With his distinctive lyrical smarts and deadpan delivery, Scott Lavene returns with his new single ‘Nigel’, a scuzzy punk song with a guttural sax line underpinning a love story of run down humans living in a run down town.
“Nigel is a twisted love story set in Boscombe where I lived for a couple of years,” comments Lavene. “It’s a deprived area overflowing with interesting and sad characters and most are trying to find a way through misfortune and mental health issues by getting their kicks in various ways. Bad tattoos, Primark sprees, bookies, crack houses, 24-hour booze shops and doomed romance. The song turns all of that into a chug-along pop song, making poetry out of misery and pop gold out of depression and addiction.”
‘Nigel’ comes accompanied by a dryly amusing video, directed by Lavene and shot in his local theatre in Bournemouth. He has also announced a socially distanced gig at The George Tavern, London on May 26 – tickets.
‘Nigel’ is Lavene’s first new music since his 2019 breakthrough ‘Broke’. The album and it’s epic, seven-minute title track, has since become something of an underground, post-punk hit. Louder Than War described Scott as “Syd Barrett meets Tom Waits” while The Times wrote “Think Baxter Dury’s warped kid brother.” And the music continues to find new fans, drawing people into a world that is full of detail of a life lived in scuffed shoes, rainy towns and the magic of the everyday.
Have we ever needed great storytellers so badly? Voices to snap us out of our collective grey funk, to pull us out of our narrow, hemmed-in worlds and to lighten our days and enlighten us with their perspectives, Immersing us in their worldview and history. People who can make us laugh, cry, gasp or nod sagely, to see our world anew and not feel so alone. We need stories, vignettes, new windows to look out of, and narrators to help those new visions make sense.
In short, we need Scott Lavene. Born and raised in Essex, but a man of the world who has wandered far and wide, Lavene is a storyteller who can capture all the madness, joy and frustration of life while singing about worms writhing in the ground.