They were too weird for my tiny little brain to cope with at the time, especially as my luxuriantly bushy curtains were probably interfering with my hearing. But subsequently I got into their album Denim On Ice in a very major way. It's literally a work of madness, divided into three roughly themed sections that I doubt anyone other than Lawrence has ever been able to listen to all the way through in one go. There's just so many ideas and musical styles on there, often in the same song; for example, brilliant eighties/Ultravox parody Synthesizers In The Rain has a Russian fol-de-rol interlude for no apparent reason.
Unfortunately Denim on Ice was as close to stardom as poor old Lawrence got. He fried his brain and ended up a methadone addict living in sheltered accomodation in Victoria, releasing appalling novelty records under the name Go Kart Mozart. There's some pretty distressing recent footage out there of him looking like an emaciated, NME-reading gargoyle. But in songs like Brumburger (below) he combined great pop songs with a genuinely odd outlook on life in a unique way. Any song with the lines "My mate's got a garage and it's full of stuffed animals / I snuck in there once and I stole a cat" deserves a certain respect.
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