Detroit, MI · new wave · art-pop

Lene Lovich

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New wave's great eccentric — yelps, trills, and a vocal style nobody has successfully copied, 'Lucky Number' still gloriously odd.

Lene Lovich was born Lili-Marlene Premilovich in Detroit to an English mother and an American father of Serbian descent. When her father's health failed, her mother moved the family to Hull, East Yorkshire, while Lovich was still a teenager. She later moved to London to study art, and it was there she began building the career that would take her name.

In London she met guitarist Les Chappell, a teenage acquaintance who became her longstanding collaborator and partner. Before recording, she busked around the Underground, danced in cabaret clubs, played saxophone in various outfits and wrote lyrics for Cerrone's disco hit "Supernature." She also took to braiding her hair while studying sculpture, to keep it out of the clay, a habit that became her signature look.

She signed to Stiff Records in the late 1970s and became one of the label's defining figures. "Lucky Number," taken from her debut album Stateless, reached number three on the UK singles chart in 1979 and made her a leading figure of the new wave scene.

Her voice is the centrepiece of the music: a high, hiccupping, trilling delivery that borrows from folk singing and operatic phrasing as much as from rock, set against keyboard-driven new wave arrangements. Her work with Chappell also produced "Say When," "Bird Song" and "New Toy," the last written by Thomas Dolby. Onstage she paired braided hair with theatrical costume, a deliberate strangeness that matched the records.

Flex (1979) and No Man's Land (1982) followed on Stiff. She released March independently in 1989, then stepped back from music for fifteen years to focus on her family, returning in 2005 with Shadows and Dust. In 2013 she launched her own label, Flex Music, and issued a remastered box set of her back catalogue.

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new waveart-pop