Get the latest gossip

Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry: ‘I was fixated with death… I needed to live in reality’

The frontwoman of the Scottish synth-pop trio had a dream pop career, but it came with years of online misogyny and artistic frustration. As she prepares to release her debut solo album, she discusses going her own way

The comic was to be set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland (Mayberry is from Glasgow and was born in Stirling) and it featured Lauren, feminist firebrand, as one of a group of women who, Handmaid’s Tale-style, had been imprisoned, repeatedly raped and inseminated by the planet’s remaining men. When cerebral synth-pop trio Chvrches went viral in 2013 with the song The Mother We Share and went on to release four UK Top 10 albums, Mayberry became an accidental object lesson in women’s experience of the music industry at the height of Twitter. She got online abuse of a peculiarly possessive kind, ranging from accusations of hypocrisy if, as a feminist, she wore a very short skirt on stage, to rape and death threats; as a former journalist and law graduate, she could not help but broadcast and respond to it all, which made the trolls angrier.

Get the Android app