This is a magnificent book, regardless of whether the reader knows who it is about. I state this bluntly at the outset because I am keenly aware that many more people are ignorant of Lawrence’s career and achievements in the field of popular music than will be familiar with them; and that I will need to use up a significant number of words attempting to explain a figure who has repeatedly proven inexplicable to the public at large. So here goes…
Has the indefatigably eccentric Lawrence led a charmed life or a cursed one?
Lawrence Hayward may be the greatest British pop star never to have enjoyed a hit single. He emerged from the Birmingham suburbs in the early 1980s as the mononymous frontman of the indie band Felt, who released ten singles and ten albums in ten years before calling it quits, just as Lawrence had planned they would. Several of these records were truly magical, but none of them bothered the charts.
During the 1990s Lawrence reinvented himself with the pop group Denim. Despite touring alongside Pulp and issuing a string of catchy novelty numbers with titles like ‘Fish and Chips’ and ‘Job Centre’, Denim too failed to attain anything more than a sliver of fame. Lawrence’s bad luck streak – more of which later – continues to the present day via his Go-Kart Mozart combo, recently rebranded as Mozart Estate, whose latest LP was released to little fanfare and fewer sales last year. And this was the year Will Hodgkinson spent trailing the would-be musical legend around Margate, Welling, Temple Fortune and sundry other neighbourhoods you wouldn’t necessarily expect to bump into a wizard and/or true star.
In Henry James’s late story, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, a man lives his entire life in fear of something awful befalling him, only to realise too late that the dreaded event was the waiting itself. In the case of Lawrence, he has passed four decades (he is now 63) attempting to become a pop star of the sort he idolised as a child of the 1970s. In this hilarious, compassionate and ultimately inspiring book, Hodgkinson demonstrates that it is this lifelong and as yet unfulfilled quest that has made Lawrence a superstar, albeit at street level. For those of a certain age and sensibility, he is our Peter Pan, our Ziggy Stardust, our Taylor Swift.
One reason he is so beloved by his fans is that he is a dependably fabulous interviewee. This means that Hodgkinson, who is chief rock critic for the Times, can pretty much set the first half of Street-Level Superstar to cruise control, pursuing Lawrence along ‘the Hot Dog streets’, noting his every gnomic and amusing utterance. For instance: ‘David Bowie didn’t have to do the things I have to do. Angie would do the supermarket shop for him’; or ‘I like them [Y-fronts] massive, but these are too big even for me. Perhaps they could work for some of the larger fans.’
But Lawrence does not merely talk it as he walks it; as Hodgkinson makes clear, when he is on song, he is great. Tracks such as Felt’s ‘Primitive Painters’ and ‘The Osmonds’, an epic ballad from the first Denim album, are worthy of comparison with records by the loftiest of Lawrence’s musical heroes. As the book goes on, however, we learn more of what Lawrence has endured to live his dream – from relative poverty and school kids laughing at him in the street, to clinical depression and homelessness. He seems incapable of maintaining close relationships. Of the handful who agree to be interviewed, ex-girlfriends and former bandmates have little good to say.
And when the bad luck strikes, it is devastating. In 1997, Denim were on the verge of massive success with a single called ‘Summer Smash’, a title that proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in entirely the wrong way. In the week of release, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. The track was banned from the airwaves and pulled from the shops. Lawrence responded to the setback by becoming a heroin addict.
Has this indefatigably eccentric man led a charmed life or a cursed one? Hodgkinson concludes:
On the face of it, Lawrence sacrificed his health, family, relationships and, arguably, his sanity for art, fame, pop, the pursuit of a particular vision. Whatever the consequences, he had the bravery to live his life in the way he saw fit. Actually, I don’t think he had any choice.
It was said of Samuel Johnson that he saw in Boswell ‘a being whose human need for just what he had to give was very nearly desperate’. In Hodgkinson, Lawrence seems to sense his biographer’s longing for a renewal of faith, not just in the magic of pop music but in the artist’s power to rouse his followers to new heights of devotion. Street-Level Superstar is travelogue, pen portrait, love letter and cautionary tale all rolled into one. Or, as Lawrence himself puts it: ‘Will has finally written his masterpiece. I’m glad I could be of assistance.’
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