Lust for Lola

Strolling onto the Bristol scene in an eclectic two-man form in 2008 (King Kenny on electric guitar, founding member Miles Bavin on acoustic) Lust for Lola began gigging at established Bristol venues such as The Louisiana, Croft and The Shakespeare. After later teaming up with bass player James Marshall the band has since gone through some changes. With university commitments keeping bass player James Marshall from joining the line-up on a regular basis and the road-that-should-just-be-a-brick-wall aka the Severn Bridge (calm down I’m only joking!) keeping King Kenny away during tougher student-related financial times, Lust for Lola has taken on the kind of changes reminiscent of a Fleetwood Mac skake-up.

More recently Lust has welcomed talented drummer Louise Stevens bringing the much needed percussion to punctuate Bavin’s songs. As of yet, the full line-up have yet to play together and subsequently there have been gigs with no percussion and gigs with percussion but no accompanying electric guitar. One thing is always constant though, stellar song writing and passionate vocals. I’ve known Miles personally for years and have been singing some of his songs since our days at Uni. With influences such as Blur, The Beatles, Ocean Colour Scene, Stereophonics, Kelly Jones (to name a few) all evident in his repertoire, theres never a sense of repetition or clichéd sentiments. ‘Kaleidoscope’ is one of my favourites, bringing a barrage of emotion with long instrumentals and cutting vocals. ‘Urban Fairytales’ reminds me of my mid-teen days lying on my bed sulking about not be able to make some stupid underage drinking fest and wallowing in my skin-deep misery. I am not implying in any way that the song is trivial, but that it has this weird way of evoking feelings you haven’t lived with in years. Think Suede/Coldplay/Starsailors early and finest work. What’s great about Lust is that the slow, atmospheric stuff is done as well at the upbeat, less serious fodder. ‘Bus Stop’ being a fantastic example and kind of takes you back (literally, if you’re really old, on telly if you’re young) to the Cavern Club footage of the early Beatles coming together for a jolly old knees-up about something so beautifully mundane as a bus journey.