Lush: "I didn't know what was going to happen with Chris, and I guess that makes it more emotional"

Formed in 1987 by principal songwriting duo Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi, Lush would go on to be one of the defining bands of the reverb-drenched shoegaze wave of the ‘90s.

They were very much at the peak of their powers following the success of their 1996 album Lovelife, before the group's tenure was brought to a tragic and premature halt following Chris Acland’s suicide.

Consisting of bassist Phil King’s Super 8 footage, Lush: A Far From Home Movie provides a candid and dreamlike behind-the-scenes glimpse into the indie rockers on the road, functioning as a warm and wistful tribute their lost drummer.

“I was inspired by a film on Chet Baker called Let's Get Lost,” King explains. “That was shot when he was alive and then he died before it came out so it's kind of it's a similar sort of thing.

“Of course, I didn't know what was going to happen with Chris, and I guess that makes it more emotional. I’d turn the camera on him, and he would start dancing or pulling faces. He was so good in front of the camera and is more or less the star of the film. It's a strange kind of poignancy, but it was natural to attribute it to him.”

In line with the band’s aesthetic and sound, the black and white film emanates a woozy, nostalgic atmosphere, a feeling King puts down to the technology sued to capture it.

“A good thing about using Super 8 is that, because it costs money, you'd only shoot in short bursts, and only when you thought it was really important, unlike using your iPhone, where you can shoot anything,” he explains. “So the limitations are good.”

Inevitably, the soundtrack also plays a central role in forming the film's ambience.

“I decided not to use any songs that have been used for videos, which tended to be the more up-tempo ones,” King notes. “In the end, the slower, more medium paced, moodier songs were more atmospheric, so they worked better with the footage. The last track is ‘When I Die’, which I didn't want to use at first because I just thought, ‘it's too obvious, it's too maudlin’, but I put it down and it worked, so it stuck.”

While it evidently stands as a deeply personal project, A Far From Home Movie also serves as a fine piece of music journalism - candidly capturing a young, globetrotting band at their peak.

“I think the good thing was that everyone was just relaxed,” Anderson observes. “Everyone was half aware that Phil was filming but not really paying that much attention, it was very much in the background. If someone had been paid to come on tour with us it would have been a different thing. It is a good little piece of music history in a way,  there's not a lot of us playing live, it's more behind the scenes, so I think it is good little window into a touring band back then.”

Things are much different for young artists these days. Still active with their own respective projects, Anderson touches on the possibility that things might not have worked out the same for Lush had they burst onto the scene a decade or two further down the line.

“It's very tough now for young bands,” notes Anderson. “It's expensive to play live compared to when we started. We’d just turn up and we'd borrow people's equipment and it was all very done on the cheap. But I think nowadays, you can't really do that anymore. When Lush started, I was living in a friend of mine's council flat. He shouldn't have been subletting it to me, but I was paying £12 a week in London. Even in today's money that would be cheap. It's a very different ballgame.”

“And also the weekly music press,” supplements King. “There was a lot of energy from that. It was very fast moving and music papers were competing against each other, so there was always new stuff coming and that drove things along as well.”

Speaking of the press, Lush were no strangers to the pages of tabloids and music publications in their day. The social happenings of Anderson and Berenyi in particular often became the subject of reportage and scrutiny.

“I think it did detract from the music unfortunately,”Anderson says. “It was weekly back then, so they had pages and columns to fill, so they would you put stuff in to sort of bluff it out. There weren't a massive amount of women fronting bands. There were obviously a lot of female singers, but I think we did have something slightly different -  which as you said can be a bit of a double-edged sword.

“We made a big effort to not present ourselves as two women at the front with these out of focus figures in the background, but there's a limited amount of control you can have over what they're going to write. At the same time, we got some really good press. Some people seem to think Lush had awful press when we had some great reviews, so I certainly don't look back and think the press were these dreadful monsters.”

• Lush:A Far From Home Movie will be shown at the IFI in Dublin, on October 31 at 18:30. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Emma Anderson and Phil King. Click here to book your tickets. Watch the trailer below: