{"title":"Scott Lavene","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eScott Lavene, born in Essex, was raised on power ballads, punk and swearing. After years of being in bands and traveling around, he almost secured a major label deal with his provocative songs. However, Scott disappeared for five years on a rusty old boat before resurfacing with renewed creativity and self-released an album with Big Top Heartbreak. Now signed as a solo artist to Funnel Music, his first single 'It's All Gonna Blow' has gained recognition from Steve Lamacq on BBC 6Music. With upcoming releases and tours planned, Scott Lavene is set to make waves in the music scene.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA string of 7inch records will be released this summer leading up to the debut album in early 2019.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDon't miss out on experiencing Scott Lavene's unique blend of raw energy and catchy tunes!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"milk-city-sweethearts","title":"Milk City Sweethearts","description":"\u003cp\u003eHave we ever needed great storytellers so badly? Voices to snap us out of our collective grey funk, to pull us out of our narrow, hemmed-in worlds and to lighten our days and enlighten us with their perspectives, Immersing us in their worldview and history. People who can make us laugh, cry, gasp or nod sagely, to see our world anew and not feel so alone. We need stories, vignettes, new windows to look out of, and narrators to help those new visions make sense.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn short, we need Scott Lavene. Born and raised in Essex, but a man of the world who has wandered far and wide, Lavene’s a storyteller who can capture all the madness, joy and frustration of life while singing about worms writhing in the ground. Lavene’s been in bands since his teens, but only really located the voice that makes his new album \u003ci\u003eMilk City Sweethearts \u003c\/i\u003eso remarkable – that combination of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability and unpredictable humour – in a music workshop for alcoholics and addicts, long after he’d bid farewell to childhood dreams of pop stardom, and the ghosts and demons that accompany those dreams.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWithout a label, he recorded the album at home, and assembled it in a week in his mum’s garage during lockdown’s heavy manners. It’s a warm, witty, charismatic record with a dark heart at the centre, Lavene sounding dislocated and therefore able to write his everyday stories with a left-handed brilliance and blunt honesty that keeps them so fresh, like classic Kinks, or David Bowie if he’d never had to go to space to feel otherworldly. His songs are talking blues, set to loose and minimal and excellent art-rock with a pop sensibility, the honk of Roxy sax and the guttural weird-funk of Ian Dury’s Blockheads haunting their grooves.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nothing Fancy","offers":[{"title":"Red | LP","offer_id":50459842249035,"sku":"1123701","price":20.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50459844739403,"sku":"1123694","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/8d613c18-83b0-42dc-9862-e77ab55b7dbb_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727227664"},{"product_id":"broke","title":"Broke","description":"\u003cp\u003eLike all the greatest music Scott Lavene is all at once familiar and yet hard to place. A street poet delivering real life vignettes over wonk beats and scuzz rifts, he is a 21st century take on those maverick genius outsiders that Stiff Records used to release back in the punk wars. Lavene has the lyrical smarts and the fairground bark of an Ian Dury, the incisive wordplay of a Costello and the deadpan pop of Madness in his creative DNA, along with the street poetry of an Essex boy version of Lou Reed, the dislocated funk of Talking Heads, the jellied eel lyrical bounce of Chas and Dave, and the inventive surreal see-saw of a Tom Waits, and many other non-conformists. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s an intoxicating brew that he makes his own in this collection of wonderful quirky songs that make up \u003ci\u003eBroke\u003c\/i\u003e. These are songs that are full of detail and a life lived in scuffed shoes, rainy towns and the magic of the everyday. Songs about small talk, being skint, doomed affairs and the sweetness of falling in love over a cup of tea. Creating unconventional backdrops for his street tales Scott builds up shapeshifting rhymes and looping grooves. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Funnel","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50511343288651,"sku":"1064968","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/fe601e2e-efb4-4805-828b-dc4228f482e8_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727887732"},{"product_id":"disneyland-in-dagenham","title":"Disneyland In Dagenham","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the 1980s the Walt Disney Company were considering building their first European theme park not on the outskirts of Paris, but in Dagenham, Essex. In his youth, Scott Lavene used to pick up drugs from a dodgy flat overlooking the proposed site. Disney and Dagenham were never a good fit, he thought, as he stood on the balcony one evening as the sun set, awaiting an overdue hash delivery. It never happened of course – perhaps the multinational corporation were put off by the sewage works and car factories that Mickey Mouse and Goofy would have counted as their neighbours. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo he recalls on the title track of his exceptional third album\u003ci\u003e Disneyland In Dagenham\u003c\/i\u003e, monologuing in warm deadpan over a wandering acoustic guitar. It encapsulates his conflicted feelings about the county he was raised. “A cowboy kind of place, a bit rough around the edges,” as he puts it. “A lot of funny stuff happened that you’d tell to normal people who’d be like, ‘What the fuck?!’” It’s changed a lot since then. Filming the video for the song, he and his sister took a drive around their old haunts along the A13. “The sewage works don’t smell anymore and they’re now calling Rainham ‘East London’, which is hilarious. It made me grateful for my past, for the shit we could get away with back then.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA born storyteller, through his records and his writing ­– he sends out monthly short stories under the title ‘Bits and Bobs’ via his mailing list and is currently working on his first novel – Lavene has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. From a man draining the blood of property agents in the aid of local businesses (‘Keeping It Local’) to a talking horse who travels Europe selling hash, gambling and performing covers of Talking Heads, \u003ci\u003eDisneyland In Dagenham\u003c\/i\u003e is no exception. It’s a record that tumbles together the autobiographical and the imagined, the heart-breaking and the preposterous; the tale of that itinerant drug-dealing horse, for instance is also a genuinely touching allegory for the way friendships can slip through one’s fingers. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor all the surrealism, it also explores the magic of the banal. When he first started writing it, Lavene says, “I was a bit sick of writing stories about the past.” He’s led a more eventful life than most. Lavene’s 20s took him from sleeping in a tent as he roamed around France with his guitar to flirting with the music industry proper while living on a London houseboat, and then to a period of serious mental collapse that saw him withdraw completely from music for seven years, “but I’m not that man any more,” he says. “These days I’m a dad of three. So initially I just wanted to make an album about living in the suburbs and raising kids.” ‘Custard’ is a song about his drinking a pint of custard straight from the carton, and his five-year-old daughter nagging him to get a dog. ‘Rats’ concerns the rodents that were there to greet the Lavene family when they moved into a new house. When the past does rear its head, it’s often through a haze of melancholy. “I’m nostalgic by nature,” Lavene says. “I think I have a really good memory for emotion. I think it’s because I’m riddled with self-pity!” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore long, of course, Lavene realised his storytelling couldn’t be contained by so simple a brief. ‘Debbie’, for example is a bizarre and semi-fictional song about fading love, based around a transfixingly woozy guitar line. “It’s a fucking weird song, but also my favourite thing I’ve ever done. So how could I not include it?” Lavene says. “The album is really about saying fuck the rules, write whatever you like.” Whether lyrically, or through music that leaps from spiky psychedelia to flute-driven crooning, driving wah-wah rock n roll to a sleazy Serge Gainsbourg-esque shuffle, Disneyland In Dagenham is therefore a record that’s frankly bonkers in its scope. For the first time he’s completely abandoned any pretence of coolness. “I was not afraid to include everything that I like, whether or not it’s really eccentric. I wasn’t afraid of just making the record that I wanted.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe made it at swift pace Benjamin Woods of The Golden Dregs, after Lavene sold a guitar to pay for a week at Greenwich’s Vacant TV studios. It was a cold December and they were limited for both time and gear so they recorded quickly in hats and coats, Woods adding drums and occasional guitar and synth. It was fleshed out later with some further home recordings and friends’ contributions on saxophone, flutes and percussion. It's Lavene’s third since getting sober, and with each album he’s got closer to the point at which he now stands, a moment of total self-assurance. ‘Sadly I’m not Steve McQueen’ contrasts the dreary romance of his Essex upbringing with his dreams of international stardom – a Malibu mansion next door to Keith Moon’s and a bright red open-topped sports car, but today such validation no longer matters. “It would be nice to make £150,000 a year from tours and sell 20,000 records, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t really care about that any more. Lavene’s got something worth more than any of that – a fanbase for many of whom his music means absolutely everything. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“My music’s a bit marmitey,” he says, but for those who love it it’s a love that runs deep – a recent crowdfunding campaign for Lavene to set up his own home studio, for instance, rapidly outstripped its target, setting the stage for “the grotty Essex Neil Young album” he’s already got in the pipeline. “There aren’t any songs of mine that are specifically about mental problems, but the amount of people that have come up to me and said that my music has got them through a really tough time. One guy said that he had tried to kill himself the year before and found my music when he was in hospital. He was like, ‘You made me want to stay alive’. That is really, really special.” An audience that’s both smaller and more dedicated can mean a type of connection more worthwhile than any arena show, he says. “That guy’s come to three or four gigs since then, and to meet the guy is just so fucking beautiful. Music’s given me a lot over the years, and I find it bizarre and wonderful that mine can give that to people too.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat’s not to say Lavene’s short of recent achievements. He was invited by The Hold Steady’s frontman Craig Finn to tour with him last year, which went down so well that they’ll hit the road together once more in February. After a triumphant set at End Of The Road Festival, he then capped 2023 opening for The Hold Steady proper at the band’s legendary annual New York residency. Finn is among the many converted to Lavene’s work, and he appears on Disneyland In Dagenham opener ‘Paper Roses’. Finn had Tweeted about his enjoyment of Lavene’s music while he was in the studio with Benjamin Woods. “I’m not very good at self-promotion but I was with someone who was. Benjamin was like, ‘Fucking tweet him back! Get him on the album! We went for a coffee and he asked me to go on tour with him, it’s a relationship of mutual admiration really. And what a bloody gift he’s given me – I’ve definitely stolen quite a lot of Hold Steady fans.” \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s not hard to see why. Though in person he’s thoughtful and softly-spoken, onstage Lavene is a born entertainer; a comedian, raconteur and storyteller as much as a musician. “I’m like a Butlins Redcoat,” he jokes. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 people or 1,000, I can entertain a crowd with a drum machine and a guitar. I like when people say that they can be laughing, then crying literally five seconds later within the same song.” It’s a safe bet, then, that in the wake of Disneyland In Dagenham there’ll be plenty more converts to follow. After all, Lavene jokes, “I’m like The Beatles, but a little bit Tom Waits, a little bit Whitesnake, a little bit Chas \u0026amp; Dave, and a little bit power ballads.” All worthy comparisons, but ultimately Scott Lavene is the kind of artist that can be compared only to himself\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nothing Fancy","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":51246123876683,"sku":"2185383","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":51246124433739,"sku":"2185384","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Disneyland_In_Dagenham_dfa9f2fd_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1739232358"},{"product_id":"cars-buses-bedsits-and-shops","title":"Cars, Buses, Bedsits and Shops","description":"\u003cp\u003eScott Lavene is as English as pork pies and pasties, dunked biscuits in Yorkshire tea. Last year’s album \u003cem\u003eDisneyland in Dagenham\u003c\/em\u003e was full of Essex, East End poetry, and classic English post punk. Following extensive touring including many sold-out shows, Scott is back with another album entitled, \u003cem\u003eCars, Buses, Bedsits and Shops\u003c\/em\u003e on Nothing Fancy. An album bursting with more dark humour, snapshots of squalor and cheek, and Scott’s unique love songs. Produced by Stew Jackson, who’s worked with Massive Attack, Black Crowes, Tom Waits and Nick Cave, the record shines with Scott’s presence, alongside Ryan Rogers of Mumble Tide, co-producing and playing organs, synths and mellotron. The album came together quickly, in a five-day wonder, in Bristol, September 2024. Scott’s longer story-based songs have taken a backseat on this record with more singing than before and a higher percentage\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eof ballads, sincere, wistful and tender. They evoke the lyrics and feelings set down by Daniel Johnston and The Magnetic Fields, Evan Dando and the immense David Berman. But a few ratty stories still remain. Scottexplains “On tour, I’d become used to playing the story based songs, the spoken word ones. But fans kept asking me why I didn’t sing anymore, which surprised me. So over the course of a month I wrote a dozen proper songs, alongside “Cars” which was something I already had, a piece of writing that went into Bits and Bobs, my short poetry book I was selling at gigs. I knew I wanted to make something more classic and polished, and when I bumped into Stew at the Bristol show he told me we should make an album and it quickly got organised. I’d been used to playing most of the instruments on the last two albums but Stew can play everything really well so he plays drums and guitars, let alone lap steel, and I just put down basic tracks and watched him and Ryan build the songs, while I sat on the sofa in the studio.” Cars, Buses, Bedsits and Shops is fit to burst with colour, a slight change in the wacky production of old, the album is polished like a classic 70’s American singer songwriter album, an ode to Wings, to yacht rock and Neil Young. Like if Wilco and Bruce Springsteen’s baby was raised in Basildon. The combination of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability and unpredictable humour makes Scott unique in today’s expansive world of artists.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Nothing Fancy","offers":[{"title":"LP - Eco Mix","offer_id":52034974417227,"sku":"R3521-9643","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":52034974449995,"sku":"R3521-8143","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":52034974482763,"sku":"R3521-6354","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/ScottLavene-Cars_Buses_BedsitsandShops-NFRLP86-Packshot.jpg?v=1749559716"},{"product_id":"be-happy-decisions","title":"Be Happy\/ Decisions","description":"\u003cp\u003eA new chapter begins at \u003cb\u003eChiswick Records\u003c\/b\u003e with the brand-new single from \u003cb\u003eScott Lavene\u003c\/b\u003e, the first in a run of distinctive releases arriving from the label in the months ahead. It is available as a strictly limited edition of 500 copies.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the UK’s most distinctive contemporary songwriters, \u003cb\u003eScott Lavene\u003c\/b\u003e brings together sharp observational storytelling, dark humour and working-class realism. Often compared to \u003cb\u003eIan Dury\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eJarvis Cocker\u003c\/b\u003e and \u003cb\u003eJohn Cooper Clarke\u003c\/b\u003e, his songs are full of dreamers, outsiders and everyday characters.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Chiswick","offers":[{"title":"7\" - Black","offer_id":58101742141771,"sku":"R4675-8791","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/13a77c6f-3da7-40ed-ecd6-e4fe7cb97d99.jpg?v=1786452476"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_656708fe_thumbnail_4096_4e83811c-2f7f-4376-9edf-4c6d16e1091b.jpg?v=1727227634","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/scott-lavene.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}