Lisa Moorish follows up the success of her ‘Sylvia’ single with ‘The Hunger’, recently premiered by BBC Radio 6’s Chris Hawkins. This is an alternative pop song loosely based on the 1980s gothic vampire romance film of the same name.

“Directed by Tony Scott, The Hunger features some of my favourite actors and artists of all time,” Lisa says, “including David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve and a very young Willem Dafoe, plus the band Bauhaus.”

Drawing on themes explored in the film, Lisa explains how the main character in the story has an encounter with a dark, enigmatic, mysterious character. “A craving then builds into a frenzied desire, until they can’t avoid or ignore it. A sickness develops if you don’t get your fix.

“I guess you could say that it touches on co-dependence and addiction with or to other humans,” Lisa adds.

‘The Hunger’ is the second single to be taken from Lisa’s upcoming album ‘Divine Chaos’, to be released this summer on Out Yer Box, the sister label to Irvine Welsh’s Jack Said What imprint. It’s Lisa’s first album for 20 years.

The remix comes from These Machines, who puts a slightly Soulwax slant on proceedings to produce a chunky, electro-tinged house revamp for the club floors.

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.”