FELT (Go Kart Mozart, Denim)... Lawrence is amazing!

yeah, im feelin better.

I am so glad to hear he's doing well these days, I didn't realise he was in such a bad way. I'm really looking forward to hearing the new albums, it's been way too long since his last album. The thought of him doing big pop songs aimed at the charts makes me a little giddy.

It would be great to see him live, he's one of the few people I absolutely love that I've never managed to see.

For those still interested in things:
we have made a couple more copies of the fanzine now.
You can get them here
http://foxtrotecholimatango.blogspot.com
Also, there was a short article about Brit Pop band Denim in last friday's Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/21/denim-britpop-band

I'm not missing out this time - ordered, and thanks for the heads up F.E.L.T.

ordered mine as soon as the email showed up a couple weeks ago!

just ordered one too... kicked myself for missing out last time..

Glad i came back here.
Hope you'll like the book!

Received the book on Friday and all I can say is that if you are in any way a fan of Felt then you owe it to yourself to buy it. From the design, to the photos, to the essays and interviews, it's front-to-back superb. Clearly a total labour of love as well, the editors Christian and Mike should be rightly proud.

this^^^

got mine today, but my fingers are too greasy from banh mi to feel okay touching it yet hahaha

forever breathes the pictorial greasy bahn mi jackson

omg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yJqV5pDxHA

Photos taken of famous people together that you would never have expected to be together but make you happy all the same.

That clip of Lawrence on The One Show is amazing, my friend text me about it but I was too late to catch it.

Also I would do anything for one of those yellow vinyls of Summer Smash they showed.

whuuuuuuuut

is that gyles 'thatcher' brandreth with lawrence?

Much as I love them/him, I am kinda bored of the eternal narrative of how supposedly Denim would've been huge if it hadn't been for their goddam BAD LUCK with record labels going bust or records getting indiscriminately banned etc. etc. ad nauseum.

I realise that in the clip above they do not particularly stress this but it seems that the banning of Summer Smash has become the go-to background detail for a band who never had a steady line-up, tried to make a gimmick out of being elderly, never fucking toured, made three records in ten years (frequently missing the advertised release date by months if not years), never released a single that wasn't on an album and had a penniless manic depressive with serious drug issues as their main man. I think there's more to their lack of commercial success than "bad luck".

This article is probably the pinnacle of this kind of thing

Totally with you there.

love his hat but loz looks like absolute shit these days

So he goes on the one show dressed like he used to in Denim.

Well, that's what they were talking about.

xpost I don't think that piece suggests it was all bad luck. Surely lots of the things listed are catastrophic misjudgments?

They were not one of the 0.001% of musicians who make it huge. So what? Who cares? I followed this band from the beginning and it never even crossed my mind that that they were competing for chart positions and TOTP appearances.

By the standards of the kind of people who liked them, I think they had a pretty good career actually. The stature of the band entirely rests upon the superb music that is contained within "Back In Denim" and "Denim On Ice". They are more than that but that should be enough. Everything they released was fantastic and still stands up today, they garnered critical acclaim that few bands achieve, didn't release anything that was aesthetically half-assed (great design, covers, concepts, clothes etc), did BBC sessions, appeared on TV, toured in Europe, even played a couple of stadium gigs with Pulp. That's a career that 99% of bands would die for.

I doubt that "Summer Smash" would have been a big hit anyway. It would have been their worst single had it ever been released. And what is the point of even speculating about this anyway? Would history have been different if they had had a single novelty hit? I'm reminded of the Dickies, who had 9 hits in the UK in the space of about 2 years. Following this, they were hampered by drug issues, bad business decisions, revolving door line-ups, quickly returning to impoverished obscurity, putting out patchy albums for decades, endlessly touring with their first two albums making up the bulk of their set. I suspect this would have been the fate for Denim, had they ever had a splash of mainstream success. Instead we got Go-Kart Mozart who I consider to be absolute genius.

Happy birthday!

For whatever reason I thought he'd be older. Happy birthday Lawrence.

Aw, happy birthday Lawrence, <3 you so much! Poem of the River for all time!

one of those bands where the interviews and conceptual stuff rivals their actual output!

have you guys heard this?? http://dominorad.io/show/lawrence_from_felt\\
i've a link to it if you wanna listen! so great!

Yeah his radio show was great.

proper link to show: http://archive.dominorad.io/lawrencefelt.mp3

was pleasantly surprised to learn that his musical tastes coincide rather eerily with mine. shack, dexys, prefab sprout fantastic something? sheesh, get out of town, loz!!

of course made a mental note to investigate win (whose existence i had been oompletely ignorant of) and sudden sway (all i had known of them was their evolution peel sessions) (he claimed during the broadcast that they were his favorite artists of the nineties!)

The two Win albums are very good.

i kind of stayed up all night a few weeks ago the first time i heard them. one of those things, like friends again, where i was like 'why didn't my obsessive record collector friends who were keyed into eighties uk pop tell me about this waaaaay earlier???'

makes me wish bimble were still here, b/c he was the sort that would post space blues on his blog and be like almost apologizing for the obviousness of it, like "of course this is basic cultural literacy for civilized ppl"

like lawrence playing wild swans... almost a tossed-off gesture

has anyone read that slim jc brouchard volume, ballad of the fan?

I wonder how he is celebrating?

Just got a copy of "Forever Breathes the Lonely Word", which Felt record should I get next?

poem of the river

really think so much of the genius of lawrence was his uncanny prescience

like making a weird moog record in 88

or taking cues from singer-songwriters like hazlewood, hardin, neil that it took almost a decade for critical consensus (at least in the circles he traveled in) to catch up with

he just made a bunch of records in accord with his affections at a given moment, and they still hold up 25 years or more later.

by and large his conceptual ambitions dwarf his contemporaries on cherry red and creation imo

thanks!

@ Neil, get "The Strange Idols Pattern and other stories". Deebank-era Felt is very different (and to my taste, superior) to Duffy-era Felt. Though "Poem of the River" is brilliant.

NP: "Synthesizers in the Rain"

thanks again!

i don't know how i feel aboot you cherry red ppl!

poem, pictorial jackson, forever, and the 12"'s are all time for me

dig the cherry red stuff,sure, but in general prefer the creation years when he gradually ironed out the pretentiousness from his system more or less lyrically and began to take cues from boring dylan years + alan mcgee pep talks + his own secret muses which were obv. working overtime in the late 80's

like pictorial is x number of songs played quickly, recorded quickly

no stagnant pools or semipiternal darkness or whatever

just candles in a church and autumn martin duffy exercises and lawrence telling it like it is while you're candy flipping

"or taking cues from singer-songwriters like hazlewood, hardin, neil that it took almost a decade for critical consensus (at least in the circles he traveled in) to catch up with"

did he know ivo at 4AD at all or anyone at cherry red, because those people were all about that stuff back then. though i guess people who run labels aren't the same as critics.

he did a single with liz frazier (sic) so i can imagine he would know 4ad people

someone i knew ruined my Goldmine Trash LP by melting candlewax on it, never got over it

Ennh, Duffy was such a disappointing replacement for Deebank. I love those later albums, for sure, and would rate "Poem" and "Forever" over "Crumbling" and "Ignite", but Duffy's organ sounds stoopid in comparison to Deebank's endlessly winding majesty. And personally I love the pairing of Deebank with Laurence's "I don't know how to sing"-early style, i.e. "The World is as Soft as Lace"

like, i think the irony is, that at the time onlookers were probably like 'this is the apex of huddling in a closet bedsit music' but if you actually go back and listen to it it's far more psychedelic material than the furthest reaches of the mancunian pill chapterhouse. mebbe i'm totally wrong, but i feel like lawrence grokked so many angles of psyche music that were played around with late eighties/dawn of the nineties. he labored with the burden of incorporating the eventual hangover and so forth w/o dwindling down into empty stabs at nihilism or broken hedonism. he recapitulated tom rush et al, and i think in a fundamentally worthwhile manner

i have my own problems with directions that he took blah blah blah, but...pretty sure that bubblegum perfume is in the running for best album art ever.

Neil, yeah get Poem of the River. If the long instrumental sections grab you then go for Splendour of Fear (the best Deebank-era record imo). If you prefer the shorter songs from Forever Breathes then go for Strange Idols Pattern.

scott, dunno, just going by old interview with him circa '87 where they cite his prominently displayed record collection. a friend of mine was friends w/ivo, and his quote on lawrence was something like, 'oh, he's a really unhappy person', which i guess rings true with the portrayal of him in the Creation book, which makes him sound like a depresso

bubblegum perfume is in the running for best album art ever.

I would agree, if it read "songs from the cherry red years" ;)