Photo 2004 by Dean Chamberlain
 
I did an interview with my old friend Douglas Rushkoff on his Team Human podcast. I’m going to copy and paste from his writing below because he says so many nice things about me, but before I turn it over to Douglas I want to clear up one thing: Doug was being modest and self-deprecating when he says he only recently came on the project. He’s arguably the first mover (either Doug or Chris Holmes, more on him soon) of how it came to be in the first place and has been an Executive Producer on the project going back to 2021. Just to give credit where it’s due.

And thanks to Luke Robert Mason for editing our conversation so that I sounded far less stoned than I was when it was actually recorded.
 
 

 
Excerpting from “Passing the Torch: Let’s Cede the Power of Reality Creation to the Next Generation” on Doug’s Substack.

My optimistic frame is that the violence and turmoil, the X/Twitter fascism and TikTok totalitarianism polluting our collective consciousness, may be less What Is Happening than reactions against what is unfolding. But boy, resistance to this future may just kill us all if we’re not careful.

To the rescue come not just smart people, but weird ones. Resilient ones who can metabolize radical change. People capable of imagining and creating new approaches to engineering reality. This used to be the province of the counterculture — but magick has always had a darker, more power-obsessed side as well. For every Wiccan healer there were always a few salesmen reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich or Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, which applied the influence and self-hypnosis elements of magic to the acquisition of power and wealth. Donald Trump himself attended the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale as a child in church. He preached that we can think and speak things into reality.

Well, we can all play at that game. When reality becomes unhinged, it is up to good people everywhere to learn the techniques required to navigate it and bend the landscape to our collective will. It’s not about which old guy is the right guy to take the torch and lead us forward. It’s about forging the communities of solidarity and collective action required for us all to move forward together. We must seize the tools for this co-creation.

That’s part of why I’m so intrigued by the new project of my friend of thirty years, Richard Metzger. He is launching a new kind of documentary series that is intended as a spell in itself: a hyper-sigil to activate and unite the next generation of magical practitioners, while also simply planting a seed of fanciful empowerment in everyone who watches. You can check it out at right now at http://magickshow.net.

Richard is probably best known for founding Disinformation, the occult media and publishing company, hosting Disinfo.con in 2000, making and hosting the DisinformationTV series for Channel Four, and then creating the Dangerous Minds website. 

I think this modular documentary series will be the crowning achievement of Richard’s career, but also become part of a necessary re-skilling of popular culture at a pivotal moment in our development. No, not everyone needs to practice or even believe in magick. But these threads of culture are part of what give people the tools and creativity required to imagination better futures. In fact, I’ve been assisting so much with the project over the past few months, that Richard has dubbed me a “producer” of the show.

I just recorded a new Team Human conversation with Richard about where we are, and what he’s doing. You can listen to that here.

But please also consider supporting and subscribing to the series. There are all sorts of great premiums on the Magick Show Kickstarter page, including a work of sigil art customized to your goals, from Grant Morrison!

The Magick Show trailer:
 

 
Support Magick Show on Kickstarter

One of the notable participants in Magick Show, who you’ll see a lot of, is the author/political activist/witch and now film director, Sarah Lyons. In fact,  the first thing anyone says in Magick Show is Sarah’s answer to the question “What is magick.” I won’t give it away here, but as soon as she said it, I knew for certain that I was going to use it.

I first noticed Sarah Lyons in a Vice video about witches. I was immediately impressed by her on-camera poise and by how articulate she is. And she looks like a witch. Perfect for a project like Magick Show. She wrote a really great book called Revolutionary Witchcraft. When I read it, I could tell that her politics and mine (go socialism!) were very sympathetic. Sarah’s also a real go-getter, too, which I appreciate. She’s one of those people where you just know she’ll go far in life.

I asked Sarah Lyons a few questions over email.

How do you think you naturally came to have an aptitude for witchcraft? Was there something about you as a child that, in retrospect, had a big influence on you in that way?
Some people struggle with religion and God when they are young, and mark adulthood as a time when they don’t have to put up with that stuff anymore. I was never like that. I’ve always found religion, mythology, and the Gods infinitely more relatable and easy to understand and love than most people. I struggle with choosing one path to follow or thing to believe, not believing in anything at all. When I was very young I wanted to be a priest, but being a Catholic girl, that wasn’t a career path that was open to me. So, I did the next logical thing and got into witchcraft.

At what point did you start to fully identify as a witch? To yourself and to family members and others around you?
I was privately identifying as a witch from about the age of 14, but around 2017 when I started working with Vice and doing online content relating to the occult it went from the last thing people knew about me, to the first thing, almost overnight. It’s something I still struggle with, to be honest. My spirituality is a very private and intimate part of my life that I don’t always feel comfortable sharing and monetizing in the surveillance culture that is social media. When you are a public spiritual figure, people want you to fix all their problems for them, and tell them what to do with their lives. I can’t do that, and I don’t believe that is a healthy way to look at witchcraft in general.

You’ve written a great book called Revolutionary Witchcraft. How is witchcraft political?
The word “witch” isn’t like other labels in occultism, because it has, historically, been something you got called, not something you called yourself. It was a word that often carried a death sentence or social ostracisation with it and was, in many ways, a legal term, which makes it an inherently political label.  It’s a great privilege to call yourself a witch today and not feel an immediate risk to your life or livelihood (though we will see if that changes), and I believe that if you call yourself one you should stand with oppressed people all over the world who are being subjected to similar persecution that historical “witches” were.

Tell me about your film project.
The Woods is my first feature film, and my first film of any sort, that will be released to festivals starting this Fall. It’s a horror movie about four hikers recreating a trip they took years ago, with mysterious and deadly consequences.  I thoroughly believe my history in witchcraft and the occult helped me make this movie, not just practically (kids reading this at home asking ‘how did she do that?’ The answer is: magic.) but psychologically. People want to gatekeep film and say there is one way to get into it and be successful. This is usually some variation on: “spend a bunch of money on a short that, sorry, no one will see, send it to my expensive festival where we dangle the chance to meet “important” people over you, and maybe if we like you will keep you held up in meetings for year about the opportunity to direct an episode of the Legally Blonde spin-off show that’s been in development hell for years for a platform called Spurt that no one is subscribed to.”

Magic has taught me there’s no one path to success, and people claiming so want to control your reality in a way that is totally illusory so that they can maintain power. There’s also no such thing as impossible. I practice fucking witchcraft, how could I believe anything is really impossible? I made a great feature film on a micro-micro budget, with an entirely female-run set, and barely over two weeks of shooting, having never made any sort of film before. That’s supposed to be impossible, but it’s just not. We live in a time of great destruction and I believe we need to spiritually answer that with creation. I hope people like The Woods, but more than that I hope it inspires them to question narratives around what they are “allowed” to create and just go make something.

Support Magick Show on Kickstarter!

Kenneth Anger’s final on-camera interview was conducted for Magick Show.

Picking up where I left off yesterday when I was discussing the various difficulties I had in trying to book interviewees for Magick Show.

Whenever you are inviting people to be a part of something… occulty, the first question one is always asked is “Who else will be participating?” 

And it would be best if you came prepared with a good answer to that because no one wants to be associated with you know, people they don’t want to be associated with. If there’s one thing I learned over the years about those in the occult community, they tend to have strong opinions… especially about other occultists.  

My strategy was to see if it was possible to book Kenneth Anger (it was) and once Ken’s participation was locked down, then I felt more comfortable emailing Bri Luna out of the blue to see if she might be interested, knowing from reading The Hoodwitch that she was a big Kenneth Anger fan. Of course I made sure to casually mention Ken’s name in my opening salvo. You can’t very well knock on the door of the queen of the witches with an empty hand, now can you?

So now, I could drop both Kenneth’s and Bri Luna’s names. In the occult world, they are a formidable duo, I think the reader will agree! And Douglas Rushkoff came for free. I didn’t even have to ask him because he is one of Magick Show‘s executive producers. Mitch Horowitz happily agreed to be interviewed. Drop all four of those names and you’re really sayin’ something.

As I wrote yesterday, although a lot of the people who were interviewed for the show took their sweet time getting back to me, almost every single person I asked, save for four people, said yes. I was also assisted by Lisa Derrick in LA, by Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington in London and by Melissa Jayne Madara in NYC, who all three made suggestions of some great people to invite to participate and then contacted these people on my behalf and vouched for me. 

Things started falling into place…
 

 
Back Magick Show on Kickstarter.

This is my second Magick Show Diary. You can read the first one here.

Once a documentary project is greenlighted, you go straight to the research, looking for potential on-camera experts. When it came to something like Magick Show, there were a lot of obvious choices, individuals who were either known to me, or who I knew personally that had to be on the list, but they comprised fewer than half of the people we finally assembled. 

Although I was well aware of the famous #WitchTok hashtag, TikTok isn’t the sort of thing I tend to partake in, so I was starting from scratch there. Primarily I was looking on the app for younger people, but I was also hoping to find within that broad subset a racial and gender mix that would represent millennial and Gen Z occultists more authentically. The occult subculture has always been—to be blunt—a very white and Eurocentric space. It also tends to skew older on the male side. Young witches, as you might expect, are in abundance, and easy to find on TikTok, but I quickly noticed that the vast majority—9.75 out of 10—of the videos that came up from clicking on the #WitchTok hashtag didn’t show anyone’s face. Altars. Lots of altars. Burning candles or burning sage, but rarely any faces. Typically no voices are heard either, you just see affirmational quotes superimposed over all the shots of the candles and altars. Few “personalities” emerge, at least on occult TikTok, and most creators who have broken through, and are seen on camera in their videos, are difficult to take seriously.

I did try to book four people from TikTok but only one of them replied when they were contacted. The young woman who did, I was bitterly disappointed about ultimately not being able to get for Magick Show. She described herself as a chola bruja and the minute I saw her severely plucked eyebrows, I thought “wow this one is a star.” She had a strong presence on camera, she looked great and quite obviously had a very, very big personality. (She ultimately passed due to her infant son not being old enough to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and she didn’t want to be on the subway in NYC, a reasonable excuse, of course.)

So much for #WitchTok. Many of the people who are in Magick Show, I tried to contact via their own websites, but it was surprising how few replied. You’d expect that this would be the easiest way to get in touch with someone, right? Maybe I’m just showing my age, but I would ultimately find that DMing on Instagram was the best way to reach many people. Even then it would take days, and often weeks—and in one case six weeks—before I’d hear back from them. Several people would contact me after I’d already written them off as unreachable. It was perplexing, not something I was used to. Whenever I have asked someone to be on camera for something, I’m used to getting a speedy response. Everyone likes being interviewed, right?

WRONG. Not when it comes to talking about occult stuff, they don’t. Many people publish occult books under pen names, their reason might be their career—one polite “no thanks” mentioned a government gig that the respondent didn’t want to jeopardize. There were several people like that, often with high-paying corporate gigs. With some it was simple shyness. John Zorn told me over email when I asked him if I could interview him for Magick Show that he didn’t do interviews anymore because “mouthing off in public has its price!” And what he meant by that is by respecting his creative muse in this way—those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know—his angels never abandoned him. Another, I felt, quite reasonable excuse. (He sent me some files of some then-unreleased music that seared my synapses. It was the nicest turndown that I’ve ever received.)

But… yeah. It was really difficult to book people for this, much, much harder than I anticipated. In the end, this forced me to work harder and to dig deeper until I assembled, like Profesor Xavier, just the right mutant thinkers, or at least a critical mass of them. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and DMs telling me “You should have gotten so and so…” Trust me, in most cases I did try to get so and so, but so and so never replied to my email or DM. I really wanted to get Erik Davis on camera, but sadly he would be in Germany while I was shooting in LA. I’d still like to get Erik on camera if the Kickstarter does well enough. By and large, I got most of the people I wanted but it was an anxious ordeal, truly one of the most difficult tasks of my entire career.

This is getting long enough, so I’ll end here and pick this up again tomorrow.

See you then.

Back Magick Show on Kickstarter.
 

 
Visit the Magick Show Kickstarter page here

I’ve decided to do a daily sort of “Magick Show Diary” type of thing for the duration of the Magick Show Kickstarter. The month-long sprint when we shot the majority of the (over 50!) interviews was a super fun adventure and each and every day of that saw me meeting as many as eight incredible new people and getting into all sorts of odd and whimsical situations. I can get a lot of blog mileage out of it is what I am saying. I’ll also be conducting some short interviews with some of the participants.

I’m going to start off with a clip from the “What is Magick?” episode, which I see as the overture to the larger project. The foundation, if you will. The rest of the episodes you could watch in any order as long as you’d watch this one first. It’s roughly a three-act structure that begins with a wide variety of people explaining what magick is to them and how they practice their magick. I got some great answers. One thing that all of these vastly different people had in common is that when they answered that question, none of them said anything remotely goofy. You might expect to get at least one kooky woo-woo answer in the mix, but that didn’t happen. What I got instead was an awful lot of amazing interview footage where magick is discussed eloquently and even scientifically by some very, very intelligent people. Someone unacquainted with the occultist mindset, or who had never given the matter any real thought, wouldn’t watch these responses and think “these people are nuts” because they clearly aren’t. The reaction would more likely be one of “hmmm, this all seems somewhat reasonable.” I think many initially skeptical people will walk away from watching Magick Show surprised at their reaction to what they’ve seen. 

To be honest, that was a big part of the goal, and again, I was aided by fifty people who knew what they were talking about, some who can express themselves like poets.

Which brings me to the video. In this clip musician/author Rodney Orpheus declares Aleister Crowley to be “the Einstein of magick” and compares Crowley’s Law of Thelema to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. As the person on the other side of the camera, imagine how happy I was to witness these words, in this order come out of his mouth. As anyone who has ever shot a TV news piece or a documentary will tell you, it’s all about the interviews, and when you’re sitting across from someone and they are giving you what Rodney was offering that morning, you want to do Snoopy’s happy dance of joy afterward. He was so good on camera. I’ve also got him talking about the birth of Chaos magick (he was there), Austin Osmon Spare, and Marjorie Cameron.  Rodney tells the most wonderful anecdote about meeting Marjorie Cameron during a trip to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. The tale is charmingly told in his great Irish accent and he describes what her home was like (inside and out), recounts their conversations, and what they did (smoked a joint and saw a movie at the Cinerama dome). He even imitates her raspy voice. It’s a solid gold piece of footage, but not something that I’d have ever been able to use on television. You just can’t have someone telling a five-minute-long story on a TV show, but when Magick Show was recontextualized as more of a masterclass thing, or as a big conversation among 50 people, one of the first things that occurred to me was “Oh great, now I can use Rodney’s Cameron story!”

And now, here’s a two-minute clip from Magick Show of Rodney Orpheus explaining Crowley’s Law of Thelema.
 

 
So we’ve got this new thing—maybe you’ve noticed—called Magick Show that we’re very eager to promote. It’s a wide-ranging documentary project about 21st-century occultism and features interviews with over FIFTY authors, experts, witches and other practicing occultists. The participants include media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, musicians Luke Haines and Rodney Orpheus, historian and TV host Mitch Horowitz, comics genius Grant Morrison, authors Gary Lachman, Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington, Amanda Yates Garcia, Melinda Lee Holm, Maja D’Aoust and Bri Luna, the Hoodwitch.

We even got the final interview with underground filmmaking legend Kenneth Anger who died in 2023.

Dear readers, would you mind downloading this image of Grant Morrison and slapping it across all your social media? It’s X, Facebook and Instagram ready! We thank you!

Below, the Magick Show trailer:
 

 
Or you can skip all the verbiage and go directly to the Kickstarter.

Grant Morrison Will Cast a Spell for You. Comics Genius to Support a Kickstarter Campaign for a New Occult Documentary Series with Unusual Offering

Launches this Thursday at midnight

Los Angeles – July 8, 2024 – Renowned comics genius Grant Morrison offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for three lucky individuals to have a personal magick spell cast just for them. This unique reward is part of an ambitious Kickstarter campaign to fund the post-production of Magick Show, a groundbreaking documentary project being described as a “masterclass in the occult.” Magick Show was created by Richard Metzger (Dangerous Minds, Disinformation) and produced by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff.

Grant Morrison, a legendary figure in the world of comics and a practicing magician, has joined the campaign with this extraordinary pledge. For his contribution, Morrison will cast a personalized spell for the backer, blending his vast knowledge of magic and storytelling to create a unique and powerful work of art.

“I’m thrilled to be part of this momentous occasion,” said Morrison. “Quite simply it’s the best show about magic ever made! The best, least sensationalized, most informed presentation of what contemporary magic is and how it works that I’ve ever seen onscreen.” Morrison looks forward to becoming part of the Magick Show community. “It is time to call together the next generation of occultists, expose them to their lineage, and initiate them into the larger culture of practicing magicians.”

The spell includes a consultation with Morrison, who will work with the recipient to focus, calibrate, and aim the spell perfectly.

Morrison is known for his promotion of the “sigil” theory of spellcasting and will create a symbol relating to the accomplishment of the desired outcome on a canvas with paint, delivering a one-of-a-kind artwork to the lucky supporters.

“It seemed pretty obvious that it would be difficult to get many outlets to write about some ‘weird occult documentary project’ on Kickstarter,” said Metzger, “but what if the story was ‘Grant Morrison will personally cast a spell for you’? That’s different. That’s catnip for comics, horror, and sci-fi blogs and the story writes itself. Then it seeps out into public consciousness. That’s how we pitched it to Grant and he readily agreed to help us out.”

Magick Show promises to delve deep into modern occultism’s mysterious world, exploring its influence on contemporary culture and uncovering its hidden truths. With a team of visionary creators at the helm, including Metzger, known for his pioneering work in alternative media, and Rushkoff, an acclaimed author and media theorist, the documentary aims to offer an unprecedented look into the myriad ways magick is practiced in the 21st century.

“Magick inflects the reality in which we live,” Rushkoff explained. “From corporate logos and money systems to warfare and presidential elections. It is everywhere, once you learn to see it. Magick Show teaches us how.”

The Kickstarter campaign seeks to raise $150,000 in 40 days to bring Magick Show to life. In addition to Morrison’s spellcasting, backers can choose from a range of exclusive rewards, including an incredible limited edition poster designed by artist Dima Drjuchin (famous for his work with Tool and Father John Misty) and special acknowledgments and credits in the film.

The campaign is being organized by Magick Show ally and Century Guild founder Thomas Negovan, an inaugural member of Kickstarter’s creator advisory council who has been responsible for over 70 successful campaigns. In his words, “Magick Show is a clarion call for everyone who can feel this acceleration of reality we are experiencing to gather together, to gain focus, and learn to harness that velocity for positive change.”

Anyone wanting to support Magick Show and take advantage of this unique opportunity to have a spell cast for them by Grant Morrison himself, visit the Kickstarter campaign page here when it goes live on Thursday, July 11, 2024.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/richardmetzger/magick-show-a-masterclass-in-modern-occultism

http://magickshow.net

For media inquiries, please contact Richard Metzger [metzger.richard AT gmail DOT com]

About Magick Show: Magick Show is a sprawling documentary project exploring the world of contemporary occultism and its cultural impact. Created by Richard Metzger and produced by Douglas Rushkoff, the project—described as a “documentary bundle”—promises to unveil the secrets and influence of modern magic practices. So far over 50 members of the occult community have been interviewed for Magick Show in London, Los Angeles, and New York City. It includes the final on-camera interview with the legendary underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

About Grant Morrison: Grant Morrison is a celebrated comic book writer, author, screenwriter, and magician, known for his groundbreaking works such as The Invisibles, All-Star Superman, Doom Patrol and Multiversity. His work often explores themes of magic, consciousness, and the nature of reality.
 

 
Have you ever wondered where we disappeared to?

The answer is simple: We just couldn’t take it anymore.

Allow me to explain:

The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.

I’d compare this sorry state of affairs to the history of widespread cocaine use in America, it’s almost the exact same story. (Okay, okay, it’s not even a remotely similar narrative, but don’t harsh my analogy!) At first, it was all fun and games. Pure and undiluted nose candy for the masses. The 1970s must’ve been incredible! But then the Devil’s dandruff starts getting stepped on. Unscrupulous dealers began cutting their Peruvian marching powder with baby laxatives and veterinary dewormers. Ultimately it becomes more of a situation where the dealers were cutting their baby laxative with cocaine and not the other way around. Now it’s all just garbage.

And that what’s happened with Internet content, too. When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.

Today’s internet is by and large a highly toxic HAZMAT site. Assholes are everywhere you turn. You can’t escape them. But on top of that, all the creativity has vanished. What started as a massive outpouring of cross-cultural communication, international information exchange and just plain HIGH WEIRDNESS has turned into a filtered, Facetuned selfie-infested septic tank of “LOOK AT ME” frivolity, knucklehead narcissism and abject idiocy. The rise of the TikTok “expert” dolling out their supposed wisdom in 45-second increments seems to me an especially pernicious development. These people are seldom experts on anything other than hashtags and yet they all apparently have an audience 10X that of CNN’s.

With the AI apocalypse rapidly encroaching upon us it’s about to get even worse. I knew it when I first saw that Star Wars if it had been directed by Wes Anderson video. “Hmmm, that’s kinda clever” immediately gave way to “Okay I get this and I can’t be bothered to even watch it to the end.” It was a watershed moment for me and when I realized THIS SHIT IS THE FUTURE. 

In retrospect, I wish I was right about this, but when the latest text-to-video AI product, Dream Machine, was released last week, what did the public decide to do with it? Something far more regrettable: animating popular memes! 
 

Dream Machine by Luma AI is just 3 days old.

Now memes are becoming videos.

10 wild examples:

1. Distracted boyfriendpic.twitter.com/QXNDQdkY4P

— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024

 
I know, let’s make it worse! That short animated clip of the Distracted Boyfriend meme represents—sums up even—how low we’ve sunk culturally. This is it, people, the crown of creation. This mindless nonsense is the rest of your life and for the lives of every generation to come until the world finally ends in a paroxysm of kitsch.

Wouldn’t it have been better to point all this capital and technology towards developing a utopian future where no one has to work and everyone is freed up to develop their own individuality and creativity?

NOPE! Not when you can have an animated “Zuckerberg is watching” meme instead!!
 

7. Zuckerberg is watchingpic.twitter.com/NphmK5nvg8

— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024

 
We simply couldn’t take it anymore. The Internet has just gotten too fucking dumb. And it’s hardly a case of the culture being dumbed down. On the contrary, it’s being dumbed UP.

So Dangerous Minds is evolving into something new. We’re going to do something different. Something that’s not been filtered or Facetuned or to be found anywhere in this cultural wasteland full of regurgitated garbage. Something with actual experts who know what they’re talking about and can speak intelligently for longer than a minute. Something that will make you smarter.

We’ll announce what this new venture is in the coming days, so keep watching this space, where all will be revealed…

 
John Peel’s oft-repeated line about how the Fall’s music was “always different, always the same” could also be said about the output of English singer-songwriter Scott Lavene, although with just four albums under his belt, he’s got a long way to go before catching up to the Fall’s apparently infinite back catalog. And much like the late Mark E. Smith’s, Lavene’s music is so infused with his own idiosyncratic personality and lyrical preoccupations (custard, double denim, drinking, stealing roses from his racist neighbor’s garden) that no one would ever mistake one of his songs for anyone else’s. With his latest album, Disneyland in Dagenham, Lavene’s tunes are, in fact, largely the same as heard on his previous two long players (2019’s Broke and 2021’s Milk City Sweethearts) which is not, I hasten to add, an indication of actual sameness, but more an indication of consistently high quality and great songwriting. That he delivers exactly what his audience expects from a Scott Lavene album—always different, always the same and always really fucking good.

According to TIDAL, I’ve listened to Disneyland in Dagenham 186 times in the past month. I’ve already listened to it from start to finish twice today and it’s not even 9 am here. I think it’s safe for the reader to assume that I really love this album. It’s world-class. All killer, no filler.  An instant classic. Every song is a 10 out of 10. I like every single song on it so much that it almost seems like a greatest hits album to my ears after only four weeks. I could say the same about his other albums, too. Another observation about Lavene’s music—this occurred to me while revisiting his previous albums—is how well they are sequenced and how satisfying they are as start-to-finish listens. That and his arrangements are really sophisticated. Yes indeed, Disneyland in Dagenham is exactly what I expected from a Scott Lavene album and after a three-year wait, I was not the slightest bit disappointed. I mean, who listens to the same album 186 times in one month?

Scott Lavene has been compared a lot to Ian Dury—I’ve done it myself—and that is a valid juxtaposition for quite a few reasons. First off, who’d mistake one of Ian Dury’s songs for anyone else’s? The same could be said of Lavene’s music. They both embrace narrative songwriting, wry portrayals of dodgy characters they’ve met along the way, wild nights out, working-class Britain, self-reflection, humor, Billericay, and wordplay, each capable of finding profound insights in life’s most mundane details. Additionally, the two men share a similar… let’s call it a “life force” that emanates from the grooves of their records. Were Ian Dury still alive, I suspect he’d see the commonality between their work himself.

Allow me to clarify further: Being compared to someone like Ian Dury as a songwriter would indicate an ineffably unique approach, would it not? It’s not that I think Lavene is all that influenced by Ian Dury. There might be some influence, sure, but if I can express this properly the thing that they probably have most in common as songwriters is that they are both, and cannot pretend to be otherwise, genuinely who they are. The music itself doesn’t sound even remotely the same, it’s the approach, and the strength of the personality. You don’t hear that much true originality or individuality anymore and when you do it’s striking. It stands out. Just as Mark E. Smith could only sound like Mark E. Smith, and Ian Dury sound like Ian Dury, Scott Lavene can only sound like Scott Lavene. 

Disneyland in Dagenham kicks off with “Paper Roses,” a wistful ballad of doomed love, a duet of sorts with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn lending his distinctive gravelly voice as a cynical bookie who won’t accept a bet on the relationship lasting. “Custard” is about family life, walking the dog, and, you guessed it, custard. “Debbie,” one of the album’s singles, portrays the titular subject, a mad inventor on a mission for Zeus, surrounded by her machinery and lots and lots and lots of fuses. (“Take the bread out of that, it’s not a toaster” goes the whispered chorus.)

“Horse and I” sounds like it started as a short story—I was reminded of both Bob Dylan’s Tarantula “novel” (which I HIGHLY recommend) as well as Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes—and tells the tale of Lavene and an equestrian pal busking across France performing Talking Heads and Cure covers. It’s a masterpiece in under four minutes. I fucking love this one. The album’s title track is a bittersweet and delicate paean to life outside of London, then we get to “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen” a bouncy New Wave raver of a song namechecking the macho Hollywood legend and imagining that he’d be the sad one not to be Scott Lavene if he only knew what he was missing out on. It’s fantastic and is followed by another banger, “Julie Johnson” a song I usually play twice in a row, if not ten times in a row every time I listen to Disneyland in Dagenham (which, I will remind you has been quite often in recent weeks.) “Little Bird” is a sweet ballad about two lovers being viewed by a feathered friend. It could be a tear-jerker in a Broadway or West End musical. “Rats” finds Lavene asking if he “can just be America’s sweetheart” and the amusing “Keeping it Local” ably caps a very satisfying song cycle.

Let me conclude by inviting you to listen to Disneyland in Dagenham below and reminding you that once you’ve finished, you’ll want to check out the rest of Scott Lavene’s catalog. If you’ve never heard his wonderful music before, I envy you, because you’re in for a fantastic treat.
 

“Disneyland in Dagenham”
 

“Debbie”
 

“Sadly, I’m Not Steve McQueen”
 

Julie Johnson