The most uncompromising figure in British pop has an urgent question: “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” This is Lawrence (no last names, please), the mastermind behind Felt’s resplendent beauty, Denim-savvy glam-rock, and bargain-earning earworms. Kart Mozart, now renamed the Mozart Estate. As we walk to your high-rise social apartment in East London, I promise you my bladder is empty. “Are you sure?” persists in its Midlands cadence. “Do you want to try going to the cafe?” He doesn’t allow anyone near his bathroom. “A worker was by here the other day, and he used it without asking. Oh God, it was ‘horrible!’
Lawrence is wearing his trademark baseball cap with its blue plastic visor and a vintage-style blue Adidas sweater. His skin is pale and papery, his eyes are small but vivid. He is now 60 years old and has been dreaming of pop stardom since he was a child. “I used to sit in the bathroom and pretend he was being interviewed: ‘So what’s it like to have your third No. 1 in the trot?'”
Only one of his songs has made it to the charts: Denim’s. He fell out of the back of a truck, straight at No. 79 in 1996. Summer Smash, a BBC Radio 1 single of the week, might have lived up to its lyric (“I think I’m going in / Straight at No. 1”) if it were released in September. 1997 had not been scrapped after a certain car accident in Paris. As Lawrence shows me around his ramshackle apartment, which he’s been decorating for the past 12 years, I see a grotesquely bad portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, tucked away in the corner. “My story is fixed to hers forever,” he says sadly.
We sat on wooden stools in the messy, dimly lit living room. Around us are piles of books and vinyl, assorted knick-knacks (duster, magnifying glass) and a mustard-colored Togo chair, a rare extravagance, still in its plastic wrap. The white shades are down; a leak has turned them urine yellow like a child’s mattress. “I don’t think anyone has been as unlucky as me,” he says. “It just goes from one disaster to another.”
And yet Lawrence of Belgravia, the 2011 documentary about him now out on Blu-ray, remains doggedly inspiring. It is the story of a born maverick who refuses to give up his dreams of success or lower his standards to make them come true. “You see so many musicians reforming their old bands,” he says. “I can not do this. Yo have to go ahead”. He knows what it’s like to be disappointed in your idols: “I couldn’t get over him in the 1980s when Lou Reed had a mullet” and he’s determined never to sully his own legacy, no matter how much money he’s offered. “I’d rather be a bum than reform Felt or play my old songs,” he says.
He has put his lack of money where his mouth is. “There came a point where I learned to live on nothing. I would have two pence in my pocket, and I would find a bench in the King’s Road in the hope that someone would sit next to me so I could order a cigarette. No one did because I looked so tough.”
Lawrence of Belgravia alludes to addiction problems and legal problems: we glimpse bottles of methadone and piles of court letters. At the beginning of the movie, he is evicted from the apartment above him. But it remains a loving and hopeful study of someone for whom fame, symbolized by limousines, helicopters and Kate Moss, has never lost its charm. “It’s a shame it didn’t happen to me,” he says. “I’d love to try fame for size, see what it’s like.” How close has it been? “There was a period in the 1990s when he could take a taxi. That was as good as it got. There’s a scale of fame and I’m near the bottom. I always have been and I accept it.
The documentary has helped a bit. “It’s a proper movie, and that took me a couple of rungs,” she says. “It legitimized me.” He has rarely wanted to be respected: he counts among his admirers Jarvis Cocker and Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian; Charlie Brooker chose Denim’s the new potatoes, with her Pinky & Perky voice, as one of her Desert Island Discs. He has also started to be recognized on the street, “which shows that you are getting somewhere.” But he complains a bit: “People who come up to me are listening to my stuff on Spotify. I tell them: ‘Buy a damn record!’ Some of them don’t have turntables, so I tell them, ‘Put it on the wall.’”
His unlucky story began when Felt failed to curry favor with DJ John Peel. “If you were an independent band in the 1980s, you couldn’t do it without Peel’s support,” he says. When Lawrence formed Denim in the early 1990s, he seemed ideally positioned to ride the rising tide of Britpop. “Except I made a big mistake,” he notes. “I thought live music was over, so we didn’t play live at first.” He believed that he would add mystique if fans couldn’t see Denim in person. “I wanted to be a cartoon band. But it turned out to be the beginning of the live boom. Indie suddenly became mainstream. I did not see it coming.
If the likes of Blur stole the march from Lawrence, it was another Damon Albarn outfit that brought him into the position with the “cartoon gang” idea. “I couldn’t believe it when Gorillaz happened,” he stammers. “I was like, ‘That’s what I wanted to do!'”
Shortly after the Summer Smash debacle, EMI dropped Denim. “We had to go down to make records for free, receiving favors from friends.” Go-Kart Mozart was intended as a stopgap, but the songs, many of them musically upbeat and lyrically gritty (When You’re Depressed, Relative Poverty, We’re Selfish and Lazy and Greedy), have continued to appear for more than two years. decades. The name change to the Mozart Estate reflects, says Lawrence, “the most difficult times we live in”.
Even he was surprised when checking out the lyric sheet for the Mozart Estate’s new Pop-Up album, Ker-Ching and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping, due out in January. “Each song has something ‘awful’ about it,” he says. One track features the line, “London is a dump full of human rubbish.” Another is called I Wanna Murder You. “I’m never going to get any money from PRS for that,” he says. “Still, it’s very catchy. It breaks into an enchanting chorus.”
It’s too much for some people. When the first Go-Kart Mozart album came out, he got a call from alan mcgee, his creation boss from the days of Felt. “Alan said, ‘What is this song, Sailor Boy, then? Is Jean Genet fucking her? I don’t understand, Lorenzo. I don’t get what the hell you’re doing!’” He looks pleased as a punch.
Paul Kelly, the director of Lawrence of Belgravia, believes the singer is in a healthier and more optimistic state now than he was during the making of the film. Production took eight years, largely because Lawrence kept disappearing for months. “First I would be frustrated, then I would worry,” says Kelly. “When he finally showed up, he acted like nothing had happened. He has that disarming personality that you always forgive him for. I think he was afraid that when we were done, there would be nothing left. I didn’t want to let the movie go.”
These days, Lawrence has his fingers in countless cakes (Felt reissues, a limited-edition binder of collectible snippets, and a 10-inch EP, all before the new album). He is bursting with ideas: he wants to write a play for the Royal Court, collaborate with Charli XCX, be directed by Andrea Arnold. “Do you know her?” he asks hopefully. “I want to be in one of her movies and write a song for her.”
His greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the larger-than-life-size pink marble bust that sculptor Corin Johnson is making of him: “He came up to me at a concert and said, ‘I’d like to make a statue of you.’ ‘” A month of sessions later, he included a nostril swipe while his head was covered in plaster of paris, and it’s almost done. Nick Cave, one of Lawrence’s heroes, has been working in the same garden on a pottery project about the devil. “He keeps saying, ‘When are you going to be done with that?'”
Even on Lawrence’s dirty old mobile phone, which is no bigger than a Matchbox car, the bust images look stunning. He wears a hood pulled up over his baseball cap, sunglasses pinned to his face, his expression sullen and defiant: it’s a literal monument to his artistic purity. “This should push me up the ladder of fame a few rungs,” he says, marveling at his marble doppelganger. I think he is in love.
This article was modified on July 27, 2022 to correct the spelling of Charli XCX’s name.