Disclaimer: A review that borders on pretension.
The first Felt album is a small object. I'm listening to it now. It exists in the space that it was made. It means more than it did in terms of influence than it ever did at the time it came out when it was fairly well ignored. It's splendid, and strangely beautiful in the space it occupies but it shakes no foundations in a real sense. It just drew on the records and artists that inspired it, distilled them into something singular and original and put down footprints of its own for others to build on in succeeding decades.
Felt are a band that exist within their influences. Most obviously from Television, where they got their name, from a misheard lyric off Venus, the second track from that band's unachievable debut Marquee Moon. But also from The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and Bob Dylan and the pure American Dream that the band members bought into as a means of escape from their humdrum Birmingham existence of the late Seventies and early Eighties.
The key facts about Felt are on public record and have been laid out time and time again for those that care. They set out to make ten singles and ten albums for every year of the Eighties and proceeded to do so before splitting. They were the brainchild of a dreamer from the suburbs of Birmingham who shortened his name to Lawrence, established his distance from his parents and the life that was expected of him and had an unshakable idea which he's clung to ever since that he was destined to be a pop star which was never realised despite twenty years of trying, first with Felt and then alone.
Felt were never rated by John Peel which meant they never quite got the leverage in the Indie hinterland which the might have managed given his support. They did befriend his darlings The Fall however, which allowed them a certain initial credibility. They started on Cherry Red and moved to Creation where they put out records for the second half of that decade to a small devoted audience.
The records are melodic, refined objects.
Their first album Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty, is the only one I bought during that period. It has a terrible title and frankly a pretty awful cover but it's a think of beauty nevertheless. It's graced, most obviously, by the guitar of Maurice Deebank, a classically trained musician who Lawrence chanced upon carrying a guitar to a music lesson in the suburb of Birmingham they both grew up in.
The songs on the album sound almost oriental. They're mood pieces and strangely similar to one another. They build around Deebank's winding, clean guitar work, pattering drums, devoid of cymbals, and Lawrence's muttered, incoherent, impressionistic lyrics. They're best heard in daylight, in a sunlit room. It's almost impossible to hear a word throughout the six songs, partly because it seems they have no particular message to impart except for their own beauty and mood.
The songs are quite sexless. Drawing also on Vic Godard, English Punk's initial great non-conformist who was similarly mesmerised by Television's records which offered a departure point for British musicians keen not to tread the most obvious Punk path as laid down by The Pistols, The Clash and The Ramones. There isn't an obvious influence of any Black record in the entire album.
Later records took a different path once Deebank departed and Martin Duffy who later moved to Primal Scream took his place as their guiding musician, thickened and deepened their sound and gave them a warmth, and a jazzy, funky momentum their debut is almost devoid of by comparison.
Ultimately, the guiding influence on the record, along with all of Felt's others was Lawrence himself. He was looked upon by fellow travellers as a visionary, a man waiting for his moment in the sun. Of course this never actually happened, either with Felt themselves, Denim, the band he formed in the Nineties who flirted briefly with mainstream acceptance just before the Britpop period, or GoKart Mozart, virtually a solo project who Lawrence puts intermittent records out with in the here and now.
The records now feel like strangely sad objects despite their own intrinsic merit and value.
It's partly because they themselves sound vaguely unrealised. The product of a dream. Beautiful as they are, they never quite intersect with the harsh commercial realities of the Pop Machine that Lawrence set out to conquer. Jarvis Cocker, a similar underachiever over the course of the Eighties went on during the next decade to seize the crown that Lawrence so much coveted. And I think, on reflection, that this was entirely right. Jarvis had an ability to interact and relate with a broader public beyond his immediate constituency that Lawrence was never quite gifted with.
I saw Lawrence a couple of years back at a Q & A for the screening of a documentary about himself entitled Lawrence of Belgravia staged at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. He was articulate, self-effacing, generous and entirely honest but still an oddball, at the margins. It seems clear he'll never have the genuine, hit record that he craves.
His legacy however is definite. He's had real influence. Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian particularly never ceases to sing his praises, but it's apparent why that band has managed to integrate Felt's crafted, melodic gifts with their own influences and vision and made a more immediate commercial success of it. Other groups such as The Allah-Las and The Tyde are similarly indebted.
I recommend you cup an ear to Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty at some point along with the band's other records. They're objects of melodic, particular beauty. Not quite muscular enough to achieve recognition beyond those who are committed to such things. Not ever among my own favourite records. But a body of work I keep returning to and am constantly rewarded by. A singular vision
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