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about
Essex songwriter Scott Lavene returns with Disneyland in Dagenham, the title track from his highly anticipated new album due out 10th May via Nothing Fancy. 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.”
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.
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. It’s a record that tumbles together the autobiographical and the imagined, the heart-breaking and the preposterous; the tale of that itinerant drug-dealing horse, for instance, is also a genuinely touching allegory for the way friendships can slip through one’s fingers.
lyrics
Basildon and Pitsea, Tilbury and Dagenham. Southend on Sea, Rainham and Vange
It’s the A13.
Before it ended up in Paris they nearly built Disneyland on Rainham marshes in Essex, just around the corner from the sewage works and the Ford factory of old Dagenham where my mum and dad once did night shifts just after I was born, Stitching seat covers, and smoking cheap cigarettes.
When I was 17 I knew a man from Rainham, a thin man called Trevor who lived on the seventeenth floor of a high rise, a hopeless grey building dotted with dirty curtains with smoke and sad TV pouring from the windows.
Basildon and Pitsea, Tilbury and Dagenham. Southend on Sea, Rainham and Vange
It’s the A13.
I used to buy acid and speed from Trevor, running the risk of murder catching the lift up and up and up and the secret knock, knock knock knockity knock. It was the best view that poverty could give. Trevor had two kids, a bad speed habit, and three TV’s all turned on but with no sound. There was always brick sized lumps of hash on the tables and dirty floors, always Tupperware filled with powders on the kitchen surfaces. Stacey, Trevor’s girlfriend was a retired stripper and she was pretty, too pretty for a man with only three teeth and 9 burglary convictions. She was always cooking chicken and the kids were always eating it, grubby little boys with big smiles, bouncing tennis balls off the outer walls and watching silent TV.
Basildon and Pitsea, Tilbury and Dagenham. Southend on Sea, Rainham and Vange
It’s the A13.
I didn’t like staying there too long but once, when the sun was setting west over the city, I stayed for an hour waiting for my drugs to show up, sitting on the balcony, watching east London dying, counting conversations and distant clouds and wondering how Mickey Mouse was gonna fit in round there. Dagenham ain’t no place for Disneyland. There’s no Jazz clubs, and my old man said, “Son, you can never trust a town without Jazz clubs.”
credits
released April 18, 2024
Words & music by Scott Lavene
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