One of the musical (and non-musical) books of 2024 is ‘Superstar of the Streets: A Year with Lawrence’ by Will Hodgkinson. The head of pop and rock of the British newspaper ‘The Times’ has taken walks for twelve months with the insufferable leader of Felt, Denim and now Mozart Estate around his childhood home in the streets of Birmingham and also through markets, sweet shops and various Costa Café in London, where our antihero always issues maniacal directives to the waiters about the milk he wants or greets familiarly with the vendors at the markets… or the naughty teenagers hesitate and refuse him. They laugh at him. Like Carrère’s Limonov, Lawrence functions as a perfect and singular character. In this case, an interesting oddity. And the journalist’s dexterous hand puts together a narrative arc about the search for a gallery that wants to show the bust that a sculptor has made of this 80s indie legend, an artist who bordered on success but remained a damn mysterious looking like Nancy. Hieratic blonde, a polyhedron of few but original faces that flow coherently without the anticlimactic babblings of real life, so little narrative, but which in summary we could summarize as ‘the Larry David of alternative pop’. In ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, which ended this year, Larry David created a series about himself with everyday scenes of a neurotic and extravagant bubble that made him a hilarious guy to watch in his tensions with the rest of humanity. Lawrence is the same but in real life. His former groupmates, ex-girlfriends or (ex) family members do not speak to him in a 98% rate. We highlight two pearls of intransigence from this notable lyricist, as direct as he is poetic, in the first chapter alone. «I would love to show this to my girlfriend. But then I realize that I don’t have a girlfriend. And I will never have it. And, if I had it, when I brought it back I would start doing all those things that drive me crazy. Those things are…exist! And another. The Fall’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, once told him that Felt had a good drummer. “But I could never get used to his curly hair, so I kicked him out.” 63 years of stubborn anecdotes, a joy to read. With all its sorrow.
#Javier #Villuendas #Lawrence #Larry #David #alternative #pop
