Scott Levine + The Plastic Son + Support

Scott Levine

+ The Plastic Son

+ More
Wednesday 5th June 2024
The New Adelphi Club
£10 Advance Tickets/£12.50 OTD
Doors 8.00pm

A born storyteller, through his records and his writing Scott Lavene has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. With
his exceptional third album Disneyland In Dagenham set for release this May via Nothing Fancy, Lavene heads out on the road again, having just done a circuit of the UK in support of The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn.

Disneyland in Dagenham
In the 1980s the Walt Disney Company were considering building their first European theme park not on the outskirts of Paris, but in Dagenham, Essex. In his youth, Scott Lavene used to
pick up drugs from a dodgy flat overlooking the proposed site. Disney and Dagenham were never a good fit, he thought, as he stood on the balcony one evening as the sun set, awaiting an
overdue hash delivery. It never happened of course – perhaps the multinational corporation were put off by the sewage works and car factories that Mickey Mouse and Goofy would have counted as their neighbours.

“My music’s a bit marmitey,” he says, but for those who love it it’s a love that runs deep – a recent crowdfunding campaign for Lavene to set up his own home studio, for instance, rapidly
outstripped its target, setting the stage for “the grotty Essex Neil Young album” he’s already got in the pipeline. “There aren’t any songs of mine that are specifically about mental problems, but
the amount of people that have come up to me and said that my music has got them through a really tough time. One guy said that he had tried to kill himself the year before and found my
music when he was in hospital. He was like, ‘You made me want to stay alive’. That is really, really special.” An audience that’s both smaller and more dedicated can mean a type of
connection more worthwhile than any arena show, he says. “That guy’s come to three or four gigs since then, and to meet the guy is just so fucking beautiful. Music’s given me a lot over the
years, and I find it bizarre and wonderful that mine can give that to people too.”

Though in person he’s thoughtful and softly-spoken, onstage Lavene is a born entertainer; a comedian, raconteur and storyteller as much as a musician. “I’m like a Butlins Redcoat,” he jokes. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 people or 1,000, I can entertain a crowd with a drum machine and a guitar. I like when people say that they can be laughing, then crying literally five seconds later within the same song.” It’s a safe bet, then, that in the wake of Disneyland In Dagenham there’ll be plenty more converts to follow. After all, Lavene jokes, “I’m like The Beatles, but a little bit Tom Waits, a little bit Whitesnake, a little bit Chas & Dave, and a little bit power ballads.” All worthy comparisons, but ultimately Scott Lavene is the kind of artist that can be compared only to himself.