• Street Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson • Review by Mathew Clayton •

Less a music memoir, more a work of psychogeography, Will Hodgkinson’s latest book explores the world of Lawrence, former lead singer of Felt and now Mozart Estate. Will joins Lawrence on a series of walks around London’s less fashionable suburbs — places like Golders Green, West Ham, and Beckenham — during the course of which he gently explains how a man that once fronted the 1980s’ most wonderfully pretentious indie band is now singing songs debating the merits of different coloured fizzy drinks.

I had listened to the latest Mozart Estate album when it came out, and I was pretty sure it was the worst album I had ever heard — music for the world’s most annoying kids’ TV show. I thought it was so bad that I found it hard to imagine how anyone else had become involved in its creation. But then… at Glastonbury last year, NJ Stevenson had persuaded me to walk up to the Crow’s Nest to watch them perform. By the end of the first song, I realized how badly wrong I had been. Mozart Estate were fantastic, in part because they sounded and looked like no one else. They were the opposite of the testosterone-charged guitar bands that seemed so popular elsewhere. There was no chance Lawrence was going to cast his clothes aside to show off his nautically themed tattoos and then repeatedly beat his chest. For this alone, I was grateful. The band were clearly super-talented musicians, and Lawrence looked like a creature (possibly swamp-dwelling) from Lord of the Rings who had been dressed by Pam Hogg. Only partially human, probably evil, but pretty cool-looking. And the songs did sound like kids’ TV, but the lyrics were funny and painfully sad — dwelling mainly on the reduced circumstances of Lawrence’s life. Take this perfect refrain from the song “Poundland” about being eyed up by a security guard:

In Poundland 

It’s only a quid, 

In Poundland 

I bought it, I did

And it struck me later, lying in my tent forlornly trying to get to sleep as some faraway stage banged out “Born Slippy” for the millionth time, that Lawrence fitted into that pantheon of eccentric British artists that includes Quentin Crisp, Leigh Bowery and Ivor Cutler. People you can call True Originals. People whose status as True Originals had been achieved in part by their inability to fit in or cope with normal life. This inability, driven by some combination of mental illness, vanity, drug addiction, self-delusion, stupidity, and talent makes them all people whose work you might enjoy but whose life you would not like to share. And so it proves with Lawrence; Will Hodgkinson does a great job of explaining what makes Lawrence unique while at the same time pointing out the many ways he had sabotaged his own career and generally been a pain in the arse to the people (especially ex-girlfriends —hello Michaela!) around him.

The book ends with Will accompanying Lawrence to his childhood home in Water Orton. “That’s where my sister was attacked by a maniac,” “This is also where the skinhead marauders from Chelmsley Wood congregated,” but it is also where he was fortunate enough to meet the guitarist Maurice Deebank, whose talent attached to Lawrence’s vision helped take them both out of the village. I am sure aged 17, neither would have guessed that 40 or so years later, Lawrence would be singing not about cathedrals but declaring he was going to “Wiggle with you.” But as Esther Rantzen used to say, “That’s Life.”

This is a very readable book — writing truthfully about anyone who is alive is a difficult feat, but Will manages that task admirably. Go buy it.

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• Street Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson • Published by Nine Eight Books •

• Pre-order a copy here • Published on September 5th •

• Buy a copy from the Heavenly Recordings Bandcamp store. •

Will Hodgkinson is author of the music books Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain and In Perfect Harmony. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Mojo and Vogue and presented the Sky Arts television series Songbook. Since 2010, he has been chief rock and pop critic for The Times.  

Mathew Clayton – lives in the village of Kingston in Sussex. During the day he is an editorial director at Michael O’Mara Books, at night he is a co-director of the Port Eliot festival. He commissioned the first Caught by the River book and was guest editor of issue four of the Caught by the River fanzine.