Scott Lavene shares new single ‘Debbie’

19 Feb

“Think Baxter Dury’s warped kid brother.” - The Times

“Sounds like an updated version of something that Stiff records would have released in the 70’s.” - Steve Lamacq

"Can't stop listening, it's everything I like all at once." - Craig Finn (The Hold Steady)

"Full of great poignant, funny and sad songs that display the man’s great writing talents. At times he’s David Bowie, Syd Barrett and Ian Dury at the same time.”- Louder Than War

"Mordant, spivvy, pop-punk TMI gabble about the urgency and futility of it all from lyrical Essex motormouth." - MOJO on The First Time

Today storyteller Scott Lavene makes his highly anticipated return sharing news of third album Disneyland in Dangenham due out 10th May via Nothing Fancy. To mark the announcement, Lavene has also, shared his surreal semi-fictional new single “Debbie”. The record follows his critically acclaimed 2021 album, Milk City Sweethearts, and continuing success from popular recent singles “Waitrose Has Run Out Of Lobsters” and “Broke”.

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 anymore,” he says. Recent achievements include a triumphant set at End Of The Road Festival, before capping off 2023 by opening for The Hold Steady on tour, and at the band’s legendary annual New York residency based on a shared appreciation of one another’s music. The bands vocalist Craig Finn (who Lavene will tour with again later this month) is among many converted to his work and appears on Disneyland in Dagenham.

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.” Lavene says. “I think I have a really good memory for emotion. I think it’s because I’m riddled with self-pity!” Disneyland In Dagenham 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. “The album is really about saying fuck the rules, write whatever you like.” Says Lavene.

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.

Lavene jokes, “I’m like The Beatles, but a little bit Tom Waits, a little bit Whitesnake, a little bit Chas & 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.

Watch / share the video for ‘Debbie’ here

In 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.

So he recalls on the title track of his exceptional third album Disneyland In Dagenham, 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.”

A born storyteller, through his records and his writing he sends out monthly short stories under the title ‘Bits & 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, Disneyland In Dagenham is no exception.

‘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 - “these days I’m a dad of three,” says Lavene, “so initially I just wanted to make an album about living in the suburbs and raising kids.”. ‘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!”

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.

He 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 anymore. Lavene’s got something worth more than any of that – a fanbase for many of whom his music means absolutely everything.

“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.”

It’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.

Disneyland in Dagenham is out 10th May via Nothing Fancy– Pre-order here

For all EU / UK press enquiries please contact Will Vincent on: will@prescriptionpr.co.uk

Full bio here

Tracklisting:

1. Paper Roses (featuring Craig Finn)
2. Custard
3. Debbie
4. Horse and I
5. Disneyland in Dagenham
6. Sadly I’m not Steve McQueen
7. Julie Johnson
8. Little Bird
9. Rats
10. Keeping It Local

Tickets are available here

Tour dates:

20th Feb - Voodoo, Belfast w/ Craig Finn
21st Feb - Workman’s Cellar, Dublin w/ Craig Finn
23rd Feb - The Wardrobe, Leeds w/ Craig Finn
24th Feb - The Attic Bar, Glasgow w/ Craig Finn
25th Feb - Night & Day, Manchester w/ Craig Finn
27th Feb - The Rainbow, Birmingham w/ Craig Finn
28th Feb - Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth w/ Craig Finn
29th Feb - The Exchange, Bristol w/ Craig Finn
1st Mar - Camden Assembly, London w/ Craig Finn
2nd Mar Moth Club, London w/ Craig Finn

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