Scott Lavene

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. 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. For all the surrealism, it also explores the magic of the banal. When he first started writing it, Lavene says, “I was a bit sick of writing stories about the past.” 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 any more,” he says. “These days I’m a dad of three. So initially I just wanted to make an album about living in the suburbs and raising kids.” ‘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. ‘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!” Before long, of course, 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. “The album is really about saying fuck the rules, write whatever you like.” 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. 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.” 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 any more. Lavene’s got something worth more than any of that – a fanbase for many of whom his music means absolutely everything.