It must’ve been a dream come true for Hatchie (born Harriette Pilbeam). That’s certainly what the Brisbane, Australia born dream-pop artist’s shining eyes and beaming smile conveyed as she listened to Lush co-vocalist/co-guitarist Miki Berenyi sing her praises during a joint interview over Zoom with Under the Radar.
“You’ve got this amazing voice. Whereas we were like, ‘We can’t fucking sing. We can’t fucking play’ back when we started. You clearly can,” Berenyi tells Pilbeam of the difference between Hatchie and Lush (which formed in 1987 with Berenyi and Emma Anderson as vocalists/ guitarists, Chris Acland on drums, and Steve Rippon on bass before he was replaced by Phil King in 1991).
Pilbeam (who is building a loving fanbase of her own thanks to her soaring art-pop sensibility on 2018’s Sugar & Spice EP and her two albums—2019’s Keepsake and 2022’s Giving the World Away) loves that quality in Lush’s music, saying: “I don’t think I could pick favorite songs, but what I love about Lush is how imperfect a lot of it is. Like how you can really hear how real it is, and how you’re really just a bunch of kids making it work in whatever way it worked for you.”
Berenyi now sports spectacles and dark hair, as opposed to the neon red locks and leather jacket so many fans loved in the “Ladykillers” video. But she nevertheless maintains her youthful spunk in conversation while giving her take on the broader scene Lush was lumped into in the 1990s when, contrary to that compliment, critics made them feel they weren’t making it work. After that, Berenyi tells Pilbeam how all that differs from the artistic gains the younger artist has made. “That shoegaze atmosphere, whatever was around it, was quite a cloaking device. It was almost like we
