Her mother moved to Los Angeles, giving Berenyi an early experience of transatlantic travel and adventures in the Hollywood Hills and visits to the family home in Japan. The band were fizzling when their sharp, wry drummer Chris Acland, to whom Berenyi was particularly close, suddenly took his own life in 1996, a denouement that still knocks the wind out of you even though you know it’s coming. Berenyi saves much of her ire for the Britpop era, which saw an explosion of pent-up misogyny and attempts to exploit young women under the guise of empowerment, and women in the business were taken advantage of. A ‘C’ word that sounds offensive in my male inner monologue sounds less so delivered in context by Miki.

It’s with remarkable pragmatism that she looks back at her life and music career: “You can’t expect good times without the bad – neither makes sense without the other. I felt like I was on the rollercoaster with Miki, from making mixtapes with her school friends to the wild dream of making it as a pop star. Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success’ is the revealing autobiography of Miki Berenyi, former member of British shoegaze band Lush and currently Piroshka. The extraordinary and searingly honest personal story of musician Miki Berenyi, revealing the highs and lows of navigating the madness of the ’90s music industry. Her Japanese mother was in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and became an agent for photographers in LA, where Berenyi spent frequent holidays.

Miki Berenyi was Lush's lead singer and frontwoman, sharing guitarist and songwriting duties with former schoolfriend (and music fanzine co-editor) Emma Anderson.

I’m not documenting my life for people to gawp or wonder at, but inviting them in, to experience the highs and the lows, and feel what it was like to live through it. I was quite late to the party with Lush; so late, in fact, that the party was over and all that remained were half-empty wine bottles and cheesy nibbles ground into the carpet. You might naively assume that having a parent in the entertainment industry comes with a degree of financial security, but the author makes it clear that this is far from being the case. When the inevitable comes to be described, it’s not over-dramatised, but presented with the kind of numb disbelief that is the common factor of all bereavements.Berenyi, especially, found herself the frequent star of music periodical gossip columns, thanks to frequently attending gigs in London and not holding back her opinions on anything (her eye-catching red hair also made her easy to spot in such venues). From the bohemian lifestyle of her Hungarian father’s social circle to the privileged glamour of her Japanese mother’s acting career, Miki’s young life was a blur of international travel, celebrities and peripatetic schooling.

Fingers Crossed is easily my favourite book of 2022 and my favourite autobiography since Bruce Campbell’s If Chins Could Kill (a very different book). Berenyi constantly downplays her own musical skills throughout the book, when even a brief perusal of Lush's back catalogue immediately contradicts that idea. It is written with an honest self awareness and reflections exploring why she felt a certain way or craved certain aspects of her life, as well as an insight into how women in the music industry were treated in the 90s. Fingers Crossed provides a salutary corrective to a much mythologised musical era; it's often extremely funny. Berenyi says of this time “ People think they toughest time for a band is at the beginning, when you’re struggling to make it.

As ever, just because I fell into it didn’t mean that once faced with the job I didn’t give it absolutely everything I had! The fact they were also moderately successful in the United States when many of their contemporary British colleagues struck up much higher profiles in the UK but couldn't crack America at all seemed even more galling to certain people, and, as gruelling as the American tours could be, they were a relief from the sometimes indifferent British ones. Balancing out the fun and hijinks are simmering tensions with Anderson and Berenyi’s reflections on an industry that fails to value creativity, treats female musicians as eye candy and habitually defers to the men in the room.