I called Go-Kart Mozart a B-side band. It didn’t mean that they were inferior songs; it simply meant that you would take away the pressure of I’ve got to write a hit single, I’ve got to write an album that’s going to get in the top ten. It was that idea of, ‘Hey, listen to that mad song that’s on the B-side.’ But then in 1999, 2000, the bottom fell out of my life. I think I had a mini-breakdown to be honest. I’d worked so hard and my mind had been so focussed on trying to be famous for twenty years, I think I just collapsed, metaphorically, and I couldn’t function anymore. Even though I wanted to get on with the second Go-Kart record, I was trying to do it but I was doing it in a really haphazard way. That one took around four years to come out and then the next one took around seven. Real life caught up with me. Before that I wasn’t rich or anything, but I’d somehow managed to skate through it all and still been able to buy records and clothes or whatever. But I went from that to looking for money on the floor. On a Sunday I would go to a bench on the King’s Road, because rich people were there and they might give me a cigarette. I went from being okay to being absolutely penniless to being homeless. It was the craziest turnaround. And I went a bit mad. I definitely had a mental breakdown of some kind, and it was purely all to do with music, because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.

Consequently, although I tried, I couldn’t get those albums finished. I wanted to do one in 99, one a year later and one maybe two years later; three albums within a three-year period. And that took until 2012, when Hot Dog Streets came out. My big regret at the moment is that I didn’t finish Go-Kart quickly, because the name doesn’t ring true anymore. It doesn’t sit right in these times. Go-Kart Mozart was purposely not a very good name because it had to be worse than Felt or Denim, because it had to be a B-side project. It wasn’t meant to turn into this huge bloody great long thing that’s gone on forever. I actually want to change it to Mozart Estate now, and that’s why I put Mozart Estate presents Go-Kart Mozart on the new album, because we’re getting ready to change the name. We’ve got a mini-album coming in September, and when that comes it’ll say on the back, this is the last Go-Kart Mozart record, we’re going away for an enforced holiday, when we come back we will then be known as Mozart Estate.

Lawrence, interviewed