Saturday 14th September
LAWRENCE: BOOK EVENT AND FILM SCREENING
£13 | £15 [+10% booking fee]
Doors open 7.30pm – tickets available
Seated 14 + event | U16s must be accompanied by a responsible adult
‘Essential reading’ JARVIS COCKER
‘Wonderful’ BOBBY GILLESPIE
‘One of the best music books I’ve ever clapped eyes on’ MARC RILEY
‘Will has finally written his masterpiece. I’m glad I could be of assistance’ LAWRENCE
Lawrence is the greatest pop star who never made it, his dreams of glory thwarted over the past five decades by bad luck and self-sabotage. At sixty-one, he set off on a new mission: to escape poverty, obscurity and the humiliation of kids at the bus stop laughing at him by writing a smash hit. But what is the cost of a dream?
In 1980, Lawrence formed Felt, who released ten albums and ten singles in ten years before splitting up. In 1991, he reinvented himself with novelty-pop outfit Denim. Signed to EMI, riding the wave of Britpop, in 1997, Denim’s song ‘Summer Smash’ became Radio 1’s Single of the Week and looked like a sure-fire hit. Then Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. All copies were melted down. Crushing depression, addiction and homelessness followed… but in the face of it all, Lawrence never gave up.
In STREET LEVEL-SUPERSTAR, bestselling author and journalist Will Hodgkinson follows Lawrence as he rebuilds his life. He gets mistaken for an old lady by an amorous pensioner, is reduced to dragging sacks of 2p coins to his local bank and wanders through London’s distant suburbs in search of lyrical inspiration. As they walk together down rain-soaked streets, Will tells the story of Britain’s most eccentric cult star. Will he write the greatest song the world has ever known before the year is out? And was it worth sacrificing everything – family, relationships, health, sanity – for art?
LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA is Paul Kelly’s stirring and acclaimed character study of enigmatic musician Lawrence (Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart).
By turns funny and bleak, Lawrence of Belgravia is a finally moving portrait of an artist who has combined an unabashed but theoretical desire to achieve fame with an eccentric kind of integrity that has kept success out of reach. Lawrence (he doesn’t use a surname) founded his first band Felt in 1979, but failed to capitalise on their 1985 indie hit ‘Primitive Painters’, and when he returned it was in the guise of fake comeback glam-rock band Denim, which acted ‘as if the 1980s never happened’. Sharing a retro sensibility with bands such as Saint Etienne and Pulp, Denim were conscripted by the music press into the Britpop movement in its early and arty phase; but Lawrence’s avowed ambition – ‘I’ll make a million: my generation’s slow’ – went unfulfilled. Their second album, Denim on Ice, led off with ‘The Great Pub Rock Revival’, an attack on what Britpop had become by 1996 that didn’t catch the public imagination in the way the likes of Ocean Colour Scene apparently did.
Paul Kelly’s film joins Lawrence in 2005, around the time of the release of Tearing up the Album Charts, his second album as Go Kart Mozart, and leaves him in 2011 on the completion of its follow-up, On the Hot Dog Streets. He lives hand-to-mouth in temporary accommodation – initially in Belgravia – and contends with mental health and drug problems.
Henry K. Miller, Sight & Sound
Bookings are not currently available for this event.