An interview with Lawrence, the last of the great pop stars
Plus Silvana Estrada, Tatyana Jane, Dry Cleaning, Tortoise and more
Have you read it yet? Well have you?
Soon enough the world will divide along the lines of people who have read Will Hodgkinson’s remarkable book Street Level Superstar, a Year with Lawrence and those who haven’t; which is to say: those who worship at the feet of Lawrence Hayward, formerly of Felt and Denim, currently of Mozart Estate, as the last proper rock star, a uniquely enigmatic mixture of utter devotion to his art and lingering commercial failure; and those who don’t.
I am confident that when Lawrence does, one sad day, shuffle off this mortal coil, he will be regarded in the same way as Mark E Smith, Syd Barrett or Roky Erickson, which is to say unique geniuses who seem ever so slightly unreal, the kind of people you can’t quite believe ever walked this earth among us.
In the interim, while Lawrence is still gleefully alive, I took a walk with him around the streets of Barcelona one September evening, the experience both gleeful and utterly surreal, like taking a stroll with Vincent Van Gogh around rural France.
Throughout our walk and subsequent interview, Lawrence is so perfectly Lawrence that it almost defies logic. He looks just like Lawrence, for a start, in that well-worn cap and shades you’ve seen in so many photos, and he feels kind of infirm; you want to give him a hug and maybe some pocket money, although I am sure he would object to both. And he definitely needs to use the toilet.
But let’s rewind a moment. Why am I walking Lawrence around the streets of Barcelona? In a way, it goes back to the 90s, when I first heard Denim and wondered what the hell was going on with this acrylically treated 70s glam stomp; or to autumn 2024 when I read Street Level Superstar and fell hard for Lawrence’s obstinate charms; or, perhaps more prosaically, to early summer 2025 when it was announced that Mozart Estate would be releasing a new album, Tower Block in a Jam Jar, and Lawrence would also be in Barcelona in September to talk about Street Level Superstar with Hodgkinson.
But you couldn’t just ask Lawrence for an interview, surely? It would be like asking for an audience with the Pope. Except, it turns out, you can. And so one Tuesday evening in September, Johann Wald, my fellow Radio Primavera Sound host, and I found ourselves waiting around awkwardly in a Barcelona council building to try to grab a word with Lawrence, who we were assured was happy to talk. Except the building in question then closes and so we have to find another venue, while everyone else in the party is going to a restaurant.
I’m nervous. If you had read Street Level Superstar you would be too. Lawrence, in book form, is friendly, funny and utterly devoted to his art; but he’s never easy and Hodgkinson doesn’t paint over the moments when Lawrence stands him up, goes missing or assails him with utterly unreasonable demands - such as the apparently sincere request that the writer doesn’t use the word “just” in his book. And now we’re walking the streets of Barcelona, Lawrence needs to have a wee and we’re not quite sure where we’re going.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. Lawrence, it seems, is in a good mood: he loves Barcelona (although he worries about the mice), the book event went well and he doesn’t want to eat or drink anything because of course he doesn’t. And so we find a bar in a charming square, alive with Gothic quarter charm rather than Rambla tat, and settle in for the interview.
We order wine; Lawrence hides a can of Coke underneath the table and takes surreptitious sips, interspersed with cigarettes. I can’t help but worry how much these cigarettes cost a man who famously lives on almost no money. “I am a songwriter,” Lawrence tells Hodgkinson in the book. “It is what I must do. However long I have to sit in this room with no money, no matter how many times the police break down my door to check I’m still alive, I cannot admit I’m not an artist.”
It’s that kind of devotion that people come to Lawrence Hayward for. But, all the same, I feel a slight fatherly concern for Lawrence, a man who is a good 20 years my senior and I have only met today. For this is the power of Lawrence.
The other thing that was worrying me, as we started the interview, was Lawrence’s reaction to Street Level Superstar. It’s a fabulous piece of writing and has helped to raise Lawrence’s profile - but is what he really wants. Fame, sure. But via a book? That he didn’t write? So that’s where I go in.
“Lawrence: have things really changed for you in the year since the publication of Street Level Superstar?” I venture
“In a commercial sense, yes,” he replies in his unrepentant Birmingham accent, untamed by decades in London. “I’ve got this ‘fame ladder’ in my head, which you’re climbing slowly. And the book has enabled me to climb a couple, about three more, rungs of the ladder, I’d say. So we’re getting there. We’ve just passed halfway.”
But does he like the book? I asked the same thing of Hodgkinson when we interviewed him around Street Level Superstar’s release and he was slightly ambivalent. Lawrence, however, has definitely made his mind up.
“I love it,” he says. “If it wasn’t about me, I’d still... I’d be mad on it. I’d be trying to tell friends to buy it. This is just the sort of book I love. In fact, something like that hasn’t really been written before. It’s just the kind of book that I would have had in my head thinking, ‘I wish I could read a book like that.’”
I wish I could write a book like that, I mention, and so do half the music journalists in the English language.
Slightly relieved, I turn to the music. And, typically, it turns out that Tower Block in a Jam Jar is not your average new Mozart Estate album; instead, Lawrence has re-recorded the songs from the band’s 2005 album Tearing Up the Album Chart (when they were known as Go-Kart Mozart). Is it a bid for fame? A Taylor Swift-esque attempt to seize back control. Kind of. Maybe.
“I wanted to do it all the time in Go-Kart Mozart,” Lawrence explains. “I used to think, ‘These records are just not good enough.’ The songs are 100% perfect but we just can’t seem to get it down on tape. We didn’t have a budget, we didn’t have a producer, we didn’t have anyone to help us, but we just persevered.
“And what happened was, I said, ‘We should record some of these again. We should do this before it’s too late. We should get some down and just gather them all together and see what happens.’ And when Taylor Swift did that thing, I went, ‘That was my idea! I made that up! That was my actual idea!’”
It’s hard to tell if he is annoyed or pleased that Taylor Swift - an artist he calls both “not for me” and “fantastic” - has borrowed his idea. I think perhaps both.
And has he definitively nailed the songs - On a Building Site, Listening to Marmalade et al. - this time? “Oh, yeah, yeah.” Lawrence is very enthusiastic now. “Because I worked with a producer and he was just going mad. He’d never heard them before. He’s going, ‘These songs are incredible!’ And he really helped us. It’s really good to have somebody on our side for once, producing properly.”
And it’s true: the songs on Tower Block in a Jam Jar are incredible and they do sound well produced. But the catch is that they don’t sound even the slightest bit like anything in the charts at the moment. Tower Block in a Jam Jar is not so much pop music per se as a vision of pop enacted by someone who lost interest in the charts as anything other than a pinnacle to aspire to around the mid 90s. The songs are brilliant and I would love them to chart - but I fear that they won’t, even with Lawrence’s newly raised profile. And I suspect, on some deep level that he will never admit, Lawrence is OK with that.
Does Lawrence feel any pressure with this new album, I ask, given the impact of Street Level Superstar?
“I don’t feel pressure,” Lawrence replies. Frankly, he doesn’t look like a man who is entirely at ease, either. But that may just be because he needs the toilet again. “I feel, ‘F**k, you know, another one that’s going to go down the drain,’ probably, because I know from the start there’s no marketing. I haven’t got an A&R man. It’s just kind of almost doomed from the start, you know, because we’re on an independent label. I need to be on a big label.”
Put down on paper, this sounds slightly depressing. But Lawrence doesn’t sound depressed. Maybe he doesn’t want to give too much away. But I suspect he’s kind of happy with his fate, over all. This, perhaps, is the biggest question that Street Level Superstar left me pondering: does Lawrence genuinely want to be a huge pop star, like he says he does, if success would mean shaking up his hermetically sealed world?
Let’s see. “Lawrence,” I ask, “Would you have sacrificed what you have now for being the biggest band in the world for five years and then that’s it?”
“Oh, for five years. Oh, wow,” he says enthusiastically, as if I might somehow have the power to go back in time and actually offer him this diabolic pact. “Well, the thing is, you can be the biggest band in the world for five years and if you are that gives you an amazing position because if it all goes wrong, you’ll still be able to make records and put them out on independent labels and you’ll still be able to play gigs, because you’ll have a following.
“So it doesn’t really go wrong if you’ve had success, unless you’re an idiot, unless you’re a real bore and you can’t write songs anymore. But massive success doesn’t do you any harm at all.”
Is this lack of success why he once called Mozart Estate “the world’s first B-Side Band”?
“That was like Go-Kart Mozart because we didn’t have money to do it properly,” he says. “So I just came up with an idea of, ‘Okay, we can’t go in big studios. We haven’t got a proper producer. But isn’t it good when we do B-sides?’”
Do B-sides still exist, in the age of streaming? Maybe not. But in Lawrence’s world they still do.
“All my life, when we’ve done B-sides, it’s been a really good sort of exercise,” he continues. “You go in with a completely different frame of mind. And everyone says that. I was reading recently Paul Weller saying exactly the same thing: ‘When we do the B-sides, we have really good fun and it’s completely different and you come out with much better stuff sometimes.’
“So I just went with that as an idea, knowing that we couldn’t have a top producer and we couldn’t have big studios. So I thought, ‘Well, why don’t we just do it like we do B-sides,’ and that may be a good angle. But it wasn’t, Ben, because now I want to re-record all those songs.”
This is the strange thing about Lawrence. Or one of the strange things, anyway. He comes up with the idea of being a B-side band and seems quite happy with it, resolved not to be making big songs with a hit producer; but at the same time he seems willing to do anything for commercial success.
Take, for example, A Lorra Laughs With Cilla, a song from the new album about Cilla Black, the English singer who was a huge primetime TV star when I was growing up in the UK. I thought that maybe Lawrence wanted to write a song for Cilla because he related to her, in some way. But no. Or not really.
“When I wrote it, which is a few years ago now, I thought, ‘If I put things in that are really popular, they might get well known,’” Lawrence explains. “It was just a calculated effort to get famous, trying to get people to say, ‘Oh, you heard that song about Cilla?’ Because she was like the number one female at the time. She just wouldn’t go down. Every year she got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I thought, ‘If I put her in a song, then that’s good.”
So far, so commercial. But there is a sentimental side to the song, too, which lifts it far beyond the kind of novelty hit you suspect Lawrence had one eye on.
“The sentiment of the song is about a young girl who’s got nothing and is stuck in a tower block, and all she’s got to look forward to is Cilla Black on Saturday night,” Lawrence says. “And it was kind of like, ‘Wow, what a hardship that is, you know. What a horrible…’ That’s not very good if that’s all you got to look forward to.’ It was a bit of a dig at Cilla but also using her name because she’s famous. So it wasn’t a celebration of her at all. I’m not a fan of her.”
The same kind of thinking lies behind On a Building Site, another excellent song from the new album.
“It was another one of them: ‘How do we get famous?’” Lawrence explains. I’d like to say he has a glint in his eye but you can’t really see anything behind his perpetual sunglasses and even less so at night. “We need a song that’s going to go on the TV, a song that can be used on the TV all the time. And because there are all these DIY shows. So I thought, ‘It’s going to get on DIY shows.’ It has been on the one on BBC One. It’s called... oh, they go to a house, they buy a house, and it’s derelict, and they renovate it.”
He means Homes Under The Hammer, we soon decide.
“So I thought, that’ll go on Homes Under the Hammer,” Lawrence says. “And it did a couple of times, not enough. But now this new version, which is a tip-top production, I think that’ll really get some traction on the DIY shows.
“It’s just me, really. Sometimes I just think, ‘How can we get famous? What do you do?’” Lawrence continues. You get a feeling he has thought a lot about this, during those long nights between gigs and band commitments.
“John Lennon said once, ‘ could write a song about a banana,’ meaning he’s good enough to do anything. ‘If I wanted to, I could write a song about a banana.’ And for me, it’s like, ‘How do we get famous? Let’s try and get songs on the TV in the background.’ So that’s why we did On a Building Site. And it’s a funny conceit. It’s a good joke. It’s like, ‘I’m going to build my love tonight.’ You know, it’s kind of like a love song on a building song. It’s a great song.”
Songwriting, you see, is very much Lawrence’s thing.
“I call myself a song stylist,” Lawrence explains, with a flourish. Johann has asked him about a moment during his Barcelona book presentation where Lawrence revealed that he doesn’t consider himself a musician. “I know how to write a song,” Lawrence continues. “I’m not a very good guitar player. It’s rudimentary but it’s good enough to write a song on. So I don’t try and do any flashy things. I leave that to expert musicians.
“But I’m a song stylist. I write a song and imagine what it’s going to be. And so all the ideas are mine. And like on the new album, it says ‘Directed by me,’ just to give people who buy it an idea of what I actually do. So it’s like a film director would be directing an actor and saying, ‘I want you to go jump over that, then do a roll over there and then jump back up.’ And I do the same thing with musicians. I want you to do this, this, this, and this.”
So when you’re recording, you tell the band exactly what they have to do, I venture?
“No, I don’t tell them exactly no,” Lawrence corrects me. “The worst thing you can do is hound a musician and make them play what you have, unless you have a melody that has to be there. I’ll make them do that and then they can deviate from that onwards. You must never make a musician feel like they’re not needed, you know. And David Bowie said the same thing: ‘I never tell musicians what to do. I’ll hire them and they astound me all the time.’”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, for someone so obsessed with musical fame, Lawrence has strong views on what pop stars should and shouldn’t do. “They shouldn’t go on any TV show that’s offered, for a start off,” he says, solemnly. “Once they’ve had big success, they should draw back and just come out every now and again for big events. Like, not just go on a TV show to be interviewed for the next album… You never see Kate Bush doing an interview. She released an album and that’s the end of it.”
Even more important is that you should always be nice to your fans. “I think the worst thing you can do is be awful to a fan,” Lawrence says. “Most of us, at some point, were in a club or somewhere where we saw someone we loved and we couldn’t go up to them, or they were a bit... And like Mark E. Smith with me, even though I knew him, sometimes he just wouldn’t talk to me. He just walked straight past me, like... we’d played a gig together, and he just walked straight, wouldn’t even say hello. And I used to think, ‘I’m never going to do that.’”
And on the evidence of Barcelona, he really doesn’t. After the book event Lawrence stays behind for a good 30 minutes, talking to each and ever fan who wants to have a word. There are no photos - Lawrence doesn’t really do photos - but he is happy to sign classic Felt records, shake hands and answer questions.
Kate Bush or no, Lawrence seems happy to talk to us, too. I feel like he could go on all night. But time is getting on, Lawrence needs another wee and Hodgkinson et al. are waiting for him in a nearby restaurant, where he won’t eat either.
But first, a couple of questions that have been bugging me.
“Lawrence: do you ever think of a life where you hadn’t done music and where you’d end up? Or is it just inconceivable?”
It’s a good question, I think. Because some musicians you just can’t imagine ending up as anything other than a pop star. Like Morrissey. Or Iggy Pop. But to do so, to spend your life as a musician, you typically need a level of fame beyond the cult appeal that Lawrence has enjoyed. I love Felt. But how many Felt records would Lawrence have to sell to live an easy life?
“I knew I was going to do music always,” Lawrence says in answer to my question. He’s not boasting - it’s just that there was never any doubt. “Since I was tiny. I thought maybe it might just be lyrics, like Bernie Taupin. I used to think of Bernie Taupin when I was at school. ‘All that guy does is write lyrics.’ Easy to write, to me, because to me, it was easy. It’s so easy.
“Obviously as I grew up and I really started looking at his lyrics, they’re brilliant. I do think they’re good. Well, Elton John made it even better. But I just thought, ‘If I don’t make it in a band, then I could be a lyric writer.’ That’s what I thought. But I didn’t think I wouldn’t make it in a band. I just thought if, for some reason, it turns out [like that], then I can always write lyrics, because I know I could write lyrics. So I was never going to work on a building site.”
So there will be no building site for Lawrence, no proper job and - let’s face it - probably not a great deal of chart fame to come either, however well deserved.
I wonder, then, how Lawrence thinks history will remember him?
“I don’t know,” he ponders the question. I had worried it seemed a bit close to the bone. Lawrence generally seems in pretty good health, beyond the fact that he doesn’t ever eat, lives on no money and likes to smoke cigarettes. But all the same…
“Sometimes I wish that, you know, if I died really suddenly and I got big, it would be in a good way,” Lawrence eventually replies. “Not like people trawling through my demos and shit... just keep it pure. And like you would with a painter, where they almost come to life when they die and they become something really special.
“God, like... almost not like an artist who... you know, someone’s gone through all my cassettes and put out ten albums of rubbish. Not that there’s any rubbish there but just badly recorded ideas, let’s say, or live shows that I’ve got in a box that I would never want released.”
And with that glance at mortality, we’re done. We say our goodbyes, I pack up my things and Johann walks Lawrence to the restaurant. Except when I head back up the street, five minutes later, Lawrence is still there and he wants to talk about Barcelona’s rodent problem. And so we do, chatting away for another 20 minutes about mice droppings with Britain’s most enigmatic rock star, a man three rungs up on the fame ladder and hoping to go higher, until eventually I have to leave, star struck and slightly bemused. As things should be, after an evening with Lawrence.
Some listening
A voice - a beautiful voice, that speaks of the gentle melancholy of summer rain - a delicately picked acoustic guitar, jazz-y double bass, feather-light strings and sparse drums: yes Mexican singer Silvana Estrada is the 2025 Nick Drake and I couldn’t be more delighted.
OK: Silvana Estrada is actually the 2025 Silvana Estrada and I shouldn’t make the cheap Nick Drake comparison. But Flores is so fantastically evocative of open fields and late summer afternoons, the melody so perfectly offset by the tender musical backing, that I just couldn’t resist.
Elias Rønnenfelt and Erika de Casier - Blunt Force Trauma
It turns out that Elias Rønnenfelt is a lot more interesting than I gave him credit for. This year alone he has recorded with Dean Blunt, Yung Lean and Foushée and on Speak Daggers, his second solo album, he invites reggae legends The Congos to sing on one song. (One song that, unfortunately, ends up sounding a bit too much like Kasabian for my tastes but we’ll let it slide.)
And now there’s Blunt Force Trauma, an Erika de Casier collab that introduces a Funky Drummer beat to a banjo, like The Stones Roses gone full Deliverance. And, hell yes, he pulls it off, a fine trace of menace running underneath the Danish Ian-Brown swagger.
A good morning indeed, courtesy of new Ed Banger signing, French-Cameroonian DJ and producer Tatyana Jane, who squishes up UK Garage, Baile Funk, house, Jersey Club, drum & bass and more into the first two glorious minutes of Good Morning.
I feel exhausted just thinking about it - and I can only imagine the dance-floor devastation such a track would wreak, a real Stars-on-45, Jive-Bunny style distillation of all that is energetic in modern dance music without resorting to the lowest common denominator.
Tortoise won. But in winning, they lost. On the band’s first few albums - but notably 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die - Tortoise sounded revolutionary, mixing dub, jazz, Krautrock and more into spaces that felt so novel, Simon Reynolds had to make up a whole new term for them.
But Tortoise won, post rock went mainstream with the likes of Mogwai, Sigur Ros and all and Tortoise disappeared for a while. Now they are back with Touch, an album that feels like the last game of the football season, when the title is already won. Which is to say that you can appreciate its quality, but there’s nothing really on the line.
So, yes, Tortoise don’t push the boat out on Touch and nor do they have to. Instead, you can sit back and enjoy the quality of five musicians who know each other inside out, the quality leeching inevitably through, as on, say, Jeff Parker’s noodling guitar work on Work and Days, the sound of melody in glide mode.
Dry Cleaning - Hit My Head All Day
I went to see Dry Cleaning live in Barcelona last week and they were humungous. Florence Shaw is, naturally, one of the best front people we have, a kind of nice Mark E Smith, where the stale beer smell is replaced by lavender. But what had never quite occurred to me is how strong the band is: Tom Dowse, especially, is a fantastically inventive guitar player, capable of everything from prime Johnny Marr jangle to huge metallic riffs, while the sight of Lewis Maynard absolutely rocking out to Gary Ashby, a song about a lost tortoise, will stay with me a long time.
Hit My Head All Day, the first single from their forthcoming third album Secret Love, is a monster live, combining Trevor Horn productions choices with an ear-worm bass line, obtuse guitar melody and a chorus that is Shaw at her best, the subtlest suggestion of a melody delivering a vast emotional load.
They played three more songs from the new album, My Soul / Half Pint, Evil Evil Idiot and Joy; and on this evidence the new record is going to be stunning, a stride onward from Stumpwork (which was already a giant leap from New Long Leg) that goes deeper, louder and more percussive.
Jon E Cash is a musical god; his digital music presence is a demonic mess. So lots of love to Sneaker Social Club for bringing out this incredible new compilation of his work called, naturally, Sublow. War is as stark, menacing and texturally fascinating as it was the first time I heard it, two decades ago. And I am going to be writing a lot more about this in the near future.
1994’s Stereotype EP was the first release by Tom Jenkinson who, as Squarepusher, would go on to become one of the most important electronic musicians of the 90s, known for his work (alongside Aphex Twin) in inventing drill & bass, pushing the haunted breakbeats of jungle into ever more extreme - and weird - places.
This makes Sterotype - which has just been re-released by Warp - historically important and you can definitely hear the musician Jenkinson would become, on the twiddling acid of Whooski, the cinematic breakbeat of O’Brien or the Quoth-ish pulse of Greenwidth.
But you can also see from the record’s limitations that Jenkinson wasn’t quite there yet. Most songs are far too long, with Whooski definitely overstaying its sixteen and a half minutes, while Falling sounds like a collection of ideas in search of a groove. The hard techno drum assault of 1994, meanwhile, offers an intriguing path that Jenkinson didn’t travel down.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - Primavera Sound 2026 line up special
It may be 10 months or so to Primavera Sound 2026 but it’s never too early to get planning. On this special Line Noise, Ben Cardew and Johann Wald look at the best electronic music in the Primavera Sound 2026 line up, from live legends to weird sh*t.
Me and a few pals got together to review the bonkers new Rosalía song…
Quizzies - With Emma-Jean Thackray
Want some more Emma-Jean Thackray? Of course you do. In this brief video interview, I ask her for her Death Row Disk, current song obsession and more.
One Minute Review - Tame Impala
Tame Impala’s fifth album, Deadbeat, is a strange one in many ways and I can understand the bad reviews. But - as someone who isn’t a vast fan anyway - I find it quite intriguing, for reasons you can discover on this week’s One Minute Review. Go on, give it some love….
The Playlists
Available via Apple Music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
And Spotify (for the moment): The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.
Fantastic newsletter, both the Lawrence piece (my god what a character) and the individual blurbs! I need to spend more time with the Tortoise album -- I really want to like it but it just hasn't quite clicked for me yet.
"Bango". I'm *guessing* that's a typo, but I'm hoping it isn't, it's too perfect