Miki Berenyi

Miki Berenyi (OQ 1980-1985), best known as a member of the band Lush, recently published a critically acclaimed and best-selling autobiography called “ Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success”. In the latest edition of our “Queen’s Reads” series, OQ Julia Rank reviews Berenyi’s  book below.

I’m not really the target audience for Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success by OQ Miki Berenyi, having no prior knowledge of Berenyi’s band Lush. I’m of the Spice Girls generation and my memories of 1990s pop music involve a bubble-gum sound rather than that of Lush’s ‘shoegazing’ style (I’m still not entirely sure what that means). I also have to confess that I’m not particularly interested in rock and pop music, but the candidness with which Berenyi tells her tumultuous and often harrowing life story makes it the antithesis of a frothy celebrity autobiography.

Lush, which was a cult rather than a mainstream success, isn’t formed until more than halfway through the book and the most compelling part is the bracing and highly disturbing account of Miki’s childhood. To call it unsettled and dysfunctional (I want to use a coarser adjective) would be a gross understatement. She was born in London in 1967 to an exiled aristocratic Hungarian father and Japanese mother who separated soon after her birth. Her father Ivan Berenyi was a womanising journalist with no idea about how to raise a child. Her actress mother Yasuko Nagazumi was more with it, but lived thousands of miles away in Los Angeles. Home in Willesden was a hotbed of squalor, neglect and sexual abuse at the hands of her paternal grandmother, Nora, a monstrous individual whom her father moved in to be his daughter’s caregiver despite having been abused by her himself. The fact that Miki is still able to love her father (now deceased) is probably the detail that will stick with me most deeply and probably not something that anyone can understand unless they’ve experienced it.

It’s not the most flattering depiction of Queen’s. There’s an amusing portrait of the then Principal, Mrs Fierz (“so posh she pronounces ‘off’ as ‘awf”), who set Miki up on a camp bed in the music department and arranged a stint living in the College’s boarding house as a respite from her chaotic home life.  At Queen’s, she met Emma Anderson with whom she shared  an ‘outsider’ status and love for rock music. It was a complex and often competitive friendship and she’s open about the fact that being bandmates didn’t necessarily make them best friends. At 17, Miki moved into a flat with a boyfriend she shared with Tracey Emin and - despite drug experimentation, eating disorders and self-harm - she still she managed to pass a few A-levels and gain a place at the Polytechnic of North London to study English, where she earned a 2.1 while forming Lush.

Much of the Lush section, filled with names of bands and industry figures, went over my head but I’m sure would be fascinating to those in the know. The sexual harassment, slut shaming and exploitation are vividly described. The rock star life sounds absolutely gruelling and ultimately not really something worth aspiring to.

It’s extraordinary that post-Lush, Berenyi has managed to build what sounds like a happy and stable a life for herself out of such pandemonium. I love that she took a proofreading course after Lush disbanded and has earned a living as a subeditor for the past 25 years – as a proofreader myself, I know that it’s one way of finding some kind of order in a world that often feels overwhelmingly chaotic.