Name: Scott Lavene
Start: 2025-09-25T20:00:00+01:00
Location: 17 York Road, Birmingham, UK

Scott Lavene is as English as pork pies and pasties, dunked biscuits in Yorkshire tea. Last year’s album
Disneyland in Dagenham 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 entitled, Cars, Buses,
Bedsits and Shops out 22nd August on Nothing Fancy. An album bursting with more dark humour,
snapshots of squalor and cheek, and Scott’s unique love songs. Lavene has also announced a 22 date tour
around the UK as well as festival appearances at this year’s Glastonbury, End of the Road, Lakefest and
Boia festivals.
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 and 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.

Doors Open at 7:30pm