Lisa Moorish first made her name in music as a teenager, when she had a club hit in 1989 with ‘Rock To The Beat’, a track written by Detroit techno luminaries Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson that fed into the UK’s acid house explosion at the time. She went on to work with the likes of Paul Weller and George Michael before being swept up in the Britpop scene and recording vocals on tracks by some of the biggest bands of that era — Oasis, Blur and Ash. She then started her own indie electro-punk band, Kill City, in the early noughties, and they were quickly snapped up by music mogul Alan McGee and signed to his new label, Poptones.
After the release of their ‘White Boys, Brown Girl’ album she spent the next few years primarily raising her kids, before turning her hand to DJing and acting in recent years. Then, recruited by friend Irvine Welsh to sing some songs on the Trainspotting musical he was crafting during Covid, she got the singing bug back and started writing songs again.
Lisa really wanted to work with a female producer, and soon hooked up with Zoe Devlin Love from the Alabama 3 crew. “I found my mojo again,” she says, “and that kind of saved my life really. I found my confidence and passion for music again.”
‘Divine Chaos’ is Lisa’s first solo album for more than 20 years, which comes out in Summer 2024. The name derives from a play that Lisa was in a few years ago about French revolutionary figure Louise Michel, The Divine Chaos Of Starry Things, and is reflected in one of the album’s songs too — ‘This Chaos Is Divine’. “It’s also a summary and description of an all-encompassing, heady and chaotic love experience with another,” she says. “The theme of the album mostly.”
Other songs on the album reflect a recent relationship that Lisa had that is now over. “I fell in love, I felt the demise of it happening, the desperation to hold onto a failing relationship, and then the eventual end of it. And some other songs are about my rage at the current state of the world today. Another one is about dealing with liars, manipulators, and narcissists. There a lot of it about!”
With this album, it feels like Lisa has gone full circle: back to working with electronic music again, the genre that she started out releasing back in the late 1980s. The songs have attitude, indicative of a life lived on both sides of the tracks. “I came from the acid house and techno scene when I started out aged 17,” she says, “and it’s like a second shot at it, without the destruction, distractions, addictions, bullshit and giving a fuck what others think or say about me.”
Lisa Moorish
Lisa Moorish made her name in music as a teenager, when she had a club hit in 1989 with ‘Rock To The Beat’, written by Detroit techno luminaries Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson. She went on to work with the likes of Paul Weller and George Michael before being swept up in the Britpop scene and recording vocals on tracks by Oasis, Blur and Ash.