almost thirty years after the most tragic events in the author’s life, Fingers Crossed reads piercingly emotional and, as she admits, ‘visceral’. Hopefully, this is not the last of her writings we shall see, as her way with words and her knack for expressing herself so well leaves us wanting more.It’s with remarkable pragmatism that she looks back at her life and music career: “You can’t expect good times without the bad – neither makes sense without the other. Berenyi recognises her difficult childhood as leading to neediness that bled into her future relationships and, in part, Fingers Crossed has a touch of therapy about it. After the band lands on the solid soil of the 4AD label in 1989, the four find themselves confronted by the challenging forces of the music business. These aren't all pleasant stories, but there is also a lot of love and nostalgia around, and an evocation of life in 1970s Britain which could both be rough (Berenyi suffered a lot of bullying and attempted bullying at various schools) but also a lot of fun, especially given the privilege of her mother's wealth and introductions to various celebrities. Lush also had a rockier side which put them in a good position when they were unexpectedly recruited by Perry Farrell to open the second-ever Lollapalooza tour in 1992, giving them a small but intense following in the United States, not to mention a hair-raising series of anecdotes about playing alongside Ministry, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.