LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA
dir. Paul Kelly, 2011
90 mins. United Kingdom.
In English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 18 – 5 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Interviewer: “Is it right that you once said that your ideal way to die would be to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge weighed down by your first edition Kerouacs?”

Lawrence: “I did. The thing is, when I thought about it, I thought, ‘They wouldn’t weigh enough to actually sink you. It would have to be a whole Beat library.'”

Felt, the band Lawrence founded in 1979, released ten singles and ten albums in ten years. Their titles include Dismantled King Is Off The Throne, All The People I Like Are Those That Are Dead, and Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death. Wrote Jon Wilde, “They make music that is heavy-hearted, brimming with tears … gibberish and baffled brilliance rolled into one woolly ball … Unutterably awkward, preposterously flawed.”

Denim, Lawrence’s next band, had a song called The New Potatoes that Black Mirror creator Charlie Booker claims is his Desert Island Disc.

Mozart’s Mini-Estate, the most recent LP by Lawrence’s current band Go-Kart Mozart, was described in The Wire as being “as oddsome as dress-wearing era Kevin Rowland, as socially astute as Sleaford Mods, as mythomaniacal as Kanye West.”

To celebrate the release of LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA on UK Blu-ray, the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture is staging a very rare U.S. screening of Paul Kelly’s celebrated film of the musician whose credo is “To remain true to one’s aims – pure and untainted – divorced from reality.”

PAUL KELLY is a musician (East Village/ Birdie), a graphic designer, and a filmmaker. His films include Finisterre (with Kieran Evans), What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2005), This Is Tomorrow (2007), Lawrence of Belgravia (2011), and How We Used To Live (2013). In 2013, the Colloquium published Nothing’s Too Good For The Common People: The Films of Paul Kelly containing essays by the likes of Dan Fox, Stephin Merritt, Jude Rogers and Peter Terzian.

Special thanks to Paul Kelly and S.S. Sandhu (Colloquium for Unpopular Culture).