Description
Label Review.
2019 album also available on CD.
Our Overview.
Essex, UK born singer-songwriter Scott Laverne is releasing his new album ‘Broke’. Scott Lavene has the lyrical smarts and the fairground bark of an Ian Dury, the incisive wordplay of a Costello and the deadpan pop of Madness in his creative DNA, along with the street poetry of an Essex boy version of Lou Reed, the dislocated funk of Talking Heads, the jellied eel lyrical bounce of Chas and Dave, and the inventive surreal see-saw of a Tom Waits, and many other nonconformists.
Scott life influences are paramount in his songs, he was raised on power ballads, punk and swearing. In bands since his teens, Scott travelled about, scratching out a living with deadbeat jobs trying to find something to cling to. After couple of years in France and a brief stint in New York, including a playing at the infamous CBGB’s Scott returned to London and came close to a major label deal with his sordid songs.
Instead Scott disappeared on a rusty old boat, a floating shed, for five years. Hiding from the world. Broke and bemused. Solitude and lonely debauchery. After five years of this Scott went kaput, so spent some time in a house for the bewildered where he emerged full of life and songs.
‘Broke’ - an album that is drenched in living in the gutter but staring at the stars.Like all the greatest music Scott Lavene is all at once familiar and yet hard to place. A street poet delivering real life vignettes over wonk beats and scuzz riffs, he is a 21st century take on those maverick genius outsiders that Stiff Records used to release back in the punk wars.
It’s an intoxicating brew that he makes his own in this collection of wonderful quirky songs that make up ‘Broke’. The songs on the album are full of detail and a life lived in scuffed shoes, rainy towns and the magic of the everyday. Songs about small talk, being skint, doomed affairs and the sweetness of falling in love over a cup of tea. Creating unconventional backdrops for his street tales Scott builds up shapeshifting rhymes and looping grooves.
“Sounds like an updated version of something that Stiff records would have released in the 70’s” - Steve Lamacq