She was the red-haired firebrand fronting Lush when shoegaze was a dirty word and \"the scene that celebrates itself\" was getting mocked in the British press. Lush's demise was a story partially of pain, but decades later, Miki Berenyi is back at it and is playing some of the most compelling music of her career. In this episode, the singer/guitarist behind much of Lush's gossamer dream pop and shoegaze guitar pop talks about the band's rise through albums like Spooky and Lovelife, the conflicts that invariably run roughshod as part the band dynamic, and the devastating suicide of drummer Chris Acland that abruptly ended the band.
Miki and I discuss her brutally honest memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success — a book that transcends typical music-bio territory with an account that's absorbing, heartbreaking, and throughout, naked and surprising in it's unfiltered honesty. Miki's coming of age story in London led to the eventual messy reality of being a woman in the male-dominated Britpop machine.
Miki Berenyi isn't a nostalgia act though. Her evolution to Piroshka — the moody post-punk/dream-pop project she built with longtime partner KJ \"Moose\" McKillop, Elastica's Justin Welch, and Modern English's Michael Conroy eventually led to her current outfit, the Miki Berenyi Trio (MB3), whose 2025 debut Tripla fuses her signature shimmer with electronics that show a marked evolution of songwriting and vastness of texture that can only be borne from a life well lived. From shoegaze pioneer to memoirist to indie-rock lifer who's somehow having more fun now than she did at her commercial peak, this is Miki Berenyi unfiltered — on life, reinvention, and why she's still not interested in being anyone's \"woman in '90s music\" cautionary tale.
Keywords: Miki Berenyi, Lush, shoegaze, Britpop, Fingers Crossed memoir, Piroshka, Miki Berenyi Trio, MB3, Tripla, Chris Acland, dream pop, '90s alternative rock, Alt rock, 4AD, Vaughan Oliver, V23, Elastica, MB3, AI Music, Creativity, inspiration, writing music
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