Lovich was born in Detroit, Michigan to a British mother and a Serbian father, but after her father became mentally unstable her mother took her and her three siblings to live in Hull, England. Lovich met the guitarist/songwriter Les Chappell, who became her longtime collaborator, when they were teenagers. In the Autumn of 1968, they went to London, England to attend art school. It was there that Lovich first tied her hair into the plaits that later became a visual trademark, though at first she did it to keep her hair out of the clay when studying sculpture.
