FILTER BOOKS
Scarlet Fever
The Lush singer-songwriter’s page-turning tale of love and survival.
By Keith Cameron.
Taxi for Lush: Miki Berenyi, 1994.
Tom Sheehan
Fingers Crossed
★★★★ Miki Berenyi
NINE EIGHT. £22
IN SUMMER 1976, Miki Berenyi drove 1,000 miles across Europe in a clapped-out Ford Capri with her Hungarian father Ivan and grandmother Nora. The gruelling trip from suburban north-west London to Budapest is funded en route by nine-year-old Miki on the streets of various cities hawking a compendium of tat bought on Willesden High Road. “Unbelievably, the shower fittings are a hit, as are the make-up sets and Top Of The Pops cassettes.” The trio’s progress is delayed after Ivan detours to the apartment of “a ‘pussy’ from his past”. Later, weary from his exertions, he falls asleep at the wheel on the autobahn, disaster averted only by the screams of his mother and daughter.
This remarkable episode is just one of many in Berenyi’s chaotic, borderline feral upbringing. Not all the remembrance is carefree. She is sexually abused by Nora, and by a friend of Ivan’s. The dilapidated house the three share following her parents’ divorce is filthy and pest-ridden. With freelance journalist Ivan frequently abroad for extended periods, Berenyi is left to fend for herself, singing along to an ABBA cassette, her bedroom door barricaded to prevent Nora from entering.
“Berenyi is equally honest about her own flaws.”
Respite comes from time spent with her mother, Yasuko Nagazumi, an actress and model whose role in Lionel Jeffries’ 1977 film Wombling Free earns Berenyi playground kudos. Yet none of the various private schools she attends seem to notice the scars of neglect and self-harm, and she proceeds through adolescence in a constant disruptive roil, from which music represents an escape, albeit initially as an avid fan rather than a creator. A pivotal relationship is cemented when she and schoolfriend Emma Anderson meet Thomp-son Twins’ Tom Bailey outside RAK Studios and are invited inside.