Inger Lorre
Music industry machinations, drugs, depression, attempted suicide: The Nymphs frontwoman is one of rock’n’roll’s great survivors.
Industry predators, drugs, depression, attempted suicide… The Nymphs frontwoman is one of rock’s great survivors.
If life was in any way fair, The Nymphs would be remembered with the same kind of respect shown to the big breakthrough art-rock bands such as Jane’s Addiction. Predating grunge and creating a mesmerising combination of gothic punk rock, glam guitars, edgy style and performance art, they were led fearlessly by fiery frontwoman Inger Lorre, a striking prototype riot grrl who was every bit as wild as Axl Rose, and yet emotionally open and eloquent to the point of discomfort. There was a gorgeous, poetic sadness to the songs on the band’s only album, which paved the way for the soul-baring that became the calling card of the 1990s rock scene.
The Nymphs should have been huge. Indeed, they were well on their way to being huge. Having formed in the mid-80s and relocated from New Jersey to LA with dreams of signing to an indie label, their uninhibited live shows saw the major labels sniffing around, and they were quickly signed to Geffen Records for $1million, with promises to make them stars. Before long they were darlings of MTV and well on their way to becoming a household name.
“The Nymphs were sung with my chin in the air and a little attitude: ‘I’m going to be harder than the boys to show how tough I am,’” Lorre says today, at home in LA, as she looks back at her hard-edged, untamed onstage persona. It’s one that’s completely at odds with the thoughtful but intense woman we speak to today, whose mind flits from subject to subject, memory to memory, without pause.
But despite the surface illusion of success The Nymphs were having, behind the scenes, the demands of controlling executives were weighing heavy on the frontwoman, who says she was also being coerced to split from the band and go solo. And so, in 1991, having finally had enough of the pressure put on her, Lorre staged a protest that marked the beginning of the end for The Nymphs.
She climbed up on the desk of A&R man Tom Zutaut (the man who signed Guns N’ Roses), hitched up her skirt and pissed on the paperwork and personal effects laid out on it.
At the time, this was dismissed as the action of a drunk and drug-addled crazy woman, despite rock’n’roll history being packed with men who were never silenced despite exactly this kind of behaviour (we’re looking at you, Ozzy), and the band were quickly consigned to history, viewed as one of rock’s great self-sabotaging fuck-ups, the ultimate could-havebeens. But the truth is, these were the actions of a woman at the end of her tether. “People thought I must be crazy,” Lorre says. “But that’s just a woman sticking up for
herself. I quit
[The Nymphs] and I pissed on the desk because I was just done with it. I’d been shown a side of music that was so ugly. The sound men are creepy and managers are creepy, everyone at the label’s creepy.”
Music was supposed to be Inger Lorre’s big escape from her difficult background. She grew up in New Jersey and had, she says, “a very tumultuous childhood” in which she felt unloved and alienated, and her relationship with her parents was tense and argumentative. She talks about lying on the ground in her back yard at the age of 11 or 12, hating her parents and gazing up into the sky, wishing for a UFO to come and whisk her away from it all.
The ETs never showed up, though, so instead she threw herself into painting and music, expressing herself through art and losing herself in creativity – an obsession that never left her. By 1985 she had formed The Nymphs, and they took the place of her longed-for escape to outer space. But it soon turned out to be one of those ‘be careful what you wish for’ situations.
Today Inger Lorre is newly clean and sober, although she nearly didn’t make it, and she’s pulled together a new version of The Nymphs to take back out for occasional live shows. In conversation she’s vibrant but fragile, full of nervous energy, with a rasping voice that holds a lifetime of tough experiences in its timbre.
She’s warm, friendly and eager to share her memories, her anger, her experiences and her last-chance redemption. These days she’s embracing domesticity, taking pleasure in her pets (when we speak, she has just brought home a pair of kittens, Thor and Freddie – as in Mercury – to join her and the dog).
But getting to this point literally nearly killed her, and at the height of the band’s fame, she, like so many others in her position, blocked out all the unpleasant sides of the music industry with heroin, which she’d first tried with a member of her family. In fact, after the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the outpouring of accusations that followed them throughout 2017, her #MeToo stories are depressingly familiar.
“I was an addict because I couldn’t deal with being in the same room with these people unless I was completely numb,” she says.
“My A&R guy would look me right in the eye and say: ‘Well you’re just a little girl from New Jersey, and I can kick you out of your own band and I will hire a supermodel to stand right there on stage and to sing better than you do, and she’s going to look better than you do doing it.’
“And I believed him. I got really intimidated and I just shut up. Now, in my late forties, I’d like to see a supermodel try to sing like I do, or write songs like I do. But I was so scared. They had so much power. And they were right, I was just a stupid little girl from New Jersey, and they intimidated the fuck out of me.”
After her experience with Geffen, she got herself back on track, collaborating with her close friend Jeff Buckley, whom she met in a bar in Manhattan, having moved back in with her parents. The platonic adoration was mutual, but the happiness was short-lived. Lorre had been staying in Buckley’s New York apartment with her then-boyfriend while the singer-songwriter was on tour when PJ Harvey called to tell her Buckley had drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River. The news came the day after Lorre’s father passed away. That was when she was hospitalised for her first nervous breakdown.
Years in the wilderness followed. She went into rehab 20 times and it never worked for her, which left her feeling ashamed and like a failure. She was also in group therapy for her ongoing depression, which is where she got to know an equally troubled soul, singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. “He was such a dear, dear soul,” she says. “His talent was so monumental.”
She put out some solo albums, which showcased her more delicate side, but she was getting by working in an art gallery
“I sang with my chin in the air and a little attitude, and ‘I’m going to be harder than the boys to show how tough I am.’”
(alongside Kurt Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean, coincidentally). She taught young children ceramics. Mainly, though, she was dealing with crippling depression, and in early 2017, defeated, she very nearly succeeded in taking her own life, attempting to gas herself with a barbecue in her home.
“I made myself this really beautiful mixtape with Bauhaus and the Cocteau Twins, music you would want to float away to,” she remembers, struggling to hold back the tears. “And I just took a pillow and went into my bathtub and fell asleep.”
She survived only because she’d tied her dog up at her mailbox to avoid him coming to any harm. Her friend and old bass player happened to be passing and noticed it barking frantically, and immediately realised something was seriously wrong inside.
“I was in a coma for about a week,”
Lorre says. “And when I woke up there were guards at the door, and I had fucked myself up really bad physically. My heart was leaking enzymes and my lungs were completely damaged. It was six months before I could even walk upstairs. I was like an old person. I was walking with a cane.
“When you do something like that, you lose all your rights as a human. I was lucky that I could still talk, because they thought I was going to have brain damage.
“I was so pissed that it didn’t work. I scared all the nurses. I ripped up a bible. A priest came to visit and gave me