ARTICLES
 "If I was a Kenickie fan I'd want to know what happened, but I just feel, well... fuck off, really." [Lauren Laverne]  "I sort of marketed my late adolescence, didn't I, instead of actually indulging it..." [Lauren Laverne]  "I wouldn't say London destroyed Kenickie. I don't think anything destroyed Kenickie, I feel like we were a success, y'know?" [Lauren Laverne]  "We all totally loved each other, and all wanted - and still want - the best for each other. It's not like we fell out, but there's... pain there." [Lauren Laverne] |
Lauren Laverne's teenage pop dream crashed and burned with the painful break-up of her band, Kenickie. Now the 21-year-old, Sunderland-born 'raconteur' is rising from the flames. Get ready... "Worst thing that could happen to us? We stop making records and hate each other" - Kenickie's bass player Emmy-Kate Montrose, June 1997. "Well... we don't hate each other and none of us stopped making records. So. Isn't that grrreeat? (Bawls into microphone) Kids!?! Don'r you just love it? It's aaall goood. I'm sounding like Jerry Springer..." Lauren Laverne, ex-Kenickie songsmith / singer / guitarist, grins hugely and sips on vodka 'n' lemonade, veggie bangers 'n' mash stabbed at and abandoned while she steadies herself into the advanced diplomacy required for non-explanation of her cavalier pop combo's final implosion on October 15, 1998. "I'm torn," she's musing, "between wanting to give everyone an explanation about the whole Kenickie thing and everything, but... as a band we never pandered to what people wanted. If I was a Kenickie fan I'd want to know what happened, but I just feel, well... fuck off, really. I'm not a Spice Girl; I don't have to say anything I don't want to. I don't want to be uppity about it, but that's the fact." In 1996 and 1997, Kenickie were the sound and sight of punk-pop-glam in excelsis; glitter-togged doyens of voracious pop-art zeal with more wit, verve and political guile that then disintegrating Britpop bloke-rockers put together. Courtney Love adored them, and, in 1997, the group danced with the rawk fuhrer in a US club, some of them vomited, and they all exchanged numbers. Lifelong teenage "bezzie mates" from Sunderland, on vodka, always, Lauren, Emmy and Marie Du Santiago (and Johnny X, aka Pete, Kenickie's habitually absent/silent drummer and Lauren's brother) made two LPs, the vim-fuelled debut 'At the Club' and its post-vim comedown 'Get In' - before splitting up on stage at the Astoria, London, with the words, from a spectacularly "refreshed" Lauren, "We were Kenickie... a bunch of fuckwits!" ("which I said," notes Lauren of the pre-planned affair, "obviously as a joke. Because we were fabulous. It was to take any arseholey sentimentality out of the situation. It was hari-kari, a noble act.") Exuberant statements such as "[in America] we're on the same label as Daffy Duck - how fucking cool is that?" had long dissolved into the wearied realisation that "the way things are, music is reduced to accountancy - it's incredibly depressing". Meanwhile, the official 'musical differences' statement (Emmy and Marie pop kids, Lauren and Pete indie resolutes) was eschewed by the besotted music press in favour of: aversion to London's pop-life vagaries (Lauren's); nervous breakdown (Lauren's); and a violent boyfriend (Lauren's). Today, Emmy and Marie are London-based pop minstrels Rosita; Pete and Lauren, now long returned to Sunderland, retain a joint songwriters' publishing deal; and Lauren, for the last 15 months, has been courted by The Terrifying World Of TV Presenting. Number of programmes desperate for her dextrous verbal gifts: "at one point, four a day" (including The Big Breakfast after Denise Van Outen's getaway). Reaction to destiny as tooth-licious Media Celebrity: "I would fucking kill myself." Following a brief incarnation in 1999 as a band called Chris, then renamed George (with Pete and John Downfall form indie shamblers Dweeb), Lauren returns this month for her inaugral 'solo' musical flight as guest vocalist/lyricist on whimsical left-field guitar chums Mint Royale's superb and fragrant 'Don't Falter'. Her solo songs arrive this spring, produced by Pete, these days a "Brian Eno-type character in his attic". Here in Glasgow, in the 13th Note bar-and-beanerie much populated by the Scottish Chemikal Underground 'glitterarti' (Martin from Mogwai is at the bar; Lauren's boyfriend, the Falkirk-living and supernaturally serene Malcolm from Arab Strap, is at the next table), Lauren, now 21, in a - gusp! - grey top, as the rightly anointed nemesis of all drab-trousered, all-about-the-music-maan earnest-bloke mutterings, is choking on the sound of her own sincerity. Away from Sunderland - the place she feels "made Kenickie happen, made us good and made me good" - she felt "out of context". To this day, "even in my worst nightmares, even when I'm sucking crack and having hallucinations", she never imagines returning to London. "I wouldn't say London destroyed Kenickie. I don't think anything destroyed Kenickie, I feel like we were a success, y'know? People always say, 'Oh Kenickie, the bargain bins, why were they never successful?' - no one fucking says that about Mogwai or Arab Strap. We were only judged that way because we were girls. We had a Top Ten album, all our singles went in the charts, we recouped - but it was like, 'You're girls, you're like the Honeyz, you've got to be Number Three.' And if you're girls you're 'pop!' That's what you enter into. And I don't think it's right." In London she was living "in a bubble"; she'd become "depressed, but I never went to see a doctor about it - it was normal, teenage stuff." She lost, she says, "me footing, lost meself, lost me instincts; I had no frame of reference, didn't know what I felt about anything, thought about anything." Which is, most definitely, a form of madness. "Well, yeah, that's what it felt like," she nods, "but a lot of it was personal, not the band. I don't want to come across as some kind of complaint rocker: 'I'm a creep, I'm a wierdo' - fuck that! I don't presume to say just 'cause I'm a songwriter I have a greater depth of emotion than other people, 'cause I haven't. That's what life is like." Did being in a destructive relationship have a lot to do with it? "Well, yeah," she says, huge eyes staring over her vodka, "but... I mean... I don't want to talk about it, really." The lyric "I am strong to break your fists on" (from 'I Would Fix You') - people took that literally, didn't they? "I know. I don't want to talk about it. But... I'm OK now. Everybody has bad things happen to them. I'm not special. And I'm not like... some kind of little victim. I'm not, y'know? I'm just an ordinary person. (Grins, mock-gushes) Except I'm not, because I'm oh-so-talented. And such a raconteur! Such a funny girl, that Zoe Ball... Anyway, I wouldn't want to give it significance, imbue it with that power, because it hasn't had that hold over us for a long time - two years - so to make that the focus of anything now is just... mental, it's got nothing to do with anything. I was just a kid. People get themselves into situations - what can you say?" Eventually, Lauren simply changed everything in her life. "Everything really mattered, and then suddenly it just didn't," she says. "I thought, 'I'm going, I want to be happy, and I'm leaving,' and I just left, left everything. And I was literally free. Suddenly me strings... (theatrically) I was no longer Pinocchio the puppet - I was the young boy..." Meanwhile, she said The Girls had "grown apart naturally"; those who believe otherwise, "want to, because a teenage catfight is the exciting version, that's what reads well". Nonetheless, they don't talk anymore. "Not really. They're doing their own thing." Does she miss them? "Yeah. sometimes. Not... not really. We all totally loved each other, and all wanted - and still want - the best for each other. It's not like we fell out, but there's... pain there. If that doesn't sound too poncey. There was no antagonism, not really; it's just growing up. I dunno. (Looks bleak) This sounds really negative and that's not how I feel about it. I'm just me now, I'm doing me own thing and I think what I'm doing is really good. I'm happier than I've ever been in me entire adult life." Three days before Kenickie split, she met Malcolm from Arab Strap and the pair are positively, visibly doolally over each other. "He's a gentle man..." she coos, "it's the most proper and the most special and the best. It's the best. Thing. In the world." You are, verily, the nation's new King and Queen of Indie. "I think there's no better couple to take on that mantle than Malky and I," she hoots. "Firm yet fair monarchs! I would never want to be some kind of post-rock Posh and Beckham, really, but I don't mind. I know he probably doesn't want us to talk about him, but it's hard to avoid the impulse to go, (mock-hysteria) 'D'you know what Malcolm did?! He's so great and then he said this and it was sooo funny..." A "hugely tall", perpetually jesting, exceptionally academic convent schoolgirl who "looked like I'd just fallen over and stood back up again, all the time", she who was one of only five successful applicants in the country to study medieval history to Oxbridge entry level; thus, post-Kenickie,she considered "becoming an academic and writing books." Instead, in 1999, she was backstage with pals Mogwai instead, thinking, "I just want to do music. Let's go! Rock 'n' Roll!" She turned down "70 per cent" of TV offers, presented a few "cool shows" (Planet Pop on Channel 4; MTV) hosted Radio 1's Evening Session for a week, wrote music, toured with Arab Strap, spent Glastonbury in a tent, travelled Europe "with a travel hairdryer", got drunk, did "loads of things I should've done when I was a teenager - I sort of marketed my late adolescence, didn't I, instead of actually indulging it." She's been living on "the Kenickie millions. I'm not a millionaire, but I definitely don't have to have another job. People underestimate how much money you earn, from a Sunderland point of view. One A-list single and you don't have to work for the next two years. If you're me. Not if you're Elton and spending 30 grand a week on flowers... But it'll keep you in potatoes." And she's bawled abuse at Richard Branson. "I was in Birmingham New Street and me Virgin train to Oxford was cancelled," she lilts, "and I was thinking, 'If Richard Branson were here I'd shout, 'Oi Branson! Your trains are shit!' And at that moment he got off a train with the cast of Eastenders. So I shouted, 'Hey, Bransmoid! Your trains fucking suck'!' It was great! That's my life. Serendipitous. Things work out for me." In 2000, she's "not bothered" if she sells no records and ends up doing "a KR" (that's a Kevin Rowland - "although, unlike Kevin, I wouldn't have shown my ass for my money. Baby.") cares only for "good records" and insists lamentations over the worldwide cultural vacuum should cease forthwith. "There's a lot of good music about, it's just not in the charts - obviously. You shouldn't expect it to be on sale in Asda". She "never despairs" for The Kids. "I think the kids still care," she brims, "I still do. Young people are so media-savvy and - what's the word? - prosumers, where you're more than a consumer... So maybe they come across as a bit jaded, but I think underneath no one really is - people are always the same. And, let's face it, the vast majority of people in the world are complete and utter wankers. And you don't want wankers buying your records. That's why Kenickie weren't the Spice Girls. (Imaginary pen aloft) 'And who do I make this autograph out to? "Child Murderer"? And you're a fan? Great!' Maybe I'm just too principled. But as long as we're not the idiots, bravo! At the end of the day, you only get one life and you've got to be happy... (Looks appalled) I can't believe how glib that just sounded! Don't print that! Just leave a few lines of blank typeface there: 'Put your own mam's favourite saying in here'. But y'know, I'm concerned with being happy, making meself happy. I don't really think anything else matters." Sylvia Patterson |
