Scott Lavene has today announced his new album Cars, Buses, Bedsits & Shops, out 22nd August via Nothing Fancy and shares lead single “Cars” accompanied by a video made by Mumble Tide’s Ryan Rogers.
“Cars”, the first taster off the new album tells stories around three different vehicles. Think Kerouac meets Ian Dury, road trips with a twist, unpredictable guitar and a joyous chorus.
Watch/share the video for “Cars” HERE
Stream “Cars” HERE
Scott explains “I grew up in Essex, where cars were a bit of a status symbol, a sign of wealth or a flash of false pride. To me, it all seemed a bit serious. From a young age I had an eye for an old banger, the anti-status. Crappy cars were more of a laugh and back in the day you could buy an 80s french car or a 70s ford for a few hundred quid. My cars often blew up or just fell to an unfixable state, but i loved em all, most briefly, and this song, Cars is about a few of them.”
Scott Lavene is as English as pork pies and pasties and dunked biscuits in Yorkshire tea. His previous album Disneyland in Dagenham (2023) was full of Essex, East End poetry, and classic English post punk. Following extensive touring including many sold-out shows, Scott is back with another album bursting with more dark humour, snapshots of squalor and cheek, and Scott’s unique love songs.
Produced by Stew Jackson, who’s worked with Massive Attack, Black Crowes, Tom Waits and Nick Cave, the record shines with Scott’s presence, alongside Ryan Rogers of Mumble Tide, co-producing and playing organs, synths and mellotron. The album came together quickly, in a five-day wonder, in Bristol, September 2024.
Scott’s longer story-based songs have taken a backseat on this record with more singing than before and a higher percentage of ballads, sincere, wistful and tender. They evoke the lyrics and feelings set down by Daniel Johnston and The Magnetic Fields, Evan Dando and the immense David Berman. But a few ratty stories still remain.
Scott explains “On tour, I’d become used to playing the story based songs, the spoken word ones. But fans kept asking me why I didn’t sing anymore, which surprised me. So over the course of a month I wrote a dozen proper songs, alongside “Cars” which was something I already had, a piece of writing that went into Bits and Bobs, my short poetry book I was selling at gigs. I knew I wanted to make something more classic and polished, and when I bumped into Stew at the Bristol show he told me we should make an album and it quickly got organised. I’d been used to playing most of the instruments on the last two albums but Stew can play everything really well so he plays drums and guitars, let alone lap steel, and I just put down basic tracks and watched him and Ryan build the songs, while I sat on the sofa in the studio.”
Cars, Buses, Bedsits & Shops is fit to burst with colour, a slight change in the wacky production of old, the album is polished like a classic 70’s American singer songwriter album, an ode to Wings, to yacht rock and Neil Young. Like if Wilco and Bruce Springsteen’s baby was raised in Basildon.
The combination of wry observation, humble wisdom, unguarded vulnerability and unpredictable humour makes Scott unique in today’s expansive world of artists.
Scott Lavene will be playing Glastonbury and End of the Road festival this summer and heading out on tour in the autumn.
