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

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Lush’s rise is vividly told, as Berenyi finds the squalor and rootlessness of her childhood has set her up well for life in a touring band. Rough Trade's Book of the Year 2022A Mojo Book of the Year 2022Formed in 1988, Lush were part of the London gig scene during one of the most vibrant and creative periods in UK music. I can’t recommend Fingers Crossed highly enough, even if you’ve never heard of Miki Berenyi and have no interest in Lush.

Fortunately, it’s far from being rubbish and all of the professional critics (you know, the ones who get paid for doing this kind of thing and therefore don’t have the luxury of partiality) agree.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. The extraordinary and searingly honest personal story of musician Miki Berenyi, revealing the highs and lows of navigating the madness of the '90s music industry. 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.

The band were fizzling when their sharp, wry drummer Chris Acland, to whom Berenyi was particularly close, suddenly took his own life in 1996, a denouement that still knocks the wind out of you even though you know it’s coming. articles years before they were even ready to record their first full album, leading to a resulting inevitable backlash from the UK's notoriously tabloidy music press. There’s an amazing authenticity to having the story told by the author and certain of the phraseology sounds so right in Miki’s voice and accent. The book also features an interesting fresh perspective on being a woman on the guitar band circuit at this particular point in time. Peppered with anecdotes involving a cast of hundreds (including Blur, Sean Connery, Tracey Emin, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers), this uncompromising autobiography documents Lush's thrilling rise, dispiriting fall and subsequent bounceback, reliving the tours, recording sessions and problematic managers they experienced along the way.It’s impossible for us, on the outside, to understand the feelings that Miki must have about Nora when looking back for this memoir, but she does a very good job of letting us feel just a little bit of what she feels. 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. I had an absolutely crazy day which started with my guitar getting knocked over by Pearl Jam and its neck-snapping. 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.