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

I’m against the ‘00s I don’t care what you say
I’m against the ‘00s you don’t listen to me anyway
well I’m for the ‘90s –oh- and for the ‘10s too
yeah I’m against the ‘00s girl look what they’ve done to you

I made a new sound and they put it underground
it was a thunderbolt crash they said it’s never going to last in the ‘00s

we’re victims of the ‘00s yeah you and me girl
deflated by the ‘00s getting caught up in its social whirl
you should have seen me in the ‘90s I was different then
oh but those times have gone and they ain’t never coming back again

so I formed myself a band and I toured it ‘round the land
I took a look around there was nothing going down in the ‘00s

remember in the ‘90s when we were at school
hangin’ out with the older boys bending all the little rules
remember in the ’93 yeah you and me
in a little wood leaning up against the tree

if the truth’s to be told then we were 12 years old
they say crime doesn’t pay but it surely did that day in the ‘90s,
yeah yeahyeah

I’m against the ‘00s duran duran
fake make-up boys the rum-runner clan
I knew you when you were at school you were nothing then
and when you left the band you were nothing again
you bought yourself a farm and you looked about as calm
as a man who’s going to freak ‘cause an earthquake’s hit his street in the ‘00s

well I’m against the ‘00s bands that couldn’t play
I’m against the ‘00s singers with nothing to say
you heard it on the radio you saw it on the tv
you still went and bought it thought – aah it amazes me

you wouldn’t know know style if it ran you up the aisle
you couldn’t spot a star if he came within a mile of the ‘00s

I’m looking forward to the ‘10s yeah I’ve got a new girl
we’re into ravesignal III ‘cos “we’re in love with the modern world”
I’m sick of winklepicker kids mary chain debris
I’ve just had enough of that nah it doesn’t interest me

I’ve made a new sound this ain’t going underground
it’s a thunderbolt crash concerns the future and the past
but not the ‘00s no not the ‘00s we’re talkin' 'bout the ‘00s.

i want that t-shirt!

x-posts

I want that shirt as well.

didn't realise he'd been in a bad way. what's the story anyone know? i hope he gets some money out of it this time. can't see it mind.

he was living on bennies in belgravia, and on some kind of drugs [government drugs, to help him off smack, or so it looked] when the doc was filmed, hence the title

I hope he tours the US doing Felt material. Fingers crossed.

ive only this year started listening to a LOT of felt, and tbh, i wish id had a little more time to quietly invest in the whole lawrence oeuvre before reissue fever struck (followed by blog fever). i know that's dumb, and like i wasnt alive when the first record came out, and who cares what is popular anyway, but like, it's fun to not have everything be reissued! the thrill of real discovery!

but also i always get cranky about everything between 4 and 6pm.

it's fun to not have everything be reissued! the thrill of real discovery!

That was the 20th century, my friend. But your point is well taken, and if you can restrain yourself you can still feel that thrill.

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!