Lisa Moorish Announces New Artist Album ‘Divine Chaos’

Singer Lisa Moorish was first told she looked like American poet Sylvia Plath around 20 years ago.

“When I saw one particular photo, it was like looking in the mirror,” she exclaims. “It’s insane. She’s an American blonde from Boston, and I’m a mixed-race Brit hailing from Brixton, South London. I was taken aback, obviously”.
“Although I knew who Sylvia Plath was, and mostly the tragic side of her life, I wasn’t that familiar with her works or her personal story,” Lisa continues. “And the more I read about her, her poetry and her classic novel The Bell Jar, the more I realised how much we had in common. We share many parallels in relation to her somewhat unfortunate loves and losses, and her mental illness too, along with areas in the UK and Paris that we both have links to. All of this was a huge inspiration for this song.”

‘Sylvia’ is the first single from Lisa’s forthcoming album, ‘Divine Chaos’, out on Out Yer Box — the sister label to Jack Said What. “Sylvia, where do I end and you begin?” Lisa sings, before explaining how she has drawn strength from learning about the life of her doppelgänger over the years.

“She lived in different times… and although it’s supposedly a modern world with regards to women being equal in relationships, when you’re an incurable romantic and the creative type, in the public domain, it often leads to being over-shadowed by the men you have relationships with,” she says. “Especially if they are even more known and revered in the public domain”.

“We also share quite a lonely, naïve outlook and yearning for love… to meet ‘the one’, to really fully exist and feel complete. And sadly Sylvia didn’t survive that, or her depression, pain and loneliness. I have leant from this, I guess… learnt that I am valid, I am enough, and don’t need what I always yearned for in my younger years to experience joy and happiness.” Another probable parallel between their two disparate lives is that Lisa was recently diagnosed with ADHD. “And I strongly suspect that Sylvia Plath may also have been a neuro-divergent”, she adds.

The alternative pop song has been remixed by none other than Mr David Holmes. The Belfast musical legend has produced albums for the likes of Primal Scream, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and Sinead O’Connor (to be released in 2024), as well as scoring numerous film soundtracks and releasing six artist albums, the latest of which — ‘Blind On A Galloping Horse’ — has just been released by Heavenly Recordings. David takes his remix of ‘Sylvia’ down a dubbed-out, percussive route, with gentle use of a 303 acid squelch and some fine cinematic synth-work. Lisa likens the leftfield rework to something that the late, great Andrew Weatherall might have done.

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, Lisa was invited into the studio by good friend Irvine Welsh to co-write as well as perform some of the songs on the upcoming 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. The name derives from a play that she was in, The Divine Chaos Of Starry Things, where she took the lead role as the French Revolutionary, Louis Michel. The play’s title and one of its themes 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’s 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.”