Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson (Nine Eight Books 2024)

Chapter 1 Temple Fortune

"Golders Green," said Lawrence, "is the worst place in the world when you need to piss."

We left the underground station in this north London neighbourhood, which has been home to the city's Orthodox Jewish community since the 1950s, and found the public toilets closed, abandoned, isolated by a dirty grey wire fence.

“This is the only area in London where you can’t find a hedge or tree just a little ways away to let off steam,” Lawrence said, dragging his narrow frame from the hall to the street with surprising speed. The wind gently stirred the black curtains of hair on either side of his baseball cap. “The last thing you want is to be caught pissing in a hedge in Golders Green. In certain parts of south London it wouldn’t be a problem, and I could write a book about it. But you have to be respectful here.”

Lawrence had first visited the neighbourhood a few years earlier. He had taken to taking long walks through residential areas, without a map and without a clear objective, to clear his mind and find solutions to his problems and, above all, ideas for new songs. Perhaps Golders Green would provide him with the inspiration he needed for that elusive success he had been chasing since 1980, a success capable of transforming his life and immersing him in a glorious bubble of fame and money. One day, while walking around Muswell Hill, he noticed a sign that said “North Finchley”. All he knew about the neighbourhood was that the teenage punk group Eater came from there, so he decided to do some research.

—“Let’s see what the place where Eater came from is like,” I thought. It turned out that Finchley was a very residential area. From there I came to Finchley Central, and eventually ended up here. And I fell in love.

Pulp’s This is Hardcore by Jane Savidge (Bloomsbury Academic 2024)

 

Released on March 30, 1998, Pulp’s sixth album, This Is Hardcore, may be as close to commercial suicide as you can get when recording an album in a burning studio with a noose around your neck. But its release also conveyed many other things, including an acknowledgement that drugs and fame are not all they’re cracked up to be, and that pornography is a clear and pleasant danger for men with too much time on their hands. One thing it most definitely signified was the end of Britpop. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I hear you cry, but it’s a truth barely acknowledged that only a band like Pulp, who’d formed almost twenty years previously – Jarvis Cocker formed the band at the City School in Sheffield in 1978 with schoolmate Peter ‘Dolly’ Dalton, who several years later became one of my closest friends whilst we were both attending Nottingham University – and spent the vast majority of those twenty years squandering in obscurity, could have successfully completed the task with so much style and vigour.

Face (1997)

 

Fingers Crossed : How Music Saved Me from Success by Miki Berenyi (Nine Eight Books 2022)

 

At one of the Soho House soirées, while I order drinks from the bar, a drunk comedian slurs at me to either suck his cock or fuck off. As I stand chatting to friends, Alex from Blur is sprawled on the floor making ‘phwoarr’ noises and sinks his teeth into my arse. The Carry-On Sid James impersonations are a common theme. I fall into conversation with Keith Allen and try to ignore him sweeping his eyes around my body, twitching with overheating gestures and tugging at his collar to show he’s letting off steam. Another comedian sharing a cab ride for convenience suggests he come in for a bunk-up, despite having spent the entire night excitedly chatting about his imminent fatherhood. Liam Gallagher circles me, wondering aloud when I’ll be ready to fuck him in the toilets. Look, I know I’m hardly Mary Poppins, but this isn’t flirting, it’s harassment. It’s constant, relentless sexualisation. And there’s a nasty edge to it, implying that it’s me, not them, who is asking for it.

I recall Suzanne Vega once pointing out that Madonna may be breaking boundaries, but every teenage girl who dresses like her is still treated like a slut. I’m experiencing a similar uncomfortable side effect with the supposed androgyny of Britpop. While Justine from Elastica and Sonia from Echobelly and Louise from Sleeper, wearing ungendered suits or jeans and T-shirts, get treated as one of the boys, my long hair and short dresses are now a signal that I’m absolutely gagging for it. Sure, I could get a crop and stop wearing a skirt, but that’s no different to saying, ‘If you don’t want the grief, dress like a nun.’ I’ve been doing what I do for years and now I’m being reframed as happy to be objectified.

I’ve been reading feminist texts since college, however unfashionable that might be right now (and, to be fair, Chris has always found it a bit tiresome). My education, both at PNL and from the politicised bands I’ve followed, has taught me precisely to see through the ‘harmless fun’ to the misogyny that drives it. I’m not militant about it. I don’t crucify people for crossing a line, I just recognise there is one. And I need to know someone well enough to accept that they’re ‘just joking’; I’m not going to swallow it as a lame excuse from a bloke I’ve just met.

Freak Out the Squares: Life in a band called Pulp by Russell Senior (Aurum Press 2015)

 

I was living in a flat above a sex shop with a girl who had a bit of a Béatrice Dalle thing going on and was the object of much pining amongst local musicians, including Jarvis. In a bid to impress her, he climbed Artery-style out of the window and made his way along the ledge, only to fall twenty feet onto the pavement in front of the sex shop – his broken glasses and splayed limbs serving as a dire warning on the dangers of pornography to several adolescent boys who had been plucking up the courage to go in.

It seemed touch and go for a bit, he’d broken his hip and was in hospital for a while, then moved out into residential care. But he slowly improved and was able to come out in a wheelchair. We had to cancel a couple of shows but he gamely did the rest in his wheelchair.

I shamelessly milked the mishap for all it was worth and took Jarvis down to London to do press, which included a surreal photo shoot pushing him round a skateboard park in the chair.

For the next show at The Clarendon, London, we brought a coach party down from Sheffield. The trip down to London was always filled with expectation. On the way into the metropolis, the excitement mounted: there were famous people just walking down the street, bold as brass. Rover always seemed to spot Oliver Reed just disappearing into a pub and demand that the van stop, but no one else ever saw him. It was probably just wishful thinking on Rover’s part, like the time when he went past Felicity Kendall in the street and she ‘gave him the eye’. Can’t remember the concert, it got some reviews.

Never one to avoid advancing the greater glory of Pulp by resorting to bad taste, I cut out a picture from a Romania Today, 1968 magazine of a forlorn man wired up with electrodes – onto which I drew broken glasses to make it look like Jarvis.

30 Day Song Challenge - Day 02

A song with a number in the title? 

One of the quicker choices to make. I have that old man habit of rediscovering old music and hammering it to death on either Spotify or YouTube  . . . until I move onto the next (new) old band. The middle of last month caught me in a My Life Story binge, so I immediately thought of '12 Reasons Why I Love Her', arguably their known song. 

I always had a soft spot for MLS. I guess they'd be dismissed nowadays as Brit Pop also rans, but I loved their debut album Mornington Crescent - another piece of music from my past record collections which has disappeared into the ether - and always thought they were London kindred spirits to Pulp. I'm not going to pretend that they are some kind of lost classic band. They never had the tune on a par with a Common People or a Girls and Boys, but they did have a certain something. Maybe Jake Shillingford tried a little too hard, wanted to be a pop star too much and he was sadly a set of cheekbones away from reaching the big stage at Glastonbury. (Yeah, I know that sounds better in my head.)

Honorable mention also to Spiritualized's '12 Steps'. On another day, I would have picked that burst of noise, and it's another song discovered via a music magazine compilation.

Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall by Luke Haines (William Heinemann Ltd 2009)

Colonel Klutz

December 1993. End-of-year round-ups in the music press. American bands still holding up – all polls feature Nirvana, Lemonheads, Belly and the Juliana Hatfield Three. Tindersticks by the Tindersticks is album of the year in Melody Maker. New Wave is at number 19. In the NME Writers' Top Fifty Albums of the Year Bjork's Debut is number one, and New Wave comes in at 18. In Select magazine New Wave is voted the seventh-best album of the year. And the best album of 1993 as voted for by the writers of Select: Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys. Suede lurk around the top three of most critics' polls, and Mr Blobby gets the Christmas number one in the singles chart.

The singer – who could now pass for an East End villain – has me pinned against the wall. After our, ahem, early-evening opening slot there had been an ominous knock on the dressing-room door.

'Can I have a word – outside?' says the singer, gesturing grimly towards me. Drunk and stoned post-gig, I follow obediently. I know what's coming. I orchestrated it so I'm looking forward to it. Quick as a flash the headline act pulls off some nifty pugilistic footwork and squares up to me. Jesus, what a knucklehead. I hadn't imagined his reaction to my onstage comments would be quite as physical. True, last night, with righteous anger and adrenalin raging through my veins I had been spoiling for a fight, but now I just wanted to be sacked – minus pasting.

'How much of a fucking prick are you gonna look when I kick the shit out of you onstage?' the singer asks unreasonably. It's a good question, and one that I assume is rhetorical. I drift off into a vision of myself being chased around the stage by a man in a gorilla suit, the gorilla's clumsy paws finally managing to grab me by the scruff of the neck before drop-kicking me high into the air to the whooping delight of the audience. Oh man, that would be entertainment.

'Well, answer me, you fucking cunt.' Not rhetorical then. I snap out of my reverie and slump back against the wall. I'm back in the playground about to take a hiding from a dim bully. There's nothing to do but let the scene play out. Shouldn't take long.

. . .

On paper it was unpromising. In real life it looked even worse. The Auteurs are booked to support Matt Johnson's band The The on a UK tour. All of this organised months in advance, before the recent setbacks, when life was a breeze and I would skip over lawns of freshly mown grass without a care in my head, laughing and doffing my hat to a cartoon bluebird as I bent down to pick a buttercup.

Tour with The The? Sure, if it keeps everyone happy and it sells some more records, why not? My levity lasts for about a day and a half. Reality dawns. The truth is, I don't care too much for Matt Johnson. He's some guy who sold a ton of records in the 80s, and now he's got some new dreck he's trying to flog. Coincidentally, some of the work on the new Auteurs album has been done at a recording studio owned by one Matt Johnson. The studio walls are covered in terrible paintings: some recognisable originals of The The album sleeves, others perhaps specially commissioned. The theme of the paintings seems to be ghastly men and ghastly women giving in to all manner of bodily functions with grim abandon. Oh, and imminent nuclear destruction. A clear indication of Johnson's faultless yet simplistic world view. Human race: awful. Never mind, will probably be extinguished in some sort of self-inflicted Armageddon. Told you so. The bastards deserved it. As I said, sold a lot of records in the 80s.

On no account attempt to tour the UK in December. Your limbs will become brittle with cold as you trundle up and down the country in a freezing tour bus and no one will come to your gigs as they are attending Christmas parties. Christmas parties in your hotel. Oh yes, the late-night bars of the Holiday Inn, Ibis and Radisson hotels – the après-gig drinking stations of the lower- to mid-level rock band. Every nook and cranny of these corporate flophouses taken over by drunken reps and violent drones from the frightening world of real honest work. Civvy Street – pissed up, embittered, trying to get over another empty year and on your fucking case.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Harper Perennial 2008)

What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this. But instead, pointlessly, I say, 'Great guitar sound.'

'Yeah,' the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how Doug - or whoever - has been playing guitar since he was a fucking foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles bashfully. It's about all I can do not to punch his stupid, talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops. But - ever reasonable - I just nod and listen and say things like 'yeah?' and 'yeah' and 'great' and 'really?' for a long time.

I hate indie music. Until a couple of years ago you didn't really have to think about it. It was just a couple of hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you've got to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you miss the next one. It's a fucking nightmare.

The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock by John Harris (Harper Perennial 2003)

Noel Gallagher had turned up at his local polling station to find that he was required to produce one more item of identification than he was carrying. 'Do you want me to sing you a fucking song?' he protested, before celebrity eventually got the better of bureaucracy. That night, though the South Bank beckoned, he remained on the sofa. 'I had a ticket for the Labour Party party, but I had that much fun watching Portillo and the others get done over I stayed at home in front of the TV. It was all champagne and cigars round our house. Meg and me got pissed and went out into the garden and played ['The Beatles'] Revolution dead loud with the neighbours banging on the walls.'

Britpop Quote of the Day

Lush's Miki Berenyi discussing the release of the Britpop and Shoegazing box set The Brit Box:

"Is there a band in existence who would feel it a compliment to be compared to Dodgy?"

Cruel, but funny . . . and I actually bought Dodgy's first two albums.

My Life Story

Just realised that I've had a 'Suzi moment' after clicking on the Marx and Coca-Cola blog.

Of course, I knew that yesterday was the 160th anniversary of Fred and Charlie's classic agit-prop pamphlet. I forgot to mention it on the blog because I just happened to be distracted by a minor mid nineties agit-pop classic.

Marx and Coca-Cola's JM provides the killer quote from said pamphlet, whilst I do a cut and paste job from Mike Leigh's classic late eighties film, 'High Hopes':

Later in the afternoon, CYRIL and SHIRLEY speed along their street on their bike. They overtake SUZI, who is scuttling along, carrying a large, bulging plastic bag. SHIRLEY waves to her as they pass. She waves back.

Moments later, as CYRIL and SHIRLEY alight, SUZI appears round the corner . . .

SUZI: (Saluting) Wotcher, comrades!

SHIRLEY: Hallo, Suzi!

SUZI: Long time no see.

SHIRLEY: You all right?

SUZI: Yeah, I been fine.

(CYRIL and SHIRLEY take off their helmets.)

Where you been?

CYRIL: Highgate Cemetery.

SUZI: Oh! Someone dead?

CYRIL: Yeah - Karl Marx.

(He walks off. SHIRLEY laughs.)

SUZI: Oh, yeah, 'course!

CYRIL: I'd 'ave thought you'd 'ave known that.

SUZI: I did know that - I just forgot.

(SHIRLEY and SUZI follow CYRIL towards their block of flats.)

This Should Explain All . . . Definitely . . . Maybe

Hat tip to El Hombre Molècula.

Missed this and it's killing me #4

Missed this and it's killing me #3

Missed this and it's killing me #2

Missed this and it's killing me

How I Learned To Love Luke Haines

*Christmas Special*

Pop over to The Vinyl District music blog, and pick up gratis *samples* of some of the best pop music from the 1990s. Five tracks from the Auteurs classic 1994 album, 'Now I'm A Cowboy', have been made available for your delectation.

Poor old Luke Haines. If the bloke had had the face and the hair to go with his musical chops, Damon Albarn would still be working in the Rucksack Dept of Millets to this day.

Having a (Brit) Pop

I'm trying to read five or six books at the moment, which is always a mistake with me because I end up just letting matters drift and invariably a few books fall by the wayside never to be picked up again. Those books I am reading include this,* this, this and this** (sneaky of me not to mention them by name, which means that people will have to click on the links and give me more page views ;-)

Another book that I am also currently reading at the moment is John Harris's The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. Yeah I know it was published a few years back and I missed the zeitgeist and all that palaver from when it was originally published (which roughly translates as the fact that it is only now that I have been able to afford to buy it and only 'cos it was being sold for a couple of quid in a record shop in Edinburgh) but from the hundred or so pages I have read of it so far, it is an intriguing enough account of that period in the early nineties when groups such as Blur, Suede and Pulp kicked back against what they considered the drugged out apathy and drone of grunge.

I never made it to the Good Mixer but I do remember reading what Harris in his book now views as the seminal issue of Select magazine, which had Brett Anderson on the front cover wrapped in the union jack, and the provocative headline emblazoned across its cover of 'Yanks Go Home'. It's strange now to think how important Suede were in the great scheme of britpop things - what with the Art School versus the Arseholes rivalry of Blur and Oasis that followed - but they were a brilliant band in their day, and seeing them perform the incendiary Animal Nitrate live on the Brits on the TV all those years ago was definitely one of those hairs rising on the back of the neck moments in life.

It's funny to read in the book that by all accounts Brett Anderson was a sweet guy who only adopted the cool and distant persona that he was notorious for in his heyday after getting his ego bruised when Justiine Frischmann went off with Damon Albarn, and that Alex James initial impression of Albarn when he first met him was of someone who was: "A pompous big-headed fucking moron with a shit band . . . He can come across as a total cunt."

But my reason for blogging on the book is for a couple of choice quotes that made me laugh out loud, that I thought I would share with my three readers - hello Mo, Curly and Reidski - and, though I don't have any particular antipathy against Suede it is the case that they are aimed against Brett and the other three haircuts in the band:

Alex James again, from when Blur returned from a disastrous tour in America, when they thought that there time had been and gone, and revealing that before the Damon vs Liam homo-erotic bunfight, there was the Goldsmith versus UCL London University inter-college dust up:

'When we got back, Suede were on all the front covers,' says Alex James. 'Those little pricks from fucking UCL.'

The second quote is from Morrissey, who Brett Anderson made the mistake of verbally sparring with in the music press. There was only ever going to be one faux English Fop left standing in the ring after that particular mismatch:

'Suede are . . . a group with all reference points so tightly packed that it consequently leaves no room whatsoever for originality, should any be lurking,' he wrote. 'Despite his claims to the contrary, I have never met Brett and wouldn't wish to; he seems like a deeply boring man with Mr Kipling crumbs in his bed. He'll never forgive God for not making him Angie Bowie.'

Absolute classic! Ten years later, and Mozzer last album is a corker and it has all ended in tears for Brett. Last time I think I spotted him was when he was fronting this video.

* The book on Orwell edited by Paul Flewers.

** The one on the Russian Communist Left. Anybody who wants to buy me the British Communist Left one for my birthday, feel free. My birthday is next week, btw ;-)