‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m not going to be that person, but I still think I could have a hit record. For me a song like “Relative Poverty” is a song for this generation, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t be an anthem for today.’
Lawrence is now 57, and he has been trying (and failing) to become a pop star since 1979. First there was a decade with Felt, the gorgeous wordy group — as if Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground had spent their time in provincial libraries — who made ten albums and ten singles in ten years and then split, and whose newly reissued back catalogue is the reason for our conversation. Then there were Denim, the arch 1990s glam- rock revivalists who both foreshadowed and despised Britpop, and who sang of a 1970s of ‘lots of little Osmonds everywhere’ and pub bombings and Hughie Green and the Black Panther rapist. For the past 20 years, there has been Go-Kart Mozart, described by Lawrence as ‘the world’s first B-side band’, whose music is, approximately, what you would get if ice-cream van themes offered social commentary.
Lawrence is beloved of a certain generation of music fans, especially music writers — those who were in their mid-teens in the 1980s when Felt were at their very best. The editor of Q magazine adores him, and the chief pop writers of the Guardian and the Times do, too. There has been a film about him, Lawrence of Belgravia.
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