THE MOTOR-CYCLE GIRL

Despite advance hype ("the greatest pop artist since Aretha Franklin," according to her label, Atlantic), 19-yearold New Yorker Lotti Golden's opus, Motor-Cycle, stalled in 1969. She tells Charles Donovan how a determined reissue label and some enthusiastic bloggers helped her rev it up in 2025

- Charles Donovan

Late-60s New York was remarkable for many reasons. One was the simultaneous emergence of several once-in-a-century teenage talents. In 1969, this group included Laura Nyro and Janis Ian, but there were lesser-known players, too, whose work slipped away by accident of fate and a few promotional missteps. Two Brooklynites issued powerful, statement-making albums that year, only to be flatly ignored.

First, Marsha Malamet, a pianist-singer-songwriter on Decca, whose remarkable Coney Island Winter revealed her to have a lithe, musical-theatre soprano and a haunting compositional style.

Then there was Lotti Golden, an Atlantic signing whose self-written album, Motor-Cycle, was, perhaps, the most startling of all: taboo-busting, uncompromising, challenging in its blunt, beat-poetry evocations of countercultural New York life, its ecstasies and indignities, thrills and slummy degradations. The two artists would, decades on, be linked again in the most random of ways; by 90s UK girl-group, Eternal, for whom they both worked, though entirely separately and two years apart.

Motor-Cycle is finally having its second chance. More than once in recent years it was poised to come back out, only for a hitch to be encountered.

“It was imminent, many times over,” Golden confirms to RC via video-call from New York. She's an enchanting presence: outgoing, easy company. And she looks like the Lotti Golden who peered out ftom album covers and magazine fashion spreads in her teens. She still has the bright eyes and delicate features.

“I just rode with it,” she says, when I ask about the reissue delays. “You can't get upset about it. I just hoped it would happen. And it's better in many ways that it's happening now. The record company is much more together. And I've decided I want t0 do a live show to promote it, and I have musicians I'm playing with that I didn't have 10 years ago. So, it's all good. It's very exciting!”