Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches: I was always trying to make everyone happy
BBC
Lauren Mayberry: “A song can have terrible production but a great story, and I’ll listen to that all the live long day”
Lauren Mayberry is a peacemaker.
Since 2011, she’s been frontwoman of the Glaswegian band Chvrches, topping festival bills and the album charts with a trademark barrage of distorted synths and razor-sharp melodies.
Mayberry was the baby of the band – just 23 when she joined, and years younger than her bandmates, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty.
But their chemistry was instant. Chvrches’ debut single, The Mother We Share, was written and recorded in 48 hours, using the only three synths they owned – but it became a word of mouth hit, earning them airplay on BBC Radio 1 and support slots with Passion Pit and Depeche Mode.
In the press, they carefully presented themselves as a band, with each member receiving equal billing. But Mayberry says she worried about being the junior partner.
“I was always conscious that I was younger than the other guys, and they had a lot more experience,” she says.
“They’d been to music school, and I hadn’t. So I always felt like I was on the back foot, in terms of where I sat in the hierarchy.”
That feeling was amplified during a 2019 tour of Australia.
The itinerary gave the band a four-day break in Melbourne, and Mayberry was looking forward to spending the downtime with her bandmates and the crew – until she discovered they’d made separate plans and she was stranded in her hotel room.
“I remember being very upset and hurt by that because I was always worrying about everyone else and taking care of everybody, and it was a humbling moment,” she says.
“In the end, I hired a little car and drove to an Australian spa town and had a wee cry listening to Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer.”
Looking back, she thinks that being the only woman in the touring party left her carrying the “emotional labour” of keeping the show on the road.
“I feel like I twisted myself into a pretzel sometimes to make everyone happy.
“Then I’d look back and think, ‘And were you happy?’
“Not really, but I was keeping the peace.”
Charlotte Patmore
The singer’s debut album is titled Vicious Creature after a lyric she’d written years ago: “Nostalgia is such a vicious creature / Another way to say that you fear the future”
She considered leaving the band after that Australian incident. Then Covid struck, and Chvrches ended up making a fourth album, 2021’s Screen Violence, remotely.
She finally took the plunge a year later, but not before signing a new record deal with her bandmates, assuring the future of the project.
“I was conscious it would give people a sense of security, that I’d made a commitment,” she says.
“I don’t know that that’s how it actually works, but that was my hope.”
She’s keen to stress there’s no bad blood: Martin and Doherty have given her their full support. Still, it’s natural for someone leaving a band to define themselves in opposition to that music – otherwise what’s the point?
As Mayberry succinctly puts it: “I didn’t want to make a crap knock-off Chvrches record.”
In recording sessions, she’d flinch when anyone pulled out a vintage synth. Instead, she pursued a more organic, lyrics-first approach.
But after a decade in a trio, the instinct to compromise was hard-wired.
“I’m very used to arguing my point, then trying to see other people’s point of view,” she says.
“So it was a real learning curve to be like, ‘No, this is my opinion, and if I don’t think it’s right, then it’s not right, and that’s the end of the conversation’.”
Crying wolf
The result is Vicious Creature, an album that showcases new depths to Mayberry‘s voice, which fluctuates between vulnerability and venom, while paying homage to her pop heroines.
She channels the spirit of All Saints on the album opener Something In The Air; and borrows the choppy, sampled strings of Annie Lennox’s Walking On Broken Glass to power the single Crocodile Tears.
The latter is a furious riposte to an emotionally manipulative man, where Mayberry snarls: “What a man will say just to get his way / Always crying wolf, so I’m sad to say / I don’t really wanna hear it from you, babe”.
The singer says she’s role-playing in that song, inspired by the dark, subversive femininity of Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago, or Cabaret’s Sally Bowles.
It’s one of several songs that survived the first incarnation of the album – tentatively titled Fiction – that would be “dark, theatrical and character driven”.
Slowly, over time, more personal songs started to creep into the mix.
The syncopated pulse of Change Shapes is a condemnation of music industry sexism (”
