“I thought me and Kate Moss could be great friends.” An afternoon with Lawrence. (2012)
“National treasure? Gosh. Am I, d’you think?” More than at any point in his life, Go-Kart Mozart singer Lawrence has good reason to reappraise his profile. He walks me back the short distance between his local café and the East London high-rise flat whose balcony graces the closing shot of Paul Kelly’s acclaimed feature-length profile Lawrence Of Belgravia. It’s Kelly’s film, of course, which has propelled the Brummie frontman within touching distance of the fame he has craved since 1980. Back then, he sent copies of Index — his debut single with feted etherealists Felt — to DJs Mike Read and John Peel, only to have neither play it. It’s also Lawrence Of Belgravia which charts Lawrence’s struggle to finance the latest instalment in his post-Felt life: a life which has seen him swap fey intricacies for the junkshop glam-rock of Denim and, latterly, Go-Kart Mozart.
His 51 year-old frame may be painfully gaunt these days, but it harbours a will of iron. It has taken Lawrence almost a decade to complete Go-Kart Mozart’s third album On The Hot Dog Streets. Along the way, his determination to put out new songs such as Ollie Ollie Get Your Collie and Spunky Axe has weathered homelessness and poverty. “An entire year would go by,” he explains, in characteristically dolorous tones, “And I’d only scrape enough money together to go into the studio for four days.” Sometimes bad luck has scuppered him. In August 1997, Denim’s single Summer Smash saturated the airwaves before the death of Princess Diana prompted Radio 1 to remove it from their A-list. On other occasions — such as the time he took acid an hour before Felt’s one and only major-label showcase — he’s had no-one but himself to blame. “I looked static but bizarre,” he recalls.
Even without such self-sabotaging experiments, Lawrence’s reputation has long preceded him. My last encounter with him, 24 years ago, took place in his rubbish-strewn Ford estate as a Fisher Price cassette player struggled to contain the volume of an album by 60s lounge trio The Peddlers. By contrast, his Birmingham flat was as pristine as you might expect from the singer of a group whose canon featured an album called Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty. This was the flat where Lawrence agreed to put up American producer Mayo Thompson, but when Thompson was told he wasn’t allowed to use Lawrence’s toilet, he had to check into a nearby hotel. “I’ve never wanted anyone to use my toilet,” explains Lawrence, “Even now, it’s the same. Do you remember when we met in the café, and I said to you, ‘D’you need the loo? I even wrote it down, to remind myself to tell you.’”
So, thanks to such forward-planning, I have no need to spend a penny in Lawrence’s lavvy. If such behaviour suggests a tendency towards OCD, a look around his flat confirms it. Everything in Lawrence’s life appears to be deliberate. The tatty blue-and-white baseball cap has been a fixture on his head for years, but there are three spare caps — identical in colour and condition — on the shelves to his left. To his right is a perfectly ordered pile of magazines, all featuring Kate Moss on the cover. “I fell in love with her when she was 15, on the front of The Face. I’ve collected every cover, pretty much until she stopped seeing Pete Doherty.”
In Lawrence of Belgravia, we see Lawrence pondering the possibility that Kate Moss might stump up some money to bankroll a Go-Kart Mozart album. He bemoans the fact that their mutual friend Bobby Gillespie won’t introduce her to him. “I thought me and Kate could be great friends. She’s the sort of girl who’d go, ‘Here’s fifty grand to make your next record. Go on! Take it!’ And she wouldn’t expect it back.”
Lawrence’s ongoing quest for that vital cash injection has taken him to some memorable creative places — take for instance, Denim’s 1992 song The New Potatoes (“I was sure that would end up on an advert”). But some enticements remain off-limits. “I couldn’t think of anything worse than a Felt reunion,” he says, emphatically. Not even if that money was, say, used to irrigate a drought-stricken African village? “Get lost,” comes his response, “I’ve got absolutely no time for charity at all. I’m all about me.”
On this, at least, he has always been consistent. Reminded about a 1985 interview with Melody Maker, in which he declared, “I hate poor people and I love rich people,” Lawrence is impressed. “Wow! See? I’ve always been the same!” Presumably, if there had ever been a time to reconsider reforming the old band, it would have been a decade ago when, amid drug addiction rumours, he was evicted from his Kensington studio flat. His local supermarket used to be Harrods (“I’d get a croissant there every morning”). At the North London hostel which became his next home, it was Morrisons. He survived on 49p packs of oatcakes: “The triangular ones with a totally brilliant design”). Whilst at the hostel, he contracted pneumonia and pleurisy. “I woke up, unable to move. It was in the middle of the night and I had to get down three flights of stairs to get the porter. When the ambulance came they told me one of my lungs had collapsed. I said to the doctor, ‘Am I going to be ok?’ And he said, ‘Guys like you die all the time.’”
What about his family? Could they not take him in at this time? Apparently not. Lawrence moved out after an argument about his plans to be a pop star resulted in his stepdad smashing a guitar over his head. When he was 15, his actual father ceased all contact with him. Before his death two years ago, Lawrence wrote to him asking why he had disowned him. “I just wanted an explanation? But all I got was this reply telling me I shouldn’t look back. I was none the wiser.”
On Go-Kart Mozart’s new album On The Hot Dog Streets, girls seem to be the main wellspring of rejection. Over the fizzy arpeggiations of a catchy vengeance fantasy called Retro-Glancing, he sounds like Mike Skinner transplanted back in time to a Birmingham of Budgie jackets, powdered squash drinks and locally popular glam-pop obscurities played on Wimpy tannoys. I Talk With Robot Voice is nothing if not frank. Lawrence yearns to avoid the pain of being dumped by becoming a robot, he sings, “I’m sick and tired of their abuse/Yet I admit I’m still susceptible to vaginas’ allure.” I point out that in sentiment, if not sound, it’s reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel’s angst standard I Am A Rock. But Lawrence has never heard it. “Wow. Really? What does he say in that, then? His whole thing is, like ‘I have no feelings’? That’s exactly what I’m trying to say!”
So he’s single at the moment? “The last girlfriend I had walked out. She was from France. She packed her bag, went to Paris and never told me why. Every girl I’ve gone out with, it’s been like, ‘Oh, I love your pessimistic worldview.’ Then after a while, they’re like, ‘All your books are about murderers and dying. What’s going on?’ And I’m like, ‘I thought you liked it.’ So that’s why I’m never going to go out with anyone again.” Not even, say, Kate Moss? Why not write a song about her? That might get her attention? “D’you reckon?” comes the response. “Do you think she might be… attracted to that? Gosh. It seems so obvious and I never even thought of it.”