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The profile · researched 16 October 2026
Twenty-three minutes at the O2, nine nights in the back rooms: Lene Lovich's second act
Lene Lovich played North America in autumn 2025 for the first time since 1989, then opened for Devo and the B-52's at the O2 in June 2026. This October and November she is back in rooms that hold a few hundred, with a saxophone, a four-piece band and no studio album since 2005.
Detroit, England, and a song she gave away
Lene Lovich was born Lili-Marlene Premilovich in Detroit in 1949 and moved to England at the age of 13. She has lived there ever since, and gave her 2025 interviews from home in Leicester. As a teenager she met the guitarist Les Chappell, who became her co-writer, bandmate and partner for most of the four decades that followed. Before any record of her own sold, her name was already on someone else's: in 1978 she co-wrote "Supernature" with the French producer Cerrone, a disco track that long outlasted the fashion that produced it, and which she still plays.
Her route to a deal ran through Stiff Records and the label's habit of commissioning cover versions. Her reading of "I Think We're Alone Now" came out in 1978 with an original on the B-side, and that B-side was "Lucky Number", written with Chappell. She has described their method as a straight swap: "You make a sound and I'll think of what I feel about that, and then we just traded from one person to the next until the song had enough legs to stand on."
Three albums for Stiff, and a borrowed Fairlight
Stateless arrived in 1978. When "Lucky Number" was promoted to an A-side and reissued the following year it reached No. 3 in the UK, No. 2 in Australia and No. 3 in both the Netherlands and New Zealand, with top-ten placings in Belgium and Ireland. The yelping, hiccuping vocal on it became the thing she was identified with, and the song is still the one the crowd films.
Flex followed in 1980, with Chappell co-writing "What Will I Do Without You?" and "You Can't Kill Me" — both of which remain in the live set. In 1981 came the New Toy EP. Thomas Dolby wrote its title track for her after seeing her perform; the subject was his newly acquired Fairlight CMI. It reached No. 53 in the UK and No. 19 on the US dance chart, and in Italy was pressed into service as the first closing theme for the anime series Attack No. 1. No Man's Land, in 1982, closed out the Stiff run.
Fifteen years off, and the way back
March appeared in 1989 on Pathfinder, made outside the major-label system, and then she stopped, standing down from records for roughly 15 years to raise a family. Shadows and Dust, released in 2005, is still her most recent studio album, and she has shown no urgency about replacing it. "People talk a lot about their career and being popular and having a hit record," she said in 2025, "but none of those things were really that important to me." Asked why she had stayed away from America so long, the answer was equally unbothered: "I don't have a very good sense of time as a person. If I'm thinking of things, I can lose track of time."
The current working life dates to 2012, when the guitarist, writer and filmmaker Jude Rawlins took over as her bandleader and music director — a post he still holds. In 2013 she set up her own label, Flex Music, and used it for a limited-edition box of early material. Toy Box: The Stiff Years (1978–1983) followed in 2023. The most recent thing with her name on it is not a studio record at all: Live In Frankfurt 2015 – Official Bootleg, a 15-track soundboard tape of her 2015 band, went up as a £9 download on Bandcamp on 17 April 2025. The priority is stated plainly — "I've just been enjoying playing live. I think live is probably the thing I like best."
2025: a UK club date, then a continent
On 9 May 2025 she played Rebellion in Manchester, a venue whose structural pillars cut the sightlines into something close to a front room. The set ran to 15 songs, opening with "Special Star" and taking in "Supernature", with Stan Greenwood of Skeletal Family on guitar; Chrysalid Homo and The Gospel opened. Michelle Corns wrote that Lovich "delivered from the first note" and that "it was impossible to feel disappointed". The one grumble was the absence of "Bird Song".
The autumn was the real event: her first North American tour in 35 years, with Rawlins assembling an American band around her. About a dozen arena dates opening for the B-52's and Devo on the Cosmic De-Evolution bill were interleaved with her own club headliners. At Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis on 1 October she played 14 songs — eleven plus a three-song encore — with Diana Weishaar on keyboards and Thomas Dolby walking on to play "New Toy"; Mickey McCarter called the performance impressive and noted how clearly her style had fed both new-wave singers and punk-cabaret acts. Portland's Alberta Rose Theatre followed on 13 October at $45.50 advance, and the Mount Dora Music Hall show in Florida on 29 October drew five stars out of five. The logistics were the hard part. "It was never like that in the '80s," she said of the visa paperwork. "You could come and go with great freedom. It's so much more difficult and expensive now."
Arenas in June, back rooms in October
The Cosmic De-Evolution package crossed to the UK in June 2026, with the Rezillos added to the bill below Devo and the B-52's. Lovich opened The O2 in London on 20 June in front of about 20,000 people, on at 6.39pm and off at 7.02pm — 23 minutes and six songs: "Savages", "Sleeping Beauty", "New Toy", "Joan", "Lucky Number" and "Home". The band was Sarah Fisher on keys, Stan Greenwood on guitar, Val Gwyther on bass and Morgan King on drums, all four singing. She came on in headwear one reviewer likened to a Charles II wig and removed it for the second song; phones went up for "Lucky Number"; at 77 she was judged to have earned the Queen of Quirk billing, and the complaint was that the slot was far too short. Manchester got the same bill the following night.
Since then she has played the Rebellion Festival at Blackpool's Winter Gardens on 7 August 2026, and is now mid-way through a headline run of her own that is the inverse of June: nine dates in small rooms, starting at The Old Cold Store in Nottingham on 16 October and finishing at Rebellion in Manchester on 8 November, by way of Exchange in Bristol (23 October), Nambucca in London (24 October), The Prince Albert in Brighton (25 October), Corporation in Sheffield (31 October), The Fulford Arms in York (4 November), Bannerman's in Edinburgh (5 November) and Ivory Blacks in Glasgow (7 November). Tickets are £24.75 to £27.50, and The Elements are billed as special guests on at least one night.
What the set actually does
Headline shows run to 14 or 15 songs, usually an eleven-song main set and a short encore, and the shape has been stable across both continents. An early-album opener — "Savages" or "Special Star" — then "Blue Hotel", "Maria", "Monkey Talk" and "Joan", on which she picks up the saxophone; "New Toy" and "Writing on the Wall" in the middle; "Say When", performed with a hand-to-shoulders pantomime; then "Lucky Number" and "Angels". "What Will I Do Without You", "Details" and "Home" do the closing work, and "Home" has ended every set reported in the last two years. Older and rarer material surfaces when the room suits it — "Supernature" in Manchester, "One in a Million" most nights.
Staging is minimal and the dressing is not. Manchester got an apocalyptic intro tape and a black lace veil; the O2 got the wig. What carries the shows is the voice, still doing the trick that made "Lucky Number" a hit, and the saxophone, which she plays on two numbers a night rather than as a novelty. Reviewers in 2025 and 2026 reached for the same observation from opposite directions: one called her ageless, another decided she had reached wise-crone status. The consistent criticism is the running time, not the performance.
The show, now
A headline Lene Lovich Band show in 2026 runs 14 to 15 songs — an eleven-song main set plus a short encore, roughly 75 to 90 minutes — in rooms holding a few hundred: The Old Cold Store in Nottingham, Nambucca in London, Bannerman's in Edinburgh. The band is a four-piece, all singing: Stan Greenwood on guitar, Val Gwyther on bass, Sarah Fisher on keys, Morgan King on drums, with Lovich on vocals and saxophone on two numbers a night, usually "Joan" and one other. The order is settled — an early-album opener such as "Savages" or "Special Star", then "Blue Hotel", "Maria", "Monkey Talk", "New Toy", "Writing on the Wall", "Say When" with its hand-to-shoulders pantomime, "Lucky Number", "Angels", and "Home" to finish, every time. Staging is a lighting rig and an intro tape; the costume does the visual work, a black lace veil in Manchester in May 2025, a towering wig at the O2 in June 2026 that she pulled off after one song. Support varies by town — Chrysalid Homo and The Gospel in Manchester, The Elements billed on at least one autumn 2026 date. Reviewers in 2025 called the playing impressive and the energy ageless, the Mount Dora show took five stars, and the recurring fan complaint is about songs left out and sets that end too early, not about the delivery.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · lenelovich.net · datathistle.com · americansongwriter.com · wweek.com · parklifedc.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Richard Marchewka · CC BY-SA 2.0
Smalltown Boy (Diskussion) · CC0
