Dismantled king is off the throne: watching the Lawrence film

I've been hearing about this film for years but I've now, finally, watched it. Lawrence Of Belgravia, Paul Kelly's 2011 documentary on Mr Felt/Denim/Go-Kart Mozart. Yep, a whole hour and 25 minutes devoted to Lawrence of Old Street/Water Orton. In my opinion, Felt's music is right up there - at its best, mysteriously poetic and sublimely beautiful - and having personally encountered Lawrence a couple of times in the past five years (blogs here and here), I've got a lot of time for him (about 85 mins, in fact). Kelly's film is of the "observational" variety, plunging straight into the modern-day life of this stranded wannabe popstar as he apparently faces eviction from his flat in central London. From there you follow him around as he gets a new flat, does a few shows and some recording with Go-Kart Music, gets interviewed by several journalists and meets up with old music cronies (Gary Ainge, Pete Astor, Vic Godard etc). It's pleasingly mundane. And it's nearly all shot on dull, cold, grey days in London, Paris or Birmingham. The greyness of Lawrence, a man with shiny yellow-white skin, a blue-tinted plastic-visor-baseball-hatted skinny apparition who smokes, chats, jokes, shambles along in the street on his own, sits on buses and trains, and then turns up on stage wearing exactly the same clothes he's been wearing throughout the day and intones a few lyrics as his band Go-Kart Mozart churn out their godawful pop mush. Er yes, because, forgive me Lawrence worshippers, I can't bear GKM's stuff, or Denim's, or in fact some of the "easy-listening" instrumentals that Felt did in the second half of the 80s. 

Quoi?: Lawrence answers (or doesn't) a French journalist's pop-tastic questions

Hmm, dismantled king, indeed. But, anyway, what's notable about the film, I hear you ask. Well, these things:

*Lawrence is very much allowed to do Lawrence in Lawrence Of Belgravia. In other words, you get a lot of his dry Brummie monotone chat, as he rehearses his now well-known shtick about wanting to be rich and famous ("I could be the first popstar pensioner"), including comments about wanting to be Kate Moss's girlfriend and getting a million pounds off her to finance his music. I think this is all part of his self-aware, self-deprecating humour (jokes about painting the walls of his new flat: "I bet Lou Reed never painted a wall in his life"), but who knows? Is this his jokey groove, his fun patter, or does he half (or quarter, or one-sixteenth) mean it? He also says that if he'd lived in the sixteenth century he could have had a rich patron who would have funded his artistic lifestyle. Yeah, or he could have died of cholera or the plague aged seven, a poor peasant from the Midlands like the rest of us.

*Other elements of the Lawrence repertoire are also present and correct: (1) Felt never became big because John Peel didn't like them ("name one indie band who made it without Peel's support"; he reckons that Peel said live on air that Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty was "the worst album title in the history of music"); (2) his aversion to any notion of revisiting Felt is fully ventilated ("you'll never ever see a Felt reunion, never", "that's one buck I'll never chase", "quote me on it, pin that to your heart"); (3) a refusal to sing on other people's records; (4) an insistence that his bands are more important than his friendships ("any friendship can go by the wayside ... the band is my friend"); (5) plus an anecdote about thinking - back in 1970s Birmingham/Water Orton - that he had nothing in common with his family, who he thought of as "stupid". 

*Lawrence's personal sense of style is pretty evident in the film. With his checked shirts, hats and long boyish fringe, Lawrence was - in his own way - an eighties indie stylist, and the 2010s version is also pretty interesting. In addition to his straggly long hair and blue-and-white baseball cap (the modern Lawrence motif), you see him in a black leather jacket with "KILL" spelt out in studs on the back, he has a yellow silk bomber jacket with the Sex Pistols'-approved Jim French two cowboy with their dangling penis's print on the back, and he wears various t-shirts, patterned shirts and sloppy jeans with a sort of slung-together cool. At least for an older guy, anyway. 

*The film captures quite a bit of the London indie scene (circa 2010-11?). Or at least it shows us the frontages of several venues, ones I've been to numerous times myself: the Windmill in Brixton, the Lexington in Islington, the Boston Arms in Tufnell Park, the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch. According to the film's credits, the Betsey Trotwood and the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell also appear. This is - or at times was - very much my stomping ground, so Lawrence Of Belgravia has a sort of semi-personal feel to anyone like me who's been doing the rounds of these venues in the past couple of decades. 

*And speaking of 2010s indie, there's a slightly surprising part of the film where you see Lawrence acting as a driver for one-time London indie-pop greats Let's Wrestle. I have no idea how or why the not-very-practical-seeming Lawrence became this band's driver, but it's nice to see a decent modern band making an appearance in the film and the snatch of them onstage doing I Won't Lie To You is really excellent (far better than anything by Go-Kart Mozart anyway).

*Kelly's film is good on buildings, place and texture. You see lots of static or slow-pan shots of buildings and signage, often looking bleak and dilapidated (take a bow, Birmingham's Deritend). This, I take it, is all part of the downbeat and faintly comic nature of a film about a "loser". There's also a shot of some Christmas cards Lawrence has received, just four cards standing all on their own on the empty floor of his Old Street flat. "There's no-one that's gone this far and failed", says Lawrence. Lawrence, the king of failure. 

*In one of the sit-down interviews you see Lawrence doing, one with a slightly uncomprehending French journalist in Paris, you appear to see Lawrence's usual drole patter break down. It seems that he can't quite understand what the interviewer is asking him and his interlocutor also doesn't appear to catch on to the habitual semi-irony in Lawrence's voice. This is all quite disarming and "real", non-showbiz. It's possibly a trick of the light, but at one point Lawrence looks almost distressed by it all, on the verge of tears (photo above).

*While the pathos/bathos and dark comedy of "failure" is a biggish part of the film, I did wonder about a couple of things. In one scene you see Lawrence in a guitar shop considering accepting £200 for one of his old guitars which he's apparently trying to sell. The guitar is rather nicely adorned with large "FELT" letters. It's the sort of thing you'd see in one of those tacky historical exhibitions to celebrate a band or music scene. "Do you really want to sell this?", asks the guitar shop man. Good question. And is Paul Kelly filming Lawrence genuinely trying to sell it, or is it a staged situation? Kelly himself - you would think - would have given Lawrence £200 (or more) not to sell it. 

*Similarly, the involvement/assistance of Kelly in Lawrence's life is - I suppose unsurprisingly - unclear from the film itself. At one point we hear an answer-machine message from Lawrence to the director where he says he's "in hospital in Holloway". Hmm, is this something to do with the Methadone bottles we glimpse lined up on a shelf in Lawrence's flat? Or the court orders and demands for money? We don't find out. It's a peek behind the curtain but no more. Again, at one point the camera hovers over some handwritten notes about Lawrence's likes and dislikes ("vegetables" are a dislike), which he reads out. Lawrence stops at "genital mutilation" (apparently one of his likes), but Kelly has filmed it nonetheless. What does it mean? That Lawrence approves of or somehow likes genital mutilation? To himself? To others? 

Cool things happening: Lawrence in his flat

Hmm, it's not all money, fame and collaborating with Charli XCX now, is it? So this grey film about a drily funny indie "genius" is at times dark and faintly disturbing. I think Lawrence Of Belgravia's strength is that it doesn't attempt to be an "introduction" to the weird and wonderful world of Lawrence - it simply dives right in. It's a film for Felt fans. People like me. Most people won't care in the slightest about this amusingly self-absorbed musical also-ran, and most people won't sit through this film. Which is - perhaps - how it should be. At this point I should make a couple of things clear. The whole success-failure trope is in my view totally bogus, and I wonder if Lawrence himself doesn't realise this and harps on about fame only because he knows it's a perversely entertaining pitch? Either way, the fact that Felt never "broke through" only makes them more attractive in my eyes. At one point Lawrence refers to Felt as a "classic" band and that's true. Who needs hits when you've produced music this good? (And plaudits obviously need to go to Maurice Deebank, Martin Duffy and the others too). And the other thing about Lawrence Of Belgravia is that (imo) it's half-ruined by the abundance of Go-Kart Mozart you hear throughout the film. Lawrence can talk up stuff like the On The Hot Dog Streets album as much as he likes, but to my mind this is just awful music. Yes, I get his point about not repeating Felt in his subsequent bands, but ... er, you can still try to emulate its quality. The throwaway bubble-gum trash-pop of Denim and Go-Kart Mozart leaves me cold. And I also don't think Lawrence's mannered, breathy voice generally suits these fast-tempo pop-rock songs. At times in Lawrence Of Belgravia the jauntiness of Lawrence's post-Felt music threatens to undermine the seriousness of the story of a musician who created timeless stuff like Riding On The Equator, Crystal Ball, Penelope Tree, Whirlpool Vision Of Shame, Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow or The Stagnant Pool. Maybe someone needs to make a film that captures this, a truly artistic film that seeks to represent the feel of this amazing music? So yeah, Lawrence of Old Street continues to haunt the streets of east London, clutching his carrier bag of stuff and waylaying passers-by with his stories of fame thwarted by dastardly late-night Radio One DJs. Dismantled king is off the throne ...  

Looking the future in the face: Felt in 1980