An artist praised by the likes of Steve Lamacq is coming to Reading this December for a night of music.
Scott Lavene is a storytelling musician who Tom Robinson says is a master.
Born and raised in Essex, his travels have seen him pull together a collection of songs that can capture all the madness, joy and frustration of life while singing about worms writhing in the ground.
His recent album Milk City Sweethearts is an example of this, with a combination of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability and unpredictable humour.
He said it came about after 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.
“I hadn’t spent a day without drugs since I was 16,” he remembers. “But now that was gone, I felt like a teenager again.
“I mean, I was working fitting fireplaces, I was the wrong side of 30, I didn’t harbour any dreams of being signed anymore.
“I started writing songs again, because I was enjoying it.
“Before, I was always trying to be cool, trying to write like other people. And after I came out the other side of addiction, with a little clarity and a lot of distance, I realised a lot of funny stuff had happened to me, and I could write about it.
“It’s been a long journey…”
That voyage of discovery started when he was sweet 16 and, by his own admission, he could sing like Jim Morrison.
“I sung someone else’s songs for five years, because my songs weren’t as good as his. I was always just a busker, really,” he says.
“I was an obsessive record-collector and reader of books from a young age, and I wanted to get away from Romford as soon as I could, really.
“There was no one there for me. I stuck out like a sore thumb.”
Armed with a guitar and the knowledge that, at a push, he could sing and play some Beatles songs, he escaped to France, where he roamed around and lived in a tent, before returning to the UK and finding a home in Canterbury among a coterie of stoners and musicians.
He met fellow misfits, artists, people making music for the sake of it, and realised he wanted in.
Then in London, he lived on a houseboat and launched a band that he says sounded like “Chas’n’Dave meets Queens Of The Stone Age”, and stirred up interest from music industry managers and A&R men.
His granddad had been a famous trad-jazz musician decades before.
His dad was a “failed” musician who died surrounded by empty booze bottles and opiates.
Charting a trajectory between those two poles soon became tightrope act, and with each footstep the high-wire grew only more torturous.
“I was just not well,” he remembers. “The madder I got, the more inclined I was to write about going mad. And then my mental health hit a point where I just stopped everything. I stopped playing music for seven years.
“My life was just solitude, self-harm and mental institutions.”
He started the rebuilding process, working for a charity for addicts and alcoholics, helping run a music workshop for people in the same spot as him.
And as he helped these people write songs of their own, he began to weave his own stories into music.
“These new songs, they were different,” he remembers.
He was no longer trying to write as somebody else – he was now singing in his own voice, and penning songs drawn from his experiences, the good and the bad. Not all the songs were autobiography but, as he says, while “the facts aren’t important, the emotions have to be honest.”
He released an album as Big Top Heartbreak, 2016’s Deadbeat Ballads, and followed it with his first album under his own name, 2019’s Broke.
“I was signed to a little label in Bristol, but then they went skint,” he remembers
Then came Milk City Sweethearts, recorded at home, and assembled in a week in his mum’s garage during lockdown.
Earlier this year, he followed it up with Disneyland in Dagenham.
His visit to Reading will be an opportunity to hear those stories, and make some of your own.
Club Velocity and New Mind Records are bringing the artist to Reading’s Face Bar on Tuesday, December 3.
Doors open at 8pm, with the music at 8.30pm.
Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult, and the minimum age for entry is 14.
Tickets cost £11, including a booking fee.
The Face Bar is in Ambrose Place, just off Chatham Street.
For more details, log on to wegottickets.com and search for Club Velocity.
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