Scott Lavene
Moth Club, London
30th October 2025

Scott Lavene’s route to success has been circuitous – the miles on his belt show an inner drive and determination. Steve Morgan thumbs a lift on his current road trip.

“Don’t you fucking ‘Woooo!’ me”.  While there’s an element of mock horror at the accompanying whoops as Scott Lavene takes to the stage at a sold-out Moth Club – he later admits to harbouring fantasies about playing there – his response offers an almost perfect window onto his world. And what a world it is: a landscape peopled with broken, bloody and bruised characters, often rootless, teetering and clutching at straws, but still – and this is the magical bit – clinging gamely to life, waiting for a break in the clouds.

It’s been a long, eventful journey to reach this point. Just 48 hours after this show – the 13^th of a tour with a week left to run – another sell-out in Brighton beckons. Back in 2018, he was asked to delay going on in the same town by a few minutes, because a third paying member of the audience had just phoned his mate to say he had been waylaid. As an exercise in the value of persistence and patience, the ballad of Scott Lavene is quite the masterclass. But you can’t fake authenticity: life will either find you – or find you out – in the end.

And Lavene, by way of itinerant wanderings from his Essex roots via Camden, Canterbury, Cambridge and a spell in France, has clearly lived. Now four albums deep into his solo career, he’s still going out as a one-man band backed by machine-generated beats, wielding his flying V guitar, or switching to the ‘ballad arena’ for the keyboard-driven kitchen-sink tales. If his palette and appeal are widening, the musical brush strokes broadening as his confidence grows, thankfully, the observational smarts accrued across a lifetime show no sign of being dulled.

August’s latest offering, Cars, Buses, Bedsits and Shops, is a brilliant, oddly moving confection of loves, both lost and found, that somehow always stays the right line of cloying sentimentality. On tonight’s opener from it, Bedsits, over strummed guitar and harmonica, he reflects on a long-ago summer in Camden – “the sun beat down on our pale skin, two lovers in the city, starved of oxygen”.

As a calling card, it’s perfect. Typically, Lavene immediately punctures the mood with a self-effacing line about starting with a quiet song – “it’s a bit pretentious, but fuck it”. After a brilliantly jaunty workout of Cars, a winding yarn of road-trips via a lifetime of motors – “Granada, council-house beige, 1978, the year of the ox…” the audience is rapt, and totally under his spell.

Scanning the room across the next hour reveals faces bathed in broad grins, or heads nodding wistfully in recognition, as the aphorisms come thick and fast. The real trick, though, is in the craft. As Dolly Parton so brilliantly observed, it takes a lot of effort to look this cheap – Lavene has all his bases covered. His voice is deceptively versatile, full of surprises and ticks. He’s no slouch on guitar, either – there’s some hilariously impressive rock-posture soloing and a threat to stagedive off the Moth’s two-foot riser. There’s also a touching dedication to French couple Arthur and Camille, as well as other travellers who have ventured from Denmark and Sweden. There are no dead spots, no let-up in quality, no thoughts of wandering off to fetch a pint.

On a night packed with moments ranging from outrageously funny to gut-punchingly true and tender, perhaps the highlights are the old favourite and breakthrough, the meandering, down-on-your-luck tale of Broke (complete with what might be the longest live sigh ever). There’s a fantastic rendition of Sadly I’m Not Steve McQueen –  “the only Malibu I’ve seen comes in white bottles” – and The Ballad of Lynsey, the bittersweet recollection of a short-lived love affair – “it felt like forever, but forever only lasted a year.” Performers capable of leading a mass sing-along of the latter’s bleak chorus refrain: “I chose amphetamines over you” are few and far between.

Lavene is made for live work. It’s where his confessionals make most sense, under the spotlight’s glare; the shaggy dog stories fleshed out with accompanying anecdotes. His continual hitting of the beat, like the prose-poet he clearly is, is uncannily impressive.

We are currently blessed with a fair few performers who seem plugged directly into the Zeitgeist. Venn diagram enthusiasts could spot an intersection with CMAT, whose ragged, take-me-as-you-find-me approach is a similar delight. Both are artists blessed with fine literary powers, and a sniper’s eye for the right targets. “You used to be able to spot a racist” he says during one break between songs – and hugely deserving of their acclaim.
Lavene knows that a bloke with a carrier bag full of custard, contemplating life from the top deck of a bus, will always be far more intriguing and mysterious than a guy freewheeling down a dark desert highway, cool wind in his hair. More Eddie the Eagle than The Eagles, or the Jarvis Cocker of Essex. And god love him for it.

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You can find Scott Lavene on Instagram here. Scott is also on Bandcamp here

All words by Steve Morgan. Steve can be found on social media here 

Photos by Rachel Lipsitz