Lazarus Kane: Under the skin of the mischievous rock star caricature

From his home in sun-dappled Bristol, Lazarus Kane is regaling NME with tales of his adventures with Axl Rose in the 1980s.

“They were real days of innocence, man,” he drawls, his delivery somewhere between a particularly down-home Matthew McConaughey and a particularly drunk Jack Nicholson. “Combined with all the cocaine Axl was taking… it was a real heady, pure platonic relationship.”

There’s a lot of this. If you’re not familiar with Kane, there’s a lot to get into here: despite looking for all the world like a slim, mid-20s stoner with a penchant for kitschy Americana, he describes himself as a “fat, fucking middle-aged dude” and speaks at length in his indeterminate accent about various wild times in the hedonistic days of yore.

In a British cultural landscape that’s so often obsessed with “authenticity”, this mischievous inversion of rock star cliché, deliberately paper-thin and preposterous yet delivered with a certain wit and warmth, is refreshing. Lazarus Kane isn’t necessarily laughing at some Saxondale-esque caricature of rock’n’roll lore – he’s indulging and toying with it, and clearly loves whatever game it is he’s playing.

His back story is quite something. He tells NME he was born to a religious family in Sheepsclaw, Arizona — it’s a local name, don’t Google it. His love of music grew from his family’s church activities, which would see him travel around the country, never really settling into school and spreading the Good News through the power of song. Decades of rock’n’roll hedonism across America apparently followed, before he arrived in Bristol about five years ago “chasing a girl – [a] tale as old as time…”

The first that many of us heard of Lazarus Kane was his debut single ‘Narcissus’, released in autumn 2019 on indie label du jour Speedy Wunderground. With label mastermind Dan Carey’s fingerprints all over Kane’s seedy, slinky disco-rock, it was quite the introduction. Then, in May, follow-up track ‘Night Walking’ made good on that early promise: an instantly bewitching romp, its pulsating drum machines and Chic-esque clipped guitars lay the foundations for an enormous central chorus. It’s smart, goofy, brazen and irresistible all at the same time. His live show is like that, too: he never breaks character, and peppers each set with allusions to “his” past.

“I originally wrote ‘Night Walking’ as a Bond theme,” he tells me. “James Bond was very popular at the time and I had this idea of an ode to salubrious activities of the night time. It made the top three, but it was Paul” – he catches himself when he remembers NME might not be on first-name terms with this guy – “Paul McCartney who won, and all credit to him, that surprise reggae interlude really takes it to a level that I didn’t see coming.”

To be clear, the Bond film that McCartney soundtracked was Live and Let Die. That film was released in 1973.

“I wanted to… get the serotonin goin’,” he says, chewing over those last two words. “It’s entertainment for entertainment’s sake. There’s no metaphor [which he pronounces ‘mettafah’] or simile – that’s it. I wrote it so long ago that it’s taken on a strange position in the cultural landscape.”

For all the bizarre meandering, Kane is pretty sincere about certain things, and his views about entertainment are among them.

“I like to entertain people, get a reaction. Some people love it, some people really hate it – if that happens, I feel like I’m doing my job,” he muses. “I don’t want people to feel indifferent about it. I like subverting people’s expectations about what entertainment can be: like, why do you pay money to go see something? It’s a transaction. I like messing with people.” NME can vouch for that. “I’d say I’m an artist first, an entertainer second, and a considerate lover third.”

He’s not without self-doubt about this stuff, though.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a nervous performer — on stage is where I feel most comfortable, where I can truly express myself,” he says. “But I like having a large group of talented musicians to hide my own insecurities and self-hatred behind. The band all came together through word of mouth: who had the quickest, hottest licks on the six strings, the hottest rhythms whackin’ on that bass? It’s a classic rock story, you know?”

Speaking of which, back to his friend from Guns N’ Roses.

“Axl — the man! I first met him in the early ‘80s,” he recounts, improbably. “I was working in quite a bad real estate development. We were trying to build the world’s largest log flume in LA and we lost a lot of the investment, and he came in and saved my ass. We shared a mutual love of superyachts, and he’s just a real nice guy. Surprisingly down to earth, and very funny.”

He becomes reflective. “I lost touch with him when I went into business making pre-cooked spaghetti, and ‘Chinese Democracy’ was calling… Axl, if you read this: I love you, brother.”

Like Rose, Kane commits to his performances, and indeed his interviews. His tangents and tall stories are unrelenting: the experience of trying to get any details from him oscillates between amusing, exhausting and absurdly funny again as the sheer, repetitive devotion to his bit eventually wears down any underlying cynicism. Kane says that the time he spent in his youth around evangelical preachers was a formative influence here.

“That passionate, firebrand preacher thing: I picked it up by osmosis,” he enthuses. “I take inspiration from the great televangelists of the ‘80s and ‘90s; maybe you don’t agree with the message, but you gotta admire their dedication to it.

“I wouldn’t call myself religious anymore, but I’m spiritual. I’m interested now in how the new religion is worship of the self, no longer about… metaphysical beings. You’re your own Mayflower, travelling the seas of life…”

As our conversation eventually draws to a close — the man can talk — NME tries to pin him down by asking how old he is. There’s a pause.

“What a question! How old do you think I am? No guess? You want an exact age? I’m between 50 and 55, but I can’t give you the exact age because of… data protection, stuff like that.”

With that, we finish up. He says he’s off to make meatballs and do some hot yoga. Whoever Lazarus Kane really is, he’s got his shtick worked out very well indeed, and some big tunes to back it up — even if, according to his own account, he was eight years old when he wrote his current single. Perhaps to sweat the maths here is to miss the point.

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