Having recently reviewed the Neneh Cherry autobiography in this column, I felt that I shouldn’t cover another rock bio. After all there is the possibility that I could get stuck in a rut. The things is that I have just finished a rock biography which was quite unlike any I’ve ever read so I have to share it (no worries folks, next week’s book is a return to fiction). I laughed, had feelings of pity but closed the book with a huge smile. This book’s subject is a larger-than-life character so that at times the book reads like fiction – but it’s all truth.
Fame is strange. People want it but when it happens, most stars then want out of it. My guess is that their private life is made public. In the case of Street-Level Superstar we encounter a character who desperately wants fame and is too scared to achieve it or when it happens, some bad luck occurs.
Lawrence was the lead singer of cult group Felt. After they split he then formed Denim and inadvertently created the first Britpop album. After that in the early 00’s he formed Go-Kart Mozart. Lawrence now performs as Mozart Estate.
When you read a lot of books about the independent music scenes of the 80’s Lawrence’s name will crop up and there will be an anecdote: the more popular ones are about his fastidiousness; or refusal to compromise. He has fired band members for not having the right hairstyle, for example. It looks like that chief rock and pop critic for the UK Times, Will Hodgkinson, had also heard these anecdotes, and although he has known Lawrence on and off for nearly three decades, he decided to spend a year with him.
Street-Level Superstar not only presents a biography of this fascinating eccentric, from childhood to present day, but it is stuffed with some very funny tales. The book itself opens with Lawrence bemoaning the fact that he cannot urinate behind shrubbery in suburban area, Golders green.
This is the only neighbourhood in London where you can’t find a lonely bush or tree to relieve yourself against, Lawrence declared, shuffling his narrow, surprisingly fast-moving little frame from concourse to high street… you do not want to be caught peeing behind a bush in Golders Green. In certain areas of South London you can do that, and I could write a guide book to weeing in the open, but here you must be respectful.
This is just the start. As the book proceeds, Lawrence gives surgical gloves to the author when he’s browsing through Lawrence’s records; he doesn’t show up for an interview stating traffic when he lives up the road from the venue where the interview was taking place; and he refuses to stay in a hotel after a gig in places outside London thus getting a driver to go six hour journeys so that he can sleep in his bed at night whilst enthusing over the clothes he finds at LIDL sales. The list goes on.
Hodgkinson interviews his ex-lovers, bandmates and various people who he has interacted with over his five decades in music, and patterns start emerging. Lawrence is clearly a person who wants to be in the limelight and has had many opportunities to do so but an inability to compromise his artistic vision has sabotaged many opportunities. These include being too shy to perform, and the many rules which he imposes on band members (one tale involves him fussing over a snare for quite a few hours as it didn’t sound as it should). His eating habits are also anecdote-worthy. Here Larence recounts a childhood memory of when his sister forced him to eat cheese, which he naturally detested. Here’s his reasoning:
My reasoning is this, he declaimed, We know that in nature if something is smelly, it is dangerous to eat. Cheese is extremely smelly. For that reason, we are not meant to eat it.
He then continues:
Actually, the way I was treated as a child was unfair because everyone made out that I was being unreasonably fussy when, in fact I belonged to a cult of religious people who refuse to eat dairy products for ethical reasons, without knowing it. There weren’t many of them back in the early 70’s but there were some, pioneers of this way of thinking and it turns out I was one of them. Now they are common and highly respected. You get a lot of young people joining this sect.
What are they called? NJ asked
Lawrence looked up at the bright blue sky
Vegans
There are moments of bad luck as well. One particular story during his Denim days involves being promised a good sum of money to write a summer anthem, which he did called Summer Smash. Unfortunately, on the day it was going to be released Princess Diana died in a car crash. Thus, the release was cancelled, and all copies of the single were destroyed. (You can hear it on Spotify though. Please do: it’s a pop rock gem). This left him destitute for several years.
When one has this many quirks in their character, I did wonder if there was trauma in Lawrence’s youth. Although never abused, Lawrence did not grow up in the most ideal home environment. One of the defining moments was when one of his close friends lived in a stable household and he wished he could live like that. A family move which was in a less desirable area also contributed to his quest to lead a certain life. The book itself does not mock Lawrence for his habits, not does it pity him. Hodgkinson just states the fact. Think of him as an anthropologist writing a field report.
The book concludes with the author asking why he chose Lawrence and I found this section poignant:
… because he (Lawrence) made you think about the world in a different way. I was under no illusions with Lawrence. His was not a life for any sane person to aspire to. But the year spent with him had taught me that he was someone you couldn’t second guess; you could never tell how he was going to react to something and that was inspiring in itself. Actually there was a very simple reason why I wanted to write a book about him, and why after twelve months of so many tears and joys I came back for more, Because he was interesting.
So, whether you are into music or not, I wholly recommend Street-Level Superstar. Like it’s subject, it’s interesting.
