After writing pages of pages on one of our favourite bands ever here’s our brief factual introduction to the world of lawrence and felt. Written in part to alert you to a new fanzine Foxtrot Echo Lima Tango dedicated to the band. Felt fans will know there’s more myth and magic connected with the band than most and this zine at last starts to unravel the story with interviews and recollections from ex band members and fans alike.
Foxtrot Echo Lima Tango available here
Pretty good archive/fan site for felt here
Superflake Custom Graphics introduction to the band is…
The two words enigmatic and birmingham rarely appear in the same sentence – when they do you’ll almost certainly be dealing with the pop group Felt.
Formed in 1979 in the birmingham suburb of water orton by lawrence hayward the band continued to release the most sublime ind individual sounding records of the 80′s, to (at the time) sparse critical acclaim and even sparser sales. They are one of my favourite groups of all time.
The first records i heard were from the tail end of the first (second, i guess, if you count the first 7″ Index recorded and released by Lawrence from his water orton bedroom as the first) version of the group. This period was hallmarked by the inclusion of classically trained guitarist maurice deebank and saw Felt release a handful of albums via cherry red unlike anything else from that time.
When Deebank upped and left (swapping birmingham for barcelona) Felt moved to creation records, added a young keyboardist martin duffy to their line up and began a run of releases that remain amongst my favourite records ever recorded.
Lawrence wound the band up at the end of the 80′s revealing it had been the plan all along to exist for 10 years and release 10 albums. I attended Felts final show at burberries in birmingham and like lawrences wonderful, singular vision for the group and the records they released it was perfect.
