Tox Report 66. Transcendence out of spite

September roundup: Lawrence, Lawrence and Lawrence!

This is Lawrence (via the Times)

Welcome back to Tox Report! I did promise a return to pop trash this week, and as it happens, there’s only one kind of pop trash I’m interested in at the moment and it’s Lawrence. It’s quite hard to explain the concept of Lawrence (no surname) to someone with no prior Lawrence knowledge: a man who is essentially famous for never having become famous.

I first remember becoming aware of him through the music press and Radio 1 graveyard shift in the 1990s, when he was referred to in a tone of oblique reverence as “Lawrence from Felt”. At the time, I hadn’t heard Felt (in fact, to my knowledge I didn’t hear Felt until about two weeks ago). And though Lawrence’s project in the nineties — a band called Denim — was both in theory exactly the kind of thing I liked, and in practice an influence on a lot of bands I really did like (Pulp, Suede), there was something about them that didn’t take.

Maybe it was that their version of shopworn post-Thatcher Britain sounded more grubby and bitter than nihilistically glam. Or maybe it was that the first song I can remember hearing by them was the cursedly annoying parody novelty song “The New Potatoes”, sung from the perspective of… some new potatoes (“I lived in a field/ And now I live in a tin”). Denim, I decided, were not for me. But something about the idea of Lawrence stuck with me, and when the Times asked me to review a new biography of him by Will Hodgkinson called Street Level Superstar, I said an enthusiastic yes.

A reminder that Toxic is now available in paperback! It’s the story of how the internet drove everyone crazy in the noughties, told through the lives of nine celebrity women and the battle to control their own images. Helen Lewis called it “a Molotov cocktail hurled at the feet of celebrity culture”, and Paris Hilton liked it so much she bought the TV rights. Click the button below to buy from Amazon, or head to your bookseller of choice.

And if you’ve read and enjoyed Toxic, please use those links to leave a review! It really does make a difference, and I appreciate everyone who’s done this already.

Listened

Felt, “Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow”

Since I’d taken this commission, I decided to revisit Lawrence’s music. Cut to: driving my children back from an appointment when “Sunlight Bathed the Golden Glow” came on, and excitedly hammering my phone in its little dashboard cradle to hit repeat while trying not to swerve too wildly across the road. This is a great song, with big chiming guitars and a lyric that sharply mocks a friend’s pretensions: “You’re trying much too hard/ To make your life feel like a dream/ You're reeling from ‘A Season in Hell’/ But you don't know what it's about.”

In Street Level Superstar, Hodgkinson asks Lawrence whether this barbed song was actually aimed at himself — an estate kid hunting out meaning in books he didn’t always understand. No, says Lawrence: it’s about a friend of his called Gay Jon. “Jon was gay,” he adds, helpfully. “Jon called himself a poet, but he was trying too hard and it infuriated me.” Wringing something transcendent out of spite? That is the essence of Lawrence.

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Watched

Lawrence of Belgravia (Prime)

A mark of Lawrence’s cult status: even though his bands have remained resolutely under the radar, he was fascinating enough to star in this 2011 documentary. Like the Hodgkinson book, which is structured around following Lawrence for a year, director Paul Kelly was interested in the everyday business of being Lawrence. What is it like to be Lawrence and record a song? Go hat shopping? Sit at home and consider your methadone? (At the time Kelly was filming, Lawrence was in recovery from heroin addiction that had left him homeless.)

Why is a musician who’s never had a hit so interesting? Partly because he’s written some very good songs (see above), but mostly because of the tension between what he wants and what he does. If Lawrence was a character in a musical, his “I want” and “I am” songs would be in totally discordant keys: he wants to be a massive popstar, but whenever there’s a danger of achieving that, he commits some wild act of self-sabotage. For example: when Felt were granted a plum spot on an indie label showcase, Lawrence prepared for the show by dropping acid and then had a massive freakout that involved refusing to play while the audience looked at him (he didn’t end up playing).

You can watch this documentary as a portrait of failure, but it’s ambivalent — the last shot pulls back and back from Lawrence smoking on his balcony, like a reversal of the Psycho opening that flits around the city then zeroes in on Marion’s window. She, suggests Hitchcock’s movie, could have been anyone: only a chance twitch of fate picked her out for the horror that follows at the Bates’ Motel. The opposite of that would make Lawrence fated — fated for what isn’t clear, but fated for something.

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Read

Will Hodgkinson, Street Level Superstar (Nine Eight Books)

Thirteen years later, as the subject of this book, Lawrence seems healthier, though still quite cussed. In my Times review, I described him as a Samuel Beckett character — not just because the absurd striving of “Fail again. Fail better” suits him so well, but also because he’s as funny as a Beckett character. See the Gay Jon story. Or the acid disaster showcase story.

From the way Lawrence talks, I think he knows how funny these stories are, but he also doesn’t have any power over whether he creates more of them. This is just who he is. That means he alienates a lot of people close to him (usually by being stubborn and dictatorial), but also that people who stay close to him tend to have an indulgent streak about what, by the age of 63, it’s probably fair to call eccentricities if not outright pathologies.

I loved this book so much that as soon as I was finished with it, I parceled it up and sent it to my dad — after phoning my dad and demanding to know why he hadn’t introduced me to Felt sooner. My dad is a generous and omnivorous enjoyer of records, and growing up with access to his collection (and his sale stock, because he also traded records and gave me free run of them) was the nearest thing to the Spotify experience pre-Spotify: if I was interested in hearing something, all I had to do was locate it in the genre/alphabetical order. If something didn’t exist in my dad’s records, it was hard to believe it existed at all.

In this way, by the time I was in my early teens, I had built up a respectable collection of British indie music. So, my dad responded, shouldn’t I have been the one introducing him to Felt? It turns out that a few years ago, a client on his stall had brought him some Felt records and told him that, since he liked Love, he should listen to this. And so it turned out that me and my dad had both, independently, become Felt fans in the last few years. Lawrence was alienated from both his parents — he told one friend that he didn’t attend his mother’s funeral because “she refused to buy Lurpack butter and would only get the supermarket’s own brand” — but at least in one way he’s bringing families together.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• “It’s a Tuesday night in downtown Austin, and Joe Rogan is pretending to jerk off right in front of my face.” Opening line of a generation from Helen Lewis? I think so! (Atlantic, gift link.)

• Jesus Christ this feature on cosmetic dentistry disasters in America is upsetting. Relatively non-horrific extract: “Dominique […] thought the veneers were gorgeous, but less than a week after the procedure, one of the hard shells fell out into a plate of scrambled eggs.” I have a lot of sympathy for the victims of these hacks, but there’s also an appalling lack of care for their own body in the way they make these choices. Don’t get your teeth filed down! They don’t grow back! (New York Magazine, registration required/paywall.)

• Bonus content: me in the Times on cosmetic surgery tourism touts, and my own tooth journey. (Registration required/paywall.)

• The parallel to the noughties redemption arc that everybody loves: the noughties schadenfreude feast. We’ve had Bennifer’s implosion, Katy Perry’s Dr Luke-powered non-relaunch, and now: Justin’s DUA disgrace. (Sky News.)

• Unexpected delight in the Lawrence book: he goes to see a Charli XCX gig “having announced to anyone who would listen over the past five years that Charli XCX was his favourite popstar of the modern age.” So he’ll be pleased to know that Brat summer is transitioning into Brat autumn with the drip-feed of the remix album: