‘The music industry is smoke and mirrors’: how DIY duo the Lovely Eggs are keeping the north weird
The psych-poppers have made records with Iggy Pop and launched their own TV channel, but their biggest challenge yet is taking shape in their home city of Lancaster
Walking through Lancaster on a sunny spring day, Holly Ross has a theory about her home town and its inhabitants. Once towering over the city was Lancaster Moor hospital, formerly the Lancaster county lunatic asylum, which was home to thousands of patients. “People were sent here from all over the place,” she says. “There was a care in the community programme and people settled locally, so you had this real collection of characters – amazing artists who burned themselves out on acid and ended up here. There was one pub they all used to congregate in, a real bunch of outsiders and freaks – and I use that as a term of endearment because that included us.”
For the best part of 20 years, Ross has been making outsider art in the duo the Lovely Eggs with her husband, David Blackwell. The pair play psychedelic punk and infectious garage rock, and – despite playing sizeable UK venues and attracting collaborators such as Iggy Pop – are a fervently DIY operation. They run their own label, and have no manager, booking agent or publisher. They often make their own music videos, build their own instruments, host their own book club and, in 2023, they launched their own TV channel. Eggs TV broadcast a hugely ambitious six-part series featuring everyone from comedian Stewart Lee to Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye. “That was such hard work,” says Ross, as we form a production line to pack up hundreds of their latest 7in single Nothing/Everything at their storage space. “But once we dive in, we’re committed to the idea. Even though it might kill us, we can’t let go.”
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