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 ****?!' 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. A born storyteller, through his records and his writing Â- 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.
