Lene Lovich

After the flush of getting into the club wore off, Christian and I started getting bored. The room filled up to capacity and everybody was milling around, impatiently waiting for the show to begin. Nine o’clock came and went without a peep, and so did 10:00 and, eventually, 11:00. People were starting to get irritated. It wasn’t an ugly irritation – no threat of riot – just the natural impatience of people standing around doing nothing for two hours. We got another round of beers and dug in.

Unwilling to release another full album of anti-hits, Stiff (begrudgingly) agreed to release an EP of new songs from Lene to see how it would do in the marketplace. Although she was still off on her own personal trajectory, the EP featured a catchy song given to her by wunderkind Thomas Dolby called New Toy about the sublimation of sexual desire into materialistic longing (or something like that). The EP sold well and New Toy got some radio play, and a new full album was given the go-ahead from Stiff.

Finally, a little after midnight, the lights went down and a band took the stage. Relieved and excited, the crowd burst into cheers and applause. It was the just the opening act, but everybody was glad that there was finally something going on and they yelled while the band kicked off their set with a bleak New Romantic synth-pop tune in the Soft Cell mold. Really pretty bad. But, hey, at least there was a band playing and the crowd was happy about that – plus it meant that Lene would soon take the stage. The opening band played another song, I guess, but it sounded exactly like the first one they played. The crowd started getting less charitable with their cheers. By the end of the third carbon copy song, the crowd was booing lustily. “Get off the stage!” “You suck!” “Le-ne, Le-ne, Le-ne”. The singer thanked everybody for their enthusiasm (I don’t know if he couldn’t tell everybody was booing or if it was just the old show-must-go-on ethos at work) and they launched into another rendition of the same song. Their set was short, but not short enough, and when they finally called it quits, a giant cheer went up from the crowd.

Lene’s third and, as it would turn out, last album for Stiff was by far her most fan-friendly release, No Man’s Land. Energetic, synthetic, and easy on the ears, the lyrical content is still pretty far out there (she even goes so far as to explicitly state that the Blue Hotel (Earth) is a nice place to visit – although you wouldn’t necessarily want to live there), but the packaging is all shiny and inviting. As is her pattern, she covers a few songs, including a questionable love song from Holland’s Meteors called It’s You (Mein Schmerz) – schmerz being German for “pain” – and another couple from Fingerprintz’ Jimmie O’Neil. No Man’s Land features her warmest, most inviting production, and includes her bounciest, bubbliest tune, the gloriously infectious Maria. No Man’s Land also features the marvelously rhythmically obtuse Walking Low, which, even though I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, still evades my ability to count it out. The album ends with a beautiful and stirring, but somewhat melancholy, instrumental tag at the end of Rocky Road, which sounds just like end credit music. As this was, for all intents and purposes, her last album, that’s exactly what it is, a final, bittersweet farewell to a long and winding road. (She did come out with another album almost ten years later, but it’s embarrassingly bad and immediately forgettable, and I prefer to ignore it and focus on her trilogy for Stiff as being her real career).

No Man’s Land was in heavy rotation on my stereo during my year at the University of Chicago – probably Peter Gabriel’s Security was the only album I played more – and Lene was touring that spring to support that album. My asshole roommate David took a shine to it and used to taunt me with his fondness for it. He thought that I thought that Lene was too cool for him, and felt that the fact that he liked it was a badge of his coolness. It’s like the time I got him high, and he freaked out and punched me in the face, and then, the next day, asked if, since he had now smoked pot, didn’t that make him cool? Er, not quite. If you have to ask if you’re cool, chances are good that you’re not. Since I hated him so much and he suddenly glommed onto something precious to me, I may have soured on Lene and moved on to things that were harder for him to like, but I wasn’t going to let his enthusiasm spoil a perfectly good record, so I just ignored him and kept playing it.

Finally, at close to two in the morning, Lene and her band took the stage. At that point, we had all been standing around for five hours and were tired and cranky, but she was so exciting and so good and so energetic that all was forgiven by the end of the first song. She was just as strange in person as she seemed on her albums, with her piercing dark eyes and her long braids woven throughout with dozens of pieces of bright yellow fabric, and her phenomenal voice was in fine form as she hiccuped and yodeled her way through the set. She roamed the stage like an exotic leopard while her band bounced and shimmied around her. Her show was so good and the band so energetic and the music so stunningly original that the whole room was lifted out of the drab, grey city of Chicago and nestled into her alien home planet for a couple of hours. She played three or four encores and when the band finally stopped around four in the morning, we were deliriously happy (and frightfully exhausted), and went out into the predawn humming and buzzing and happy to be alive. It was, all in all, the best concert I’ve ever attended. And it was followed the next night by one of the worst. But that, as they say, is another story.