The New Cue #384 May 31: Lush, Manu Chao, Bat For Lashes, Arooj Aftab, Royel Otis, Richard Hawley, Clairo, Iceage

'After Lush, like Austin Powers, I lost my mojo.'

Good morning,

It’s half-term: Niall’s camping in Cornwall all week, Chris is creating digital magic at Mojo magazine with the other adults, and I’ve got an hour while my kids go house-breaking in the streets around us so we can gather enough swag to pay for a summer holiday too. I’m using this moment of peace to layout today’s newsletter.

We’ve got some recommendations for new music in here, as usual. But first, we also have an interview that I, Ted, did with Emma Anderson and Phil King from Lush in a central London pub about Phil’s beautiful short Super-8 film, A Far From Home Movie. This is the trailer:

Phil shot it on tour with the band when he was their (second) bassist between 1992 and Lush’s sudden end in October, 1996, after drummer Chris Acland committed suicide at his parents home in the Lake District, bringing the band to an abrupt, shocking halt. There was a Lush reunion in 2015 for dates and an EP, and then another split in November 2016. The second split was not as traumatic as the first, clearly, but it wasn’t amicable either - some of which is detailed in singer Miki Berenyi’s 2022 memoir, Fingers Crossed (though not the reunion), but it’s not a book that has hastened the band’s reunification.

Phil and Emma are wisely keeping their counsel about the band’s second ending and Miki’s book. Instead, they’re talking about Phil’s film, which stands as a short memorial to the best of the band: a quartet who made arty, romantic future-rock carved from classic songwriting influences, while also never taking themselves nor their business too seriously.

The New Cue is hosting A Far From Home’s European premiere tonight at The Social in London. It’s sold out, but keep your eyes on our X account in case of returns. There are other showings at Hebden Bridge on July 3 and in Paris on July 10th. We’re also looking forward to St Vincent’s first show at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday, on the back of a first top five album for Born Kicking and Screaming - but that’s a whole other edition.

Enjoy today’s bulletin - we’ll see you on Monday for a chunk of John Grant.

Ted, Niall and Chris.

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End The Week With: Lush

Emma Anderson and Phil King tell us the story behind Phil’s Super-8 film about life on the road in Lush, as detailed in A Far From Home Movie.

Phil and Emma, hello.
Emma Anderson: hi.
Phil King: hello.

Phil, tell us about the genesis of your film please.
PK: I had this Japanese Sankyo Super 8 camera and I used to take it on tour and shoot bits and bobs. Chris [Acland] used to always call it a ‘juxtaposition between the old and the new’…

You being the old?
PK: Yes. I used to film Chris in particular. We’d hang out together and he’d play-act a lot, doing his Bobby Gillespie impersonation and that kind of thing. I was just trying to capture the excitement of being on tour. Before I joined Lush, I’d never been to America in a band, whereas you’d been so many times.
EA: So many!
PK: I joined in January, 1992, and they were so jaded compared to me. They were, like, ‘Where’s the limo?’ I was just happy to be in America! By that point they’d done something like 150 shows or something.
EA: Lush played a lot generally.
PK: America was great because there was tour support, so there was a nice tour bus, and that was exciting. My idea was just to capture some of that. Hopefully I have.

How long has it been in your mind to put it all together?
PK: It’s called ‘A Far from Home Movie’ and that’s what it was. It’s just a home movie. After Chris died, I put it away for years. I met an American film editor in Porto who did the final edit for me and that’s when it sort of made sense to finish. There’s been enough time now to share it. When people review it now on Letterbox they say things like, ‘Wow! America before 9/11!’ And it was a different time.  
EA: I find it very bittersweet. Those American trips were so intense. We went there a lot, the meet and greet stuff, the shake and fake…
PK: Honestly, the promotion. In the day before a gig you’d be going to radio stations, having meals with local promotors, doing interviews with every fanzine…
EA: You were there! It’s all in your book. [Full disclosure: I, Ted, was going out with Emma then and therefore on some of these tours in 1994, so I bear witness]

My memory is that you were not happy, Emma. Those tours made you miserable.
EA: I DID like touring, to a point. Generally, I loved the travel and meeting new people. It was amazing. But it was too relentless. The big problem really was that they thought that we were going to break America and sell a million records there. I remember thinking, I don’t think we are, you know? Not in a defeatist way, but I felt that us going back on tour there again and again was going to break the band.
PK: The last tours there did break the band, because they sent us there with Goo Goo Dolls and Gin Blossoms on these long tours. And their recent albums hadn’t done well, so they weren’t playing huge places. You’d still see couples pitching up like they were at the cinema with popcorn and a big drink though. On the Gin Blossoms tour we ended up at the same New York venue we’d headlined on the tour before. That night, we went to a bar and Mark Eitzel of American Music Club was in there. I drowned my sorrows with him. When Chris died, he thought I was Chris and he wrote a song called Lower East Tourist about me killing myself based on our conversation.

Oh no.
PK: Which goes to show, because Chris was always happy-go-lucky.
EA: He wasn’t on that last tour.
PK: No, he was very quiet.
EA: But the film is mainly Split, the album before. We did a short US tour and then a longer one later, which suited us a bit better.
PK: When I joined Lush, they had a 32-date UK tour. Imagine that now, a band doing a 32-date UK tour. We had catering, Eat to the Beat. Then on the Split tour we only did five UK dates. So going to America was suddenly like doing a proper tour again.
EA: And by Lovelife were staying in bed and breakfasts where they didn’t turn the heating on in the day.
PK: But even then they still wanted us to go back to America and play bowling alleys.
EA: That’s why Spinal tap is so brilliant: it’s actually true.
PK: That and the cliché that you don’t break America, America breaks you.
EA: I remember them taking 500 and servicing it to ‘female orientated radio’ in the States. I mean, bloody hell.

PK: There was this day where we went out to a tenement flat in Long Island, you’d look out the window and it was like Eraserhead, it was so bleak, and we had to do a whole day of radio jingles. ‘Hi this is Phil from Lush and you’re listening to The Cutting Edge of Rock in Long Island’ or…
EA: Worcester, Massachusetts.

Well, it’s a very beautiful film and you don’t really get a sense of that Spinal Tap silliness.
PK: Thank you. You know that Chet Baker film by Bruce Weber, Let’s Get Lost? I was influ…influenced is a bit much! But that was in my mind, because that’s a black and white too with a tragic end, because he died during it. Chet Baker fell off a balcony, didn’t he? In Amsterdam.
EA: It’s not just America, though. There’s Chris in that graveyard in Italy.
PK: In a graveyard in Bath as well, I think. Or Windsor. Just playing around, in a mausoleum.
EA: I find that quite difficult to watch.
PK: The original cut finished with him sleeping but it was too downbeat. I found a bootleg of that Filmore show where we had the male and female Elvis impersonators singing to him, so I thought I’d finish on that to try and be slightly more upbeat.

Which Fillmore date was that?
PK: In 1996, on his birthday. He died about four or five weeks later. What was his birthday? September…7th? And he died on October 17^th.

So that is actually probably one of the last pieces of film of him, and it’s lovely, being serenaded on his 30^th birthday by Elvis in San Francisco.
PK: The management actually wanted us to do a European tour with another drummer. I rang Chris up to see what he thought and they’d just found him. His dad answered the phone. Can I speak to Chris? ‘No, you can’t’. His brother had just got him down.

Had he left the band?
EA: No, the management said he was depressed and had gone back to the Lake District. They were suggesting another drummer fulfil our dates. Oh God, it’s just so horrendous. It’s still hard to process, 28 years later.

What were the happiest times in Lush?
PK: The catering, when we got it. Eat to the Beat did a nice shepherd’s pie, probably the same Keith Richards has.
EA: The early years were were very exciting: signing to 4AD and having Vaughan Oliver do our sleeves...the stuff of dreams.

PK: By 1996, Britpop had started and you ended up in this world of Richard and Judy.
EA: All Rise for Julian Clary.
PK: It went from 4AD Vaughan Oliver exhibitions in France to Zig and Zag and Dear Davina.

Lush on Dear Davina, July, 1996

You were an art rock group at heart, that’s how I thought of Lush.
EA: Phil and I think we should have split after Split. I think Chris thought that too.
PK: I remember there was an NME interview and I think it was Liz Evans said to Chris, ‘Oh I heard you were thinking of leaving.’ I didn’t know anything about that, but I’d been thinking of leaving.
EA: I’d been thinking of leaving, but none of us had communicated it to each other.

You may have had a nagging disappointment that you’d missed out on Britpop had you split then.
EA: Well, we went on Top of the Pops and all that, Radio 1 etc, but we didn’t actually sell that many records in the UK. 4AD did play the multi-format game with singles but they didn’t go down the path of using the more underhand tactics of getting bands into the Top 40 that a lot of other labels, especially majors, did.
PK: We used to do so many B-sides. Even Chris and I did B-Sides.
EA: I prefer some of the B-sides to the album tracks.

One of your B-sides, the cover of Love At First, is used really movingly in your film, Phil.
PK: By The Gist. My favourite bit is when we’re going into San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge and there’s a really ethereal atmosphere.

Never-Never sounds great in the film in particular. Are you happy to revisit Lush or is it painful?
EA: This is good.
PK: I’m proud of this because this is my film. With Lush, Miki and Emma wrote the songs and all the parts, for me this is my creative input. We’ve all moved on and are happy doing that. After Lush, like Austin Powers, I lost my mojo.
EA: I did as well. I can listen to Lush now, but after the reunion I couldn’t for quite a long time. It was too traumatic.
PK: And we haven’t said a word. Apart from to each other.

Have you considered writing your book?
PK: Well, I have a title: Indie Zelig. I could do a chapter on each bands I’ve been in [Felt, Biff Bang Pow!, The Servants, Lush, Jesus and Mary Chain…]. After Lush I’d basically run out of people to play with: I’ve played everyone I know.

Do you think you’ll release the film commercially?
PK: There’s talk of releasing it on Blu-ray via 4AD, but I’d like to get some of the little hairs out of it. They did a Desire Lines video using my Super 8 and the guy who directed it said, ‘Where are you keeping these films, down your pants?’ Nowadays, you can film everything, whereas I could only film in little bursts when it felt essential because the film was expensive. Consequently there isn’t much I didn’t use.

Does the film help bring closure to Lush?
EA: I don’t think it’s a matter of closure - more like striking a balance between version of events, because the one that’s been told in recent years is not one that I myself recognise.  
PK: It’s great getting this film out because there’s a sense of completion and it would be nice for it to end with a more positive look at Lush. It’s romantic, it looks good, the music’s great. It’s not all the dirt.

What are you both up to now?
EA: I put out an album last year called Pearlies, which was really well-received. This year we are releasing a series of ‘rearrangements’. So far, there has been one by MEMORIALS..

And a deary one, too.

PK: I live in Porto. I’m in an Anglo-Portuguese group called Population Five. We have an album out, on the Mojo playlist this month.

I’ve also been playing with Beth Hirsch, who sang with Air. I made an album with her called West 11, which a deal is just being sorted out for.

Great stuff, we’ll see you both at the Social for a Far from Home Movie’s premiere.

TK

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