Storyteller Scott Lavene has shared “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen”, a new single from his highly anticipated third album Disneyland in Dangenham – out 10th May via Nothing Fancy. The single follows the recent announcement of his new album and UK headline tour, one that comes closely on the heels of his shows with Craig Finn. The Hold Steady singer joined Lavene on stage for the final night of tour to perform Paper Roses, a track that Finn provides guest vocals for on the upcoming album, while Michael Hann of the Spectator left the show saying, “once upon a time, he’d have found a home on Stiff Records, alongside Ian Dury and Wreckless Eric, even Jona Lewie, and he’d have become a national treasure”.

A born storyteller, through his records and his writing – he sends out monthly short stories under the title ‘Bits & Bobs’ via his mailing list and is currently working on his first novel – Lavene has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. From a man draining the blood of property agents in the aid of local businesses to a talking horse who travels Europe selling hash, gambling and performing covers of Talking Heads, Disneyland In Dagenham will prove no exception.

I was not afraid to include everything that I like, whether or not it’s really eccentric. I wasn’t afraid of just making the record that I wanted.” Lavene says. “I think I have a really good memory for emotion. I think it’s because I’m riddled with self-pity!

The tongue-in-cheek new single “Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen”, contrasts the dreary romance of his Essex upbringing with his dreams of international stardom – a Malibu mansion next door to Keith Moon’s and a bright red open-topped sports car, but today such validation no longer matters.

This emphasised by the closing lyrics of the track:

Maybe if Steve McQueen could see me and my girl, laying down, her head on my chest and we sweat in her dad’s caravan until morning when the sun fills the windows and there’s a cool wind from the west, then we realise we’re more in love than the night before. You know maybe if Steve McQueen could see that he would think, he might think, Sadly I’m not Scott Lavene

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.

So he recalls on the title track of his exceptional third album Disneyland In Dagenham, monologuing in warm deadpan over a wandering acoustic guitar. It encapsulates his conflicted feelings about the county he was raised. “A cowboy kind of place, a bit rough around the edges,” as he puts it. “A lot of funny stuff happened that you’d tell to normal people who’d be like, ‘What the fuck?!’” It’s changed a lot since then. Filming the video for the song, he and his sister took a drive around their old haunts along the A13. “The sewage works don’t smell anymore and they’re now calling Rainham ‘East London’, which is hilarious. It made me grateful for my past, for the shit we could get away with back then.”

A born storyteller, through his records and his writing – he sends out monthly short stories under the title ‘Bits & Bobs’ via his mailing list and is currently working on his first novel – Lavene has long been populating a hallucinogenic world of his own creation with ne’er do wells, ragamuffins and eccentrics. From a man draining the blood of property agents in the aid of local businesses (‘Keeping It Local’) to a talking horse who travels Europe selling hash, gambling and performing covers of Talking Heads, Disneyland In Dagenham is no exception.

‘Custard’ is a song about his drinking a pint of custard straight from the carton, and his five-year-old daughter nagging him to get a dog – “these days I’m a dad of three,” says Lavene, “so initially I just wanted to make an album about living in the suburbs and raising kids.”. ‘Rats’ concerns the rodents that were there to greet the Lavene family when they moved into a new house. When the past does rear its head, it’s often through a haze of melancholy. “I’m nostalgic by nature,” Lavene says. “I think I have a really good memory for emotion. I think it’s because I’m riddled with self-pity!”

Whether lyrically, or through music that leaps from spiky psychedelia to flute-driven crooning, driving wah-wah rock n roll to a sleazy Serge Gainsbourg-esque shuffle, Disneyland In Dagenham is therefore a record that’s frankly bonkers in its scope.

He made it at swift pace Benjamin Woods of The Golden Dregs, after Lavene sold a guitar to pay for a week at Greenwich’s Vacant TV studios. It was a cold December and they were limited for both time and gear so they recorded quickly in hats and coats, Woods adding drums and occasional guitar and synth. It was fleshed out later with some further home recordings and friends’ contributions on saxophone, flutes and percussion. It’s Lavene’s third since getting sober, and with each album he’s got closer to the point at which he now stands, a moment of total self-assurance.

“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.”

It’s not hard to see why. 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.

Disneyland in Dagenham is out 10th May via Nothing Fancy

Live dates:

Sun 2nd June, Liverpool, Kazimier Stockroom
Mon 3rd June, North Shields, The Engine Room
Tue 4th June, Glasgow, The Hug & Pint
Wed 5th June, Hull, The Adelphi
Thu 6th June, Leeds, Hyde Park Book Club
Fri 7th June, Manchester, 33 Oldham Street
Sun 9th June, Stroud, The Prince Albert (Matinee)
Mon 10th June, Bath, The Bell Inn
Tue 11th June, London, The Lexington
Wed 12th June, Brighton, The Prince Albert
Fri 14th June, Bristol, Crofter’s Rights 2