Discussing Russian literature with Lawrence

I've said it before on this blog - never talk to people in bands. Especially if they're someone from a band you've actually come out to see and that you in some way like. No, don't do it. It'll only end badly. It'll be death by over-familiarity syndrome. Anyway, looking back, over the years I reckon I've more or less stuck to this mini-rule (though no doubt in reality this has had as much to do with my own social awkwardness/aloofness/wariness as anything else). But ... rules are for breaking, right? Last year, in the heart of a sweaty London summer, I stepped over the line. Transgressed. Let my guard down. Yeah, I couldn't resist a quick chat with Lawrence from Felt. Weird, eh? I'd read a few of those pieces in recent years about how he was supposed to be some sort of near-recluse living in a tower block in east London. Near the Barbican. These little features (in places like The Quietus) always seemed to show him wearing a strange blue-visor'd baseball cap thing. So, the bloke shambling along Old Street with a carrier bag underneath a blue-visor'd hat that July evening was going to be Lawrence for sure. "Excuse me, are you Lawrence?". "Yeah, yeah, how's it going?" Etc etc. Corny? Slightly embarrassing? Yes, though not much so. But what can you really talk about with a person you don't know at all, who's music you're fairly familiar with (though nowhere near as much, presumably, as the person you're addressing)? Not a great deal. Here it came back to me: the reason I usually don't want to talk to musicians. There's only the music as common ground, but you're both coming at it from completely different starting points. For the "fan" (dread term), the default position is a sort of gushing small-talk which - prig that I am - I almost completely recoil from. Yes, I managed to mumble to Lawrence that I'd always liked Felt, but that was about as far as I was prepared to go. (He probably thought: Why has this bloke stopped me if he's not going to say how great my music is?). No, readers, it was a thoroughly low-key encounter. Not very celeb-y. Niluccio the non-gusher was simply stopping this once-vaguely-well-known-but-definitely-never-famous singer to say hello and not much else. In line with his magazine interview comments, Lawrence said some stuff about how Felt's re-mastered albums had all been re-issued "but no-one's buying them". His final words to me were, "buy the records." Oh dear. What can you say? I like your Felt records, Lawrence, but I'm not going to buy all ten pristine vinyl albums at £19.99 a piece. Er, no. And that was that. Off he went down Whitecross Street, off I went ... somewhere else. There was to be no amusing chat about our shared Midlands roots (both from north Warwickshire). No wry reminiscences about the indie-pop scene of the 1980s. No exchanges about the current London music world, its best venues or whatever. No, none of that - thank god. What an encounter! I should have called this blog: "The day I met Lawrence and said ... very little". In fact, there had perhaps been one potentially interesting conversational strand that summer evening - the book I was carrying, Tolstoy's conspicuously fat Anna Karenin. "Good book!", exclaimed the singer of all those "poetical" indie masterpieces from The Splendour Of Fear or Forever Breathes The Lonely Word. "Ha, yeah! That's right", my semi-ironic response. What, we're going to have an awkward discussion about classic Russian literature on a busy section of Old Street on a Friday evening when everyone's rushing to the nearest pub? No, best let that one go.

Future back-page blurbs will say: 'Good book' - Lawrence, Felt  

So off went the blue-visor'd hat man. A man on a mission. A mission to claim his rightful place in the history of underground British pop. Water Orton's Tom Verlaine, Old Street's Lou Reed. Well, have I learnt my lesson - will I talk to people in bands again? Possibly not! But either way, I make a special case for Lawrence, because ... because, well the music is so great. Achingly beautiful (Maurice Deebank's guitar parts especially), epic and mysterious, and shot through with poetry and melancholy. Ah, yes, shot through with poetry:

I've read your po-e-try

It wasn't saying what it should ... I've read your po-e-try

It was sometimes good

I was about 19 or 20 when I first start hearing this stuff (not sure how, given John Peel was apparently reluctant to play Felt). If anything it sounds better now than it did 35 years ago. There! That's what I should have said to the bloke who admired my taste in Russian literature. And now class, here's a poem:

I didn't want the world to know

That sunlight bathed the golden glow

Loneliness is like a disease

Triggers off my sense of unease

I was lonely till I found the reason

The reason was me

Oh, Penelope Tree

Why don't you just enter the night?

Why don't you just do what you like?

Loneliness and all that heartache

That's something I just can't take

You've got your head on back to front

That's easy, so easy for me

Oh, that's easy for me

You know that's easy for me

Oh, Penelope Tree

Hey, tell me: Why are you so scared?

It's like the beginning

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