He’s been described as Baxter Dury’s warped kid brother, and a master storyteller … you can hear for yourself next week when Scott Lavene comes to Reading.
He will be at The Face Bar, thanks to Club Velocity and New Mind Promotions.
Organisers say we need great storytellers, ones with voices that can snap us out of a collective grey funk, pull us out of our narrow, hemmed-in worlds and to lighten our days, enlighten us with their perspectives, an immerse us in their worldview and history.
These are people who can make us laugh, cry, gasp or nod sagely, help us see our world anew and not feel so alone.
We need, they add, stories, vignettes, new windows to look out of, and narrators to help those new visions make sense.
In short, they say, we need Scott Lavene.
Scott Lavene’s journey
Born and raised in Essex, he is a man of the world who has wandered far and wide and is a storyteller who can capture all the madness, joy and frustration of life while singing about worms writhing in the ground.
Scott has been in bands since his teens.
His 2021 album Milk City Sweethearts is full of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability and unpredictable humour – in 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. But 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…”
Scott started as a singer when he was a teenager, “because I could sing like Jim Morrison,” he grins.
“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. 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.”
In Essex, he says, you either “become a plumber or get a job in the city. I was raised by a stepdad who said, ‘Get a trade – you can’t do music.’”
Instead, 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.
He traced a new path, one that brought him to London, where he lived on a houseboat, and tried to write songs that sounded like other people’s songs, and started a band who sounded like “Chas’n’Dave meets Queens Of The Stone Age, basically”, 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,” Scott 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.”
From this bleak moment, Lavene began to rebuild his life.
He started 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 droll and marvellous Broke.
“I was signed to a little label in Bristol, but then they went skint,” he remembers.
This time, however, the disappointment didn’t shake his confidence or his resolve.
“I started writing prose, like ‘flash fiction’, and I’ve begun a novel,” he says. “And I’ve started some creative writing workshops for people who’ve come out of my situation.”
Amid all this activity, the songs that became Milk City Sweethearts began to take shape. Lavene noticed the border between his prose and his songwriting beginning to become porous, and the album feels like a clutch of excellent short stories set to music.
He recorded the album at home and assembled it in a week in his mum’s garage during lockdown.
And when he stands gazing at worms writhing in the mud, he sees the maddening, contradictory entirety of himself, and all of us.
“I have an extreme personality,” he says. “I can entertain a roomful of people, but what I mainly want to do is be alone. It’s an honest and poignant song, but it’s still really funny. I know I’m not the only person who feels that way.
“I’ve had people tell me my gigs made them laugh, and then moments later they wanted to cry. In the end, people want to feel things, don’t they?”
With his stories, Lavene makes us all feel a little less alone – he’s that voice in our ear who always has a tale more weird, more tragic, funnier than our own, but in whose experiences we can see our own. Laughter, tears, madness and redemption reside within this magical songs, the full spectrum of existence. You’d be a fool to miss out.
Scott Lavene is at The Face Bar in Reading’s Ambrose Place on Tuesday, December 3. Doors open at 8pm.
Tickets costing £11 including a booking fee can be reserved from https://wegottickets.com/event/626778
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