GO-KART MOZART - Tearing Up The Album Chart

“A Rock Life”. That's what this review could be titled. But first a fundamental question: how is it possible? How is it possible that a figure like Lawrence Hayward remains largely unknown to this day, even among those who follow rock/indie/alternative/etc.? Yes, one can save face by citing Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian, who essentially started making music because of his love for the Eighties band led by Lawrence: Felt. Stuart was so obsessed with our friend that he set off for London specifically in search of this renowned eccentric, with his neurotic love of cleanliness and his (almost achieved) dream of becoming the perfect loser. He never managed to find him. Today Lawrence includes his e-mail address in the leaflet of the second album released under the name Go-Kart Mozart, making things a lot easier for the next generation of aspiring Murdochs.

Anyone approaching this record expecting to find the refined Felt-style alt-pop descended from Velvet/Television, suspended with inimitable lightness between carnality, oblivion and disenchantment, might end up bitterly disappointed. We're actually much closer to the 90s incarnation, the glam-electro-pop outfit called Denim, but this time what Lawrence creates, after the ironic socio-political invectives built on lo-fi foundations on "Instant Wigwam And Igloo Mixture", is a kind of aesthetic of the lowbrow, a sort of electronic pub-rock, with dirt-cheap lounge detours, worn-out riffs and bare-bones arrangements: entirely and sublimely under the banner of "couldn't care less".

Why does Lawrence come out with a record like this? Or rather, it would be better to say: only Lawrence could come out with a record like this! Because the man has always been one of the most fiercely independent personalities steeped in rock culture that England has ever produced. His is almost the attitude of a fan, or a character out of "High Fidelity", but with the wit, resentment and acidity of someone who wrote fundamental pages in the history of pop music (here we're on a par, folks, with contemporaries like the Smiths, and in many cases a notch above), yet never received official recognition, save from the many fans and musicians who plundered ideas from Felt without ever quite grasping that indefinable something. Today Lawrence seems to tell everyone to get lost, producing a record that's funny, sarcastic and irritating, damnably English, which he throws in our faces with every song, and with the deliberately fanzine-like style of the leaflet, exposing the mystification of the record industry and the pomposity of so much contemporary music.

This simplification of means and the choice of a grotesque poetics don't diminish the value of the songs, which within these raw yet somehow soft wrappings tell of tragicomic love affairs, urban adventures of marginal characters, small transgressions committed by small-town antiheroes, and in some cases even become delicate, ramshackle declarations of love. "Fuzzy Duck", built around a list of 70s progressive band names, and "Listening To Marmalade", a portrait of the despair of an old rock collector overwhelmed by the horrors of contemporary music, are hilarious, while "At The DDU" and "Donna & The Dopefiends" are junk-songs viewed with an eye that's both ironic and hyperrealist, like brief dialogues from a Ken Loach film.

In short, there's plenty to think about and enjoy with this record, alien enough to remain, once again, the preserve of a devoted few. After all, in the leaflet Lawrence presents his gaunt, half-naked body of a forty-something junkie with the caption: "I still want to be a star/ But I just sold my guitar/ And you know the way things are…". A wonderful loser. This is a rock life.

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30/04/2026