In advance of our upcoming fanzine (which will only exist in printed form), it is worth pointing out some of the writing about Lawrence and Felt already available on the world wide web.
Foremost among them is Felt: A Tribute, Rui Kalda's virtual shrine to the band. It hasn't been updated for a while now, but it's phenomenally comprehensive: there's a discography, lyrics, loads of scanned articles and reviews, plus a few downloadable rarities. (The link in the pictures section is dead, but the images are still available via Rui's Flickr page.)
There are also several excellent overviews of the band and its career. Lee McFadden gives an ideal introduction on the Perfect Sound Forever site. Written to coincide with Cherry Red's series of re-releases of the Felt back-catalogue several years ago, it weaves together a succinct chronological history with insights from Lawrence ("Every album has the word 'the' in it! No one's ever spotted that!") and acute critical asides.
Alistair Fitchett's 'The Man Who Was Not With It', from 1996, also gives a great general history. He is particularly good on the band's beginning ("Almost everyone who came to Felt late has been confused by 'Index'") and good too on their general untimeliness:
Foremost among them is Felt: A Tribute, Rui Kalda's virtual shrine to the band. It hasn't been updated for a while now, but it's phenomenally comprehensive: there's a discography, lyrics, loads of scanned articles and reviews, plus a few downloadable rarities. (The link in the pictures section is dead, but the images are still available via Rui's Flickr page.)
There are also several excellent overviews of the band and its career. Lee McFadden gives an ideal introduction on the Perfect Sound Forever site. Written to coincide with Cherry Red's series of re-releases of the Felt back-catalogue several years ago, it weaves together a succinct chronological history with insights from Lawrence ("Every album has the word 'the' in it! No one's ever spotted that!") and acute critical asides.
Alistair Fitchett's 'The Man Who Was Not With It', from 1996, also gives a great general history. He is particularly good on the band's beginning ("Almost everyone who came to Felt late has been confused by 'Index'") and good too on their general untimeliness:
[Felt] seemed totally out of time, existing within their own vacuum [...] It was easy to imagine them as part of the Warhol factory scene, and certainly Lawrence was tragically and beautifully strange enough to have stood out amongst a crowd of Edie Sedgewicks, Gerard Malangas or Billy Names. It was also easy to picture him as a character in a Scott Fitzgerald story; he had that certain doomed existential prettiness that the twenties seemed to suggest. Twenties Lost Generation or Seventies Blank Generation. You could take your pick.
And finally Adrian Denning provides an album-by-album account, offering scores out of ten along the way - some of them, inevitably, controversial...
Great to see the band's name being kept alive - and thanks for the mention of my article. I'll be following tis blog with interest. Have been trying to contact Lawrence to set up a gig - but - not surprisingly - it's proving difficult.
ReplyDeleteCheers - Lee McFadden
Glad you found the blog! The article is really fantastic, I return to it often (I love the story of how Let The Snakes... got its title). We're working on collating all the stuff for the zine at the moment - if you think you might like to contribute somehow please just let us know, would be great to have you involved. You can always email us at the address above. And of course, please do let us know if you have any luck with the gig too...
ReplyDeleteThe problem was - I did the interview in June 2003 but the article wasn't published until the end of October that year - basically Lawrence had some ideas for the reissues that were never brought to fruition - maybe one side or the other couldn't be bothered, I dunno. Anyway - the major bit that was omitted was that Lawrence hated that title so much he originally intended to change it for the reissue and it was to be named after one of it's tracks - "The Seventeenth Century". By the publication "Let The Snakes" had already been released so I deemed it anachronistic to include that info, so I'm submitting it for the first time here.
ReplyDeleteThe last sentence was written in a rush but you get the gist!
ReplyDeleteAdrian Denning here, thanks for the mention. Controversial? What do you mean??!!!
ReplyDeleteHi Adrian, great to hear from you! And of course your album run-down is only 'controversial' in the sense of fannish quibbling - e.g. the relative merits of Ignite the Seven Cannons, as discussed in another post. I'm enjoying the rest of your site too btw, nice to see the write-up of Gene Clark's No Other - I first discovered that album through a nice Melody Maker booklet called Unknown Pleasures, which also alerted me to Abba's The Visitors...
ReplyDelete