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Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson review – portrait of a wayward would-be pop star
His bands Felt and Denim never quite made it. So will this sympathetic biography help give indie’s most enigmatic figure the status his stoicism deserves?
For the purposes of narrative structure, Hodgkinson – who is terribly patient with his wayward subject – treads the streets of London with him, window shopping for clothes Lawrence can’t afford, and gently unpicking his biography as they go. The son of a Birmingham market stall trader, Lawrence laments the fact that Felt’s gloriously jangly 1985 single, Primitive Painters, wasn’t a hit, but shrugs off his current situation. Lawrence recalls the pain of watching former peers such as Jarvis Cocker go on to soar, and the time in 1997 when he was convinced that Denim’s Summer Smash looked like becoming a hit until Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash, and radio promptly removed the song – with its unwittingly insensitive title – from the airwaves.
Or read this on The Guardian
