Felt - Primitive Painters [feat Elizabeth Fraser] (1985) Producer: Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins)

Пара интервью с вокалистом Felt.

• их главный хит Primitive Painters спродюсировал Робин Гатри из Cocteau Twins, и на бэк-вокале с его подачи там спела Elizabeth Fraser;

• сингл Primitive Painters попал на вершину UK Independent Singles Chart, чего не удалось достичь ни The Smiths, ни Cocteau Twins;

• когда песня взлетела в топы МакГи из Creation и Cherry Red решили снять видео на этот сингл, но МакГи (был на мели) не заплатил ребятам (Cherry и Creation изначально договаривали разделить расходы пополам), поэтому они смогли снять только полклипа (!), из-за этого Lawrence собирался уничтожить видео, к счастью копия была не только у него (группа как раз перешла из Cherry на Creation);

• Робин очень любил эту группу и старался им помочь по мере сил, но для сведения альбома они заставили их вокалиста (по имени Lawrence Hayward) подписать бумажку, что он никаким образом не будет вмешиваться в сведение записи, потому что были наслышаны о его характере, он очень страдал что не может повлиять;

• видео сняли спустя пару лет после выхода альбома, в доме Фила Кинга (в будущем басиста Lush и The Jesus and Mary Chain) в Hammersmith, он тогда играл в Felt; штатным басистом Felt был Marco Thomas, так что Phil King даже не отмечен ни на одной их пластинке, хотя и снялся в их самом популярном видео;

• Martin Duffy сыграл на клавишах на этой пластинке, когда ему было всего 18 (а пришёл он в группу вообще в 16 лет), после распада Felt он примкнет к Primal Scream (на днях скончался /RIP);

Felt discography

1982.01 — Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty (Cherry Red)
1984.02 — The Splendour of Fear (Cherry Red)
1984.10 — The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories (Cherry Red)
1985.09 — Ignite the Seven Cannons (Cherry Red) - Primitive Painters отсюда
1986.06 — Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death (Creation)
1986.09 — Forever Breathes the Lonely Word (Creation)
1987.06 — Poem of the River (Creation)
1988.05 — The Pictorial Jackson Review (Creation)
1988.07 — Train Above the City (Creation)
1989.11 — Me and a Monkey on the Moon (Creation)

compilation

1987.09 — Gold Mine Trash [Cherry Red]
1990.04 — Bubblegum Perfume [Creation]
1992.04 — Absolute Classic Masterpieces [Cherry Red]
1993.10 — Absolute Classic Masterpieces Vol. II [Creation]
1993.10 — Felt Box [Cherry Red]
2003.05 — Stains on a Decade [Cherry Red]

singles

1979 — Index
1981 — Something Sends Me to Sleep
1982 — My Face Is on Fire / Trails of Colour Dissolve
1983 — Penelope Tree
1984 — Mexican Bandits / The World Is as Soft as Lace
1984 — Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow
1985 — Primitive Painters
1986 — Ballad of the Band
1986 — Rain of Crystal Spires
1987 — The Final Resting of the Ark
1988 — Space Blues

• Уникальный саунд Felt — заслуга гитариста Maurice Deebank (Lawrence его друг детства) и он покинет группу сразу после альбома «Ignite the Seven Cannons», 1985, он говорил в другом интервью, что на первых альбомах учил всех играть на инструментах, там все самоучки кроме него (и даже после его ухода, они играли так как он их научил), Maurice признавал что Lawrence великий поэт, но они разошлись т.к. парни перестали слушать его советы по поводу саунда, плюс им вскружил голову успех Primitive Painters — Джон Пил и все остальные там подпрыгивали от радости когда её включали и они реально остановились в полушаге от глобальной популярности, но эта же песня стала их последним большим хитом;

Phil King играл в группах:

The Servants (1986)
Felt (1986-1987)
Apple Boutique (1987)
Hangman's Beautiful Daughters (1987)
Biff Bang Pow! (1988-1989)
See See Rider (1989-1992)
Lush (1992-1997, 2015-2016)
The Jesus & Mary Chain (1997-1998, 2017-)
(удивительно конечно, что я посмотрел живьём и Lush и JAMC хотя даже и не мечтал о таком!)

Felt одна из самых недооценённых британских групп, как и McCarthy.

...

An interview with Lawrence: “‘Primitive Painters’ was this great big statement, Felt were going to be massive.”
— Michael Bonner @ Uncut, 24.07.2015
www.uncut.co.uk/features/an-interview-with-lawrence-primi...

— Where were Felt just prior to Ignite the Seven Cannons?
— Honestly there’s so much. I don’t want to blab on and on. Originally I wanted to continue with John Leckie after The Strange Idols Pattern. He didn’t want to do it. I was writing these trademark pop songs at the time, short 3-minute things. Leckie said, “They’re all the same, they just seem to start and then stop, there’s no beginning.” Things like that. He was reluctant to get involved. But I said, “These are just a few rough demos that you’re listening to, the songs are nothing like that really. They’re quite expansive, there’s a lot going on.” But he wouldn’t give it a chance. So he passed on it anyway. We were trying to get Tom Verlaine as well.

— Did you approach Verlaine?
— We did, yeah. He said – oh God, his quote was classic – he said he didn’t want to get involved himself because he felt the guitars were playing all the way through the songs. That’s the gist of it. They would start and continue, like a long solo. The songs, they weren’t arranged. Like most would start and then continue all the way through the song. That’s a lot to do with me, because Maurice [Deebank] is such a great guitarist that I encouraged him to play from beginning to end, especially on my songs. That’s something Tom Verlaine picked up on. It was a good criticism, I suppose, in a way, if you were trying to write conventional songs. But we weren’t. At the beginning of this chat my point would be that these people didn’t give us a chance to see what could happen in the studio with this.

— How did Robin Guthrie become involved?
— Cocteau Twins had approached us to play with them live because we were Robin’s favourite band. We didn’t know them, they got in touch with us, and Robin said they were doing a small UK tour – well, for them it was a massive tour. It was 5 days on the trot I think, or 6 days. They took us with them in their mini bus and they paid for everything. They were very kind to us, and we became great friends on this tour. So, I thought, “Maybe I’ll ask Robin because he seems to know what he’s doing in the studio.” He wasn’t known as a producer then, he’d only produced Cocteau Twins. Now he’s known as more of a producer. I wanted to work with a musician. Robin liked us a lot, and he agreed to do it as long as I wasn’t at the mixing. I had to sign a contract to say that I wasn’t allowed to be at the mixing, because he thought my presence was too overpowering. There could only be one person mixing the record, and that would be him.

— Is that just how he works or was that about you personally?
— That was about me personally, absolutely. Because I was in control of every asset of the band. I had a comment on everything, even a shoelace, for example. I was in to everything, and I was completely obsessed. I think he thought, if he was going to produce, he’d want to produce it his way. He’d probably heard stories of me in the studio before anyway.

— What sort of stories?
— I don’t know, the usual. You always hear stories about people in the studio that are kind blown up out of all proportion. I don’t know what he could have heard, there are so many. He’d probably heard that it’s very hard to work with me. I signed this piece of paper anyway. There was a production contract and there was an extra contract for me to sign saying that I wouldn’t be there at the mixing. I can’t go into the whole thing, we’d need a whole book. But, what happened was, as we were recording the album, I was more and more reluctant to go along with this. I wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t be there. It got to the point where we had 11 days to record and five or six days to mix. We did it in Palladium studios in Edinburgh. Robin knew the engineer, the guy who owned it. Jon Turner I think his name was.

— Do you remember when this was?
— Let’s remember the weather… I reckon it was spring. It was coldish but there wasn’t any snow or rain. I’d say spring we did it. Definitely spring, yeah. Loads of Eighties bands went to Palladium, especially Scottish bands. Paul Haig and people.

— What was it like?
— It was residential which is the first time I’ve done that, and I didn’t like that at all, being away from my own surroundings, and sharing a room, we were all sharing a room. Like a dormitory it was.

— Who did you share with?
— I had my own room. I think that was part of it. I had to have my own room. I think we threw someone else in together, three of them together, so that I could have my own room. I think that was my one diva moment. It was awful for me, it was in the middle of nowhere. About a 45 minute bus ride into Edinburgh. It was awful, in a country lane, there was like a tiny little village down the lane. I got attacked by a dog, had to go to hospital. Like a wolf it was. It attacked me one day.

— Why did it attack you?
— I don’t know, just saw I was scared. It didn’t attack anybody else. I was on my own. Had to go to hospital. I hated it. And also I hated the food, and the whole day was geared up to “Is he going to eat or not tonight?” It’s all like that.

— What kind of food did they serve, if you don’t mind me asking?
— I can’t remember. But I didn’t eat anything. I didn’t like any meals, it was always a big deal. His wife was cooking the meals for us, of course, and you tend to be polite in those situations, but I couldn’t eat the food. Robin, he thought it was wonderful that all this was going on, and he’d make a big show of it to the wife, “He’s not eating it again, he doesn’t like your food.” All this kind of stuff. He’s quite the joker, Robin is. Everything’s based around a joke and japes with him. He sort of revelled in my idiosyncrasies.

— I want to talk more about Robin in a minute. But this is Duffy’s first record. How did he come into the picture?
— He joined late ‘84, straight from school. When we did Ignite… he was probably 16.

— How did you find him?
— I put an advert in Virgin for a guitarist. This was during one of the periods where Maurice left. This guy who worked there came up to me and said, “Look, you’re in Felt aren’t you? I know this great keyboard player.” That was Martin. I rang him and it was as simple as that. That was it really. Very lucky. I was thinking about a keyboard player anyway, because Maurice is so hard to replace. I got Martin in, we worked on all songs that were on Ignite the Seven Cannons – apart from “Primitive Painters” and Maurice’s solo song. In between then and starting the album, Maurice rejoined. He’d always leave, then he’d rejoin. Me and Gary [Ainge] would carry on on our own for a few months, and then we’d come to a low point, go round to Maurice’s house and beg him. We’d stay up all night with him and plead with him to come back. He took a lot of persuading, he wasn’t bothered about being in a group at all. So anyway, the next time we got Maurice back, Martin was with us. One of the reasons Maurice was quite happy to come back was the fact that we had a keyboard player. He thought it would be better for the arrangements.

— This was Maurice’s final record, though?
— Every record he came in and left really. That’s why he’s never in a lot of interviews, because he’d left straight after recording. But what happened this time was he’d got married to a girlfriend, and what should have been his honeymoon was spent recording Ignite the Seven Cannons. When we delivered him back to his flat in Birmingham, he got out the van and said “I’m finished now, yeah that’s it, I’m finished.” I knew he meant it that time. He left soon as we’d finished recording.

— When did you start writing “Primitive Painters”?
— When Maurice rejoined, he bought the music for “Primitive Painters”. It wasn’t like a fully formed song, it was like a cyclical riff. We arranged it together, and I put the verses in so it was a joint collaboration. But he wrote all the music to that and he brought his instrumental track, “Elegance of an Only Dream”. I wanted there to be lots of Maurice songs on that record. But he wasn’t interested, or he just found it too hard to work on his own, I think. When we wrote the songs together, we would sit opposite each other, parallel to each other, in my bedroom or flats that we subsequently got, and we’d just sit there and work on them. I’d play the chord sequence while he’d work out his guitar parts. I think he liked the camaraderie of that better than sitting on his own in a cold room trying to come up with songs, which I didn’t have a problem with. The poet in the garret was made for me. I was quite happy to be on my own composing and writing the words and writing the music, just waiting for fame. I was very prolific, but Maurice wasn’t. He wrote I think one on the first album, “I Worship The Sun”, and he wrote a song called “Spanish House” on the third album, and “Primitive Painters” and the “Elegance…” song. I was quite happy for him to present a whole album worth of stuff. We were partners and it didn’t matter who wrote what bits. We were songwriters’ together, joint songwriters. And of course, he came up with the best song, “Primitive Painters”.

— Where did the lyrics come in, do you have books of lyrics?
— I was sitting in my kitchen in Moseley doing it. The lyrics, I don’t know how they come about. That would’ve been the last song on Ignite the Seven Cannons, because I had all the others written. So that would’ve been the last lyric I wrote. I can’t say there was any special moment that made me come up with it.

— Can you explain the song?
— “Dragons blow fire, angels fly, Spirits wither in the air/It’s just me I can’t deny I’m neither here, there nor anywhere”. It’s about wanting to be in a select group. “Primitive painters are ships floating on an empty sea, gathering in galleries”. Imagine groups of really cool kids hanging out in galleries, not pubs. That was my sort of conception.

— Was that you?
— Yeah, that’s me. I’d always find myself in a gallery on my own, y’know.

— Can you talk us through how you worked on the song in the studio?
— We’d work them up in a practise room. There was no improvising going on, so we knew exactly what we were doing. Then we set up like a band in the studio. They were layered afterwards. They were very simple, very traditional big group concepts, just like everyone did. You’d set up live and you’d get the bass and the drums and the keyboards down, and the rhythm guitar, and you’d layer it from there, adding lead guitar and vocals afterwards. It’s quite boring, that aspect of it. But it was done really quickly because we didn’t have enough time to ponder, so we just did them all live.

— What was Robin like in the studio as a producer?
— While I was there, he was capturing it all with the engineer. He didn’t make any arrangement suggestions because it was all set in stone before we got there. I was very pedantic like that. But he put effects to tape, which is something you don’t do.

— Could you explain what you mean?
— You should record everything dry, and then you decide what effects to put on afterwards so you have the choice. That’s why that album sounds so impenetrable and dense because all the effects went down, so by the time of the mixing there was nothing to change. I suppose that was the way he recorded the Cocteau Twins. It was a massive mistake, and I’m sure he would never do that now. Over the years I’ve collected some of the master tapes and on the reissues that are coming out, I’ve tried to extract the Cocteau Twins from my record. You can’t really hear Maurice’s guitar leads. Okay, skip forward to the end of the mixing when I finally got my tape. I was horrified, I would never have made a record like that. I was like beside myself with anguish. The thing was in those days, you couldn’t remix an album. But Robin quite rightly said “Primitive Painters” has to be the single. He went on and on about it, and he went to Cherry Red and he told them, he persuaded everyone. I didn’t think it was a single, I thought it was too long. I went with him to a studio in London and we remixed it together. And that’s why that’s the best song, ‘cause I was there in that mixing. I went with him to Barry Blue’s studio in Camden. Remember that guy Barry Blue? He had some hits in the ‘70’s? He was like a teenybopper. His studio in Camden was by the Roundhouse. We spent an afternoon there and we remixed “Primitive Painters”. I think we should’ve done an EP with Robin; that would’ve been the best outcome. It would’ve been a different story. But, anyway, we were lumbered with a whole album. And it was 11 tracks as well. That’s something I could never get my head around because I like everything symmetrical. That hurt me a bit, straight away, before I’d even listened to it.

— How did Liz Fraser come to be on the record?
— Liz came with Robin to work on her own lyrics and songs and that, so she’d be upstairs in the bedroom, in their room, working on her lyrics. She had a bed full of books that she was poring though, reading and writing. Anyway, when we’d recorded “Primitive Painters” and we listened back, Robin said “I’ve got a good idea.” He ran upstairs and he said to Liz, “I want you to sing this song.” He just played her the end section. I wrote the lyrics out for her on a piece of paper, she went in, listened to it once on headphones, and then just improvised around it. It was as real as that. It was a remarkable moment. When you listen back to something like that, we knew we’d got it.

— It was on the cusp between the 7-inch culture of the late ‘70’s and the 12-inch culture of the Eighties.
— Yeah, I wanted it to be a stand alone release like Wild Swans’ “Revolutionary Spirit” and Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” which were 12-inches. “Atmosphere” was on 7-inch, but that was that French label so it didn’t count. Songs that were too big to hold on 7-inch, they were big. Cherry Red wanted to do a 7-inch edit of “Primitive Painters”, but I wouldn’t let them.

— Talking of Cherry Red, what was your relationship like with them at that point?
— Michael Alway was the A&R guy who signed us to Cherry Red. He formed a new label with Geoff Travis and they went to Warners and they started Blanco Y Negro. He always promised that he’d take us with him. He took most of the Cherry Red rock stuff, and he left us behind, because Warners just wouldn’t entertain the idea of having Felt. So we were on a label that we didn’t want to be on. But we all made friends and we had two albums left to deliver so we did Strange Idols Pattern, and then Ignite the Seven Cannons. I’d been speaking to Alan McGee at this point so I knew we were going to Creation after this last album. There was no animosity there, we were all friends and I’ve never fallen out with them, we’d been friends for years and it was just business.

— You made a video with Phil King a couple of years later. How did that come about?
— We were on Creation when we did it. What happened was, I don’t know why but it was mooted that we should do a video for “Primitive Painters”. It got half made. Cherry Red and Creation were meant to pay for it together, pay half each. Cherry Red came up with their half because they initiated the project, and McGee didn’t pay his half. So we did half a video with Phil’s friend Danny. What you see on YouTube is half a video. We were meant to do another half and join it together, have stuff superimposed over the top, have extra scenes. But all you can see really is me and Phil in Phil’s house in Hammersmith, just standing around. It’s ridiculous. I was so embarrassed when it leaked out. So we put it to bed, and it lay there until somebody scooped it up and put it on YouTube or leaked it on a VHS probably first, it was probably a leaked VHS first.

— Yeah, it’s got that slight tracking wobble you get every now and again on VHS…
— I should’ve been more attentive and got hold of it and cut it up or something. I was very meticulous about ‘there’s no extra tracks’ and things like that, no demos or extra tracks hanging around. But with this for some reason it went wrong. I can’t remember why it was resurrected I’d say about a year and a half later. Maybe together McGee and Cherry Red were going to do something.

— Where do you think now the song fits into your body of work? Is it a song you still feel proud of?
— Oh yeah, oh wow. It was great that we went back – at that time you never went back and revisited anything – and we spent an extra afternoon getting it right and perfecting it. It was this great big statement, Felt were going to be massive. I was prone to short pop songs. My thing was, I’m going to break in to the mainstream by doing a short pop song. I was totally off the mark. We nearly had a hit single with a six-minute track that was not a traditional pop song, let’s put it that way. I reckon that if it would’ve been in the ’90s, it would’ve been a Top 10 song – because the independent movement was ready to promote songs like that. In 1985, there was no apparatus for a song like that, to take it to the mainstream. Even The Smiths would only get to 23, and the Cocteaus would only get to 38. I’m really proud of the song, I’m really proud that Maurice got his moment. I’m proud of the fact the Cocteaus are on it. I suppose it was the high point of the first days of Felt wasn’t it?

...

Trash ascetic. The minimally-monikered Lawrence - driving force behind Felt, Denim, and now Go-Kart Mozart - lives like a monk but dreams of pop stardom, drawing inspiration from the 'middle-of-the-road underground'

• The Guardian, 8 Jul 2005
www.theguardian.com/music/2005/jul/08/1

When the cult pop star Lawrence was 12, he saw a film of Gary Glitter disposing of his old life as Paul Gadd by putting all of his possessions on to a boat on the river Thames and floating them downstream. "I said to myself, 'I'm going to do that one day,'" says Lawrence, who began the process by disposing of his surname. "I'm going to put one life away in a box and start a new one."

Although he hasn't quite reached Glitter's levels of fame or infamy, Lawrence has succeeded in reinventing himself several times. For most of the 1980s, he was the sensitive leader of the influential indie band Felt. Then he re-emerged in the 1990s with Denim, whose wry wit and celebration of 1970s pop culture proved too far ahead of its time for commercial success. Now he is back with Go-Kart Mozart, and a roster of perfectly formed pop songs that he hopes will be recorded by some of the biggest stars of the day. He's setting his sights on Charlotte Church, but whether she will add Um Bongo (about the Rwanda genocide), and Transgressions (about a trend for spraying Lynx body lotion on to your tongue for a cheap high) to her repertoire remains to be seen.

"I got a letter from a fan the other day who said that I was the only true talent left, now that Stephen Duffy is writing for Robbie Williams," says Lawrence, who lives in near poverty in a featureless flat in Victoria. "But I'd love to write for Robbie Williams! I think I write hit singles anyway; it's just taken me a long time to master them because I'm a slow learner. I couldn't tie my own shoelaces until I was 12."

Lawrence manages the unlikely feat of existing as both pop star and monkish hermit. He eats as little as possible because he believes that creativity comes from being hungry - if pushed, he will admit to pigging out on the occasional sausage roll from a stall on Victoria station - yet he is in love with glamour. He likes the Norwegian singer Annie because "she's a gorgeous girl and I'm into beauty. I could never listen to that big fat oaf from Pop Idol [Michelle McManus] because she's over-indulged herself. My whole thing is about not doing things, about being as thin and as minimal as possible. Ideally I'd like to wear brown robes, eat a bowl of rice a day, and go into a trance as I stare at beautiful album covers."

Then there are the records. In the corridor of the tiny flat Lawrence has a shelving unit with his French pop and 1970s glam albums. He's heavily into what he calls the underground middle-of-the-road scene. He has two copies of his favourite ones in mint condition "just in case", and visitors are only allowed to touch them once they have donned special protective gloves. "I don't want fingerprints on the laminated covers," he explains. Asked about his prized albums, he presents the solo debut by the 1960s/70s Israeli pop star Abi and 1973's Aquashow by obscure glam rocker Elliot Murphy.

Lawrence plays an emotional version of David Bowie's Life on Mars by British choral group the King's Singers and follows it with 1973's Dee Doo Dah by the actress and singer Jane Birkin. "And get ready for this," he says, unsheathing a poster of Michel Polnareff depicting the flamboyant French star proudly displaying his bottom. The poster was banned in 1972 and Polnareff was fined 10 francs for every copy printed. "I go mad on Polnareff. In the 1970s, he moved to the penthouse suite of a hotel in Los Angeles and as far as I know he's still there."

His only other significant possession is a book collection, shelved under a durable polythene dust cover and containing true-life accounts by heroin addicts, a few cult novels like Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Ask the Dust by John Fante, and an entire set of the Skinhead novels; the violent pulp books written by Richard Allen in the early 1970s. "I would say that real accounts by junkies are my favourites, and I'm not into fiction. I have everything by Jack Kerouac but his novels are about real life anyway."

Lawrence does dream of riches, despite currently living as an ascetic. "I love prison cells - if I had the money I would definitely build one of those cement beds that extend from a wall - but I'd really love a circular penthouse flat in Mayfair," he says. "I have a jewel case full of hits ready for ransacking, but I'm also in the market for a rich wife. She can be late 20s to early 30s and if her dad's in Who's Who, that's a bonus."

...

‘I’d rather be a tramp than reform my old bands’: Lawrence on life as British music’s greatest also-ran

• The Guardian, 27 Jul 2022
www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jul/27/lawrence-interview-...

His fans range from Charlie Brooker to Jarvis Cocker, yet the auteur behind Felt, Denim and Mozart Estate never found fame. He explains why it was all Princess Diana’s fault

The most uncompromising figure in British pop has an urgent question: “Do you need the loo?” This is Lawrence (no surnames, please), the mastermind responsible for the coruscating beauty of Felt, the knowing glam-rock of Denim and the bargain-bin ear-worms of Go-Kart Mozart, now renamed Mozart Estate. As we walk to his high-rise council flat in east London, I promise him that my bladder is empty. “Are you sure?” he persists in his Midlands lilt. “Do you want to try going in the cafe?” No one is allowed near his toilet. “A workman was round the other day, and he used it without asking. Oh God, it was ’orrible!”

Lawrence is wearing his trademark baseball cap with its blue plastic visor and a vintage-style blue Adidas jumper. His skin is pale and papery, his eyes small but vivid. He is 60 now and has been dreaming of pop stardom since he was a child. “I used to sit in the bath and pretend I was being interviewed: ‘So what’s it like to have your third No 1 on the trot?’”

Only one of his songs has ever charted: Denim’s It Fell Off the Back of a Lorry, straight in at No 79 in 1996. Summer Smash, a BBC Radio 1 single of the week, might have made good on its lyrics (“I think I’m gonna come / Straight in at No 1”) if its release in September 1997 had not been scrapped following a certain Parisian car crash. As Lawrence shows me around his ramshackle flat, which he has been decorating for the past 12 years or so, I spot a grotesquely bad portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales stowed in one corner. “My story is pinned to hers forever,” he says glumly.

We perch on wooden stools in the cluttered, dimly lit living room. Around us are piles of books and vinyl, assorted knick-knacks (feather duster, magnifying glass) and a mustard-coloured Togo chair – a rare extravagance – still in its plastic wrapping. The white blinds are pulled down; a leak has stained them urine-yellow like a child’s mattress. “I don’t think anyone’s had as much bad luck as me,” he says. “It just goes from one disaster to another.”

And yet Lawrence of Belgravia, the 2011 documentary about him which is now being released on Blu-ray, remains stubbornly inspiring. It’s the story of a born maverick who refuses either to abandon his dreams of success or lower his standards to make them a reality. “You see so many musicians reforming their old bands,” he says. “I can’t do that. You’ve got to move forward.” He knows what it’s like to be disappointed by your idols – “I couldn’t get over it in the 1980s when Lou Reed had a mullet” – and is determined never to sully his own legacy, no matter how much cash he is offered. “I’d rather be a tramp than reform Felt or play my old songs,” he says.

He has put his lack of money where his mouth is. “There came a point where I learned to live on nothing. I’d have two pence in my pocket, and I’d find a bench on the King’s Road hoping someone would sit next to me so I could ask for a cigarette. No one ever did because I looked so rough.”

Lawrence of Belgravia alludes to addiction issues and legal woes: we glimpse bottles of methadone and piles of court letters. At the start of the film, he is evicted from his previous flat. But it is still a fond and hopeful study of someone for whom fame – as symbolised by limousines, helicopters and Kate Moss – has never lost its allure. “It’s such a shame it hasn’t happened to me,” he says. “I’d love to try fame on for size, see what it’s like.” How close has he come? “There was a period in the 1990s when I could get a taxi. That was as good as it got. There’s a fame ladder and I’m near the bottom. I always have been, and I accept that.”

The documentary has helped a bit. “It’s a proper film, and that took me up a couple of rungs,” he says. “It legitimised me.” He has rarely wanted for respect: he counts Jarvis Cocker and Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch among his fans; Charlie Brooker chose Denim’s The New Potatoes, with its Pinky & Perky vocals, as one of his Desert Island Discs. He has also started being recognised in the street – “which shows you’re getting somewhere”. But he has a little grumble: “The people who come up to me are all listening to my stuff on Spotify. I tell them: ‘Buy a bloody record!’ Some of them haven’t got a turntable, so I say, ‘Put it on the wall.’”

His hard-luck story began when Felt failed to win favour with the DJ John Peel. “If you were an indie band in the 1980s, you couldn’t make it without Peel’s support,” he says. When Lawrence formed Denim in the early 1990s, he seemed ideally placed to ride the incipient Britpop wave. “Except I made one super error,” he points out. “I thought live music was over, so we didn’t play live at first.’” He believed it would add mystique if fans couldn’t see Denim in the flesh. “I wanted to be a cartoon band. But it turned out to be the beginning of the live boom. Indie suddenly went mainstream. I didn’t spot that coming.”

If the hard-gigging likes of Blur stole a march on Lawrence, it was another Damon Albarn outfit that pipped him to the post with the “cartoon band” idea. “I couldn’t believe it when Gorillaz happened,” he splutters. “I was like, ‘That’s what I wanted to do!’”

Soon after the Summer Smash debacle, Denim were dropped by EMI. “We had to go down to making records for nothing, getting favours from friends.” Go-Kart Mozart was intended as a stop-gap but the songs, many of them musically upbeat and lyrically harsh (When You’re Depressed, Relative Poverty, We’re Selfish and Lazy and Greedy), have kept on coming for more than two decades. The name-change to Mozart Estate reflects, says Lawrence, “the tougher times we live in”.

Even he was taken aback while checking the lyric sheet for the new Mozart Estate album Pop-Up, Ker-Ching and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping, which is to be released in January. “Every song has something ’orrible,” he says. One track features the line, “London is a dustbin full of human trash.” Another is called I Wanna Murder You. “I’m never going to get any PRS money for that,” he says. “Still, it’s very catchy. Breaks into a lovely chorus.”

It’s all too much for some people. When the first Go-Kart Mozart album came out, he received a call from Alan McGee, his Creation boss from the Felt days. “Alan said, ‘What’s this song Sailor Boy, then? Jean Genet going down on you? I don’t get it, Lawrence. I don’t get what the fuck you’re doing!’” He looks pleased as punch.

Paul Kelly, the director of Lawrence of Belgravia, thinks the singer is in a healthier and more optimistic state now than during the making of the film. Production took eight years, largely because Lawrence kept disappearing for months on end. “First I’d be frustrated, then I’d worry,” says Kelly. “When he finally turned up, he’d act as though nothing had happened. He has that disarming personality so you always forgive him. I think he had a fear that when we were finished, there’d be nothing else. He didn’t want to let the film go.”

These days, Lawrence has fingers in umpteen pies (Felt reissues, a limited-edition folder of collectible bits-and-pieces and a 10-inch EP, all ahead of the new album). He is bubbling with ideas: he wants to write a play for the Royal Court, collaborate with Charli XCX, be directed by Andrea Arnold. “Do you know her?” he asks hopefully. “I want to be in one of her films and write a song for it.”

His greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the larger-than-life-sized pink marble bust which the sculptor Corin Johnson is making of him: “He came up to me at a gig and said, ‘I’d like to do a statue of you.’” A month’s worth of sittings later – including one spent with straws in his nostrils while his head was encased in plaster of Paris – and it’s almost ready. Nick Cave, one of Lawrence’s heroes, has been working in the same yard on a ceramics project about the devil. “He keeps saying, ‘When are you going to bloody finish that?’”

Even on Lawrence’s rinky-dink, old-school mobile phone, which is no bigger than a Matchbox car, the pictures of the bust look imposing. A hood is yanked up over his baseball cap, sunglasses are clamped to his face, his expression is surly and defiant: it’s a literal monument to his artistic purity. “This should push me a few rungs up the fame ladder,” he says, marvelling at his marble doppelganger. I think he’s in love.

...

📼 Felt - Primitive Painters [feat Elizabeth Fraser] (1985)

Producer: Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins)

video 1987 - Lawrence Hayward & Phil King (in Phil’s house in Hammersmith)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bYHwXtX00E

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Taken on: December 23, 2022

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