“Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty” (M-RED 25) February 1982
Felt | Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty | (Cherry Red) 1982 | Midland band FELT say they lead boring lives, put on a boring stage show and they even called their latest single ‘Something Sends Me To Sleep’. But they are making quite a lot of people sit up and listen. The single has reached the Top 30 in the independent charts within a week of release, and some of the music critics are making comparisons with Lou Reed.
Felt got started 17 months ago when 19-year old Jon Lawrence made a solo single ‘Index’ on a EIS cassette-tape-recorder in his bedroom and paid for the pressing of 500 copies himself.
It sold out and Jon teamed up with a local friend, Maurice Deebank and drummer Gary Ainge.
Two others joined for a while, then left, and FELT are still hunting for a bass-player. The threesome has just finished their first album as you can feel, hear and see.
The band have so far played just 15 dates with bands like THE FALL, mainly in London. (promo leaflet)
Feel like dancing? We’ll soon put a stop to that
“I DON’T KNOW. . .” mutters Lawrence. Squinting through his fringe, he always looks puzzled. Talking in a soft Birmingham accent, his sentences trail off and upward, like apologies. Most things he says, he ends with “I don’t know . . .”
What he does know is that he, Lawrence, is half of a group called Felt, who’ve just made an LP for Cherry Red Records (‘Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty’), who aren’t very well known, but who are liked intensely by the few that do. Gary Ainge is his drummer, his other half.
They’ve just split from Maurice Deebank, who used to be Felt’s third, and the split was not friendly. But Felt, the two-piece, are going to go on, and even hope to start selling records. Musically and commercially, it’s said, Felt are “making the transition from the Velvets to The Monkees”.
Lawrence knows something else: “I detest dancing,” he says, a man after my own heart. Felt music, which is nearly all guitar, is the stuff you sit down and listen to, and enjoy: music to be taken internally, not to flail your limbs around to. He’s not guilty about using the despised guitar, because he thinks it can be a beautiful instrument for expressing emotion — meaning used with feeling, none of your crass heroics.
Felt music is delicate, and moody: Lawrence’s lyrics are strange, but sung so softly they fade inside the total sound. Admittedly, titles like ‘Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty’ can suggest pretentiousness: “But I’m not, not when you meet me. I’ve had no education, I’m just ordinary . . . I don’t know.”
Ideally, Lawrence would have liked Felt to be on the Elektra label: home of Tim Buckley, Stooges, Doors (we worry about whether Jim Morrison used to dance, finally agreeing yes, but only in a ritual sort of way), but Cherry Red are decent enough. Some have said Felt are “psychedelic”, so Lawrence looked the word up: it still means nothing to him. (NME, 06/03/82)
Leave a Reply