When Miki Berenyi was eight years old, her father, Ivan, would take her out on the town. At local nightclubs, he would buy her vodka and orange and the pair would hit the dancefloor. Soon it would be time for her to fulfil her main purpose, which was to act as bait for an “appropriately attractive woman”. Once Ivan had selected his target, his daughter would be dispatched to chat to her. A few minutes later, Ivan would apologetically retrieve her and engage the woman in conversation. “While I’m pleased to have been an accomplice – part of Dad’s dynamic duo – it’s a self-defeating skill because I am from that moment sidelined,” Berenyi recalls. “No longer the centre of Dad’s attention, I become bored and begin yawning, and he has the perfect excuse to usher his catch home.”
Music memoirs tend to race through their author’s childhoods to get to the meatier business of rock’n’roll stardom, but Fingers Crossed is not like most music memoirs. Fiercely honest and emotionally acute, it is evenly divided between Berenyi’s early life and her nine-year stint as the singer in British dream-pop outfit, Lush. While the band, who toured the world and enjoyed a handful of Top 40 singles in the 1980s and 90s, had their dissolute moments, they had nothing on Berenyi’s family life, which was characterised by extreme chaos and dysfunction.
