Rock history, like other sorts, tends to get told from the point of view of victors rather than losers. By popular acclaim, the big winners of British rock in the 1990s were the “Britpop” bands and it is they who have had the narrative field to themselves ever since. From 1993 until the end of the decade, the north/south jousting between Blur and Oasis, the geeky posturing of Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and the retro reclamation of the mod aesthetic of the 1960s by a slew of groups with cutesy names such as Menswear, became the measure by which success was judged and reputations brokered.

This was, and still is, intensely annoying to Luke Haines, a man whose “biblical desire for revenge” has spawned a lavishly bitchy memoir packed with gripes, grievances and tall stories told at the expense of other more famous musicians who caught the Britpop zeitgeist and whom he has chosen to ignore. As the soi-disant “recovering egomaniac” leader of the Auteurs - a band who, through a mixture of bad timing and truculent originality, managed to comprehensively miss the boat despite touring and hanging out with all of Britpop's big names, and nearly winning the Mercury Music Prize in 1993 - Haines has constructed a vivid literary persona for himself as the great, grumpy Nearly Man of 1990s rock.

The Auteurs took flight in the slipstream of their south London buddies Suede in 1992. At the time, rock fans everywhere were neurotically obsessed with Nirvana and grunge, and it was the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994 that, according to Haines, dumbed down everything. “Without the abrupt end of Nirvana there would have been no lightentertainment battle for No1 between Blur and Oasis. No young British artists. No Cool Britannia. Not only did Cobain kill himself, he went and left the bloody door open on his way out.”

Turning his back on sensible career management and Britpop's cheery provincialism, Haines proceeds to become the pitiless scourge of a movement he characterises as “typically thought up by some lance corporal halfwit... unaware the term had been used before to refer to that pre-Beatles milky light pop with a Norrie Paramour orchestral arrangement”.

He pours endless scorn on his amiable peers, who bizarrely seem not to mind or even notice. His old mate Cocker gets the thumbs-down, once success finally beckons, for having “packed up his amateur birdman wings... he has one eye on Woolworths”. Blur, “those habitual bandwagon jumpers”, he dismisses as “a masterclass in media complicity”. Thom Yorke of Radiohead - “that most heinous of creatures, a heavy rock outfit, fright-wig and all” - compliments him on his relentlessly contrarian attitude. Noel Gallagher, whose “mindless northern bluff” Haines privately despises, praises him to his face for his “top tunes, man”. The Verve, another northern band he disparages, who share the same record label as the Auteurs, kindly pay Haines's drug fine from their tour float and are rewarded by being bombarded with pyrotechnic devices after a Scandinavian concert.

Haines, it seems, has always aspired to be rock's misanthrope in excelsis. A musical snob from the home counties with a thing about the Velvet Underground, he studied at the London College of Music, proudly boasting: “I am a cell of one. Great art must be created in isolation.” Eschewing the standard guitar/drums band format, Haines hired a cellist, installed his girlfriend on bass and, thanks to the choice of an arty French name, made more of an impression across the channel in his early career than he did back home.

As Bad Vibes opens, Haines is on stage in Strasbourg getting badgered by “an unfashionable, drunken and extremely aggressive dwarf”. This arresting image of a perpetual misfit in search of an audience that never quite shows up sets the tone of the book perfectly. Nothing goes right for Haines and co from then on. He ends up in hospital after a drunken brawl on the night the Auteurs' album misses out - by one vote - on the Mercury. Naturally insubordinate, he gets thrown off a UK tour supporting The The. He's equally rude to underlings: his attempt to break America comes unstuck after he quarrels with the management of the Auteurs' support act. Even the people Haines professes to like stateside, he can't get along with. His tour manager Gene, for example, “claims to be employed by our US record company, but I just can't imagine anyone paying this guy money and having to see him every day”.

Haines's musical capacity for transgressing the lightweight standards of Britpop proves as unerring as it is commercially disastrous. While other bands blither their way to platinum discs singing about greyhound racing and wonderwalls, Haines makes a record about the Baader Meinhof gang. By remarkable reverse serendipity, the Auteurs release an album called After Murder Park, with its lead single Unsolved Child Murder, 12 days before Thomas Hamilton slaughters 16 children at Dunblane Primary School in 1996. By the time the American rock press has excitedly picked up on this, the Auteurs are back in blighty, with their US tour aborted, “once again ahead of their time”, as Haines acerbically notes.

Haines's boast in his subtitle that he had some part in bringing down Britpop is the biggest joke he tells against himself in the book. He is all too aware of his waspish irrelevance to the pop circus that swirls around him. The Auteurs never become a part of new Labour's branding of Cool Britannia and Haines isn't present at the famous 1997 party in Downing Street. By the time Oasis has taken up residency in the pop chart, Haines has more or less disbanded the Auteurs in favour of other recording projects, such as his art-pop band Black Box Recorder, and is holed up with an eccentric rich pal in the Sussex Downs, as high as a kite on LSD. Back home in Camden - now “overrun by provincial zombies from Northshire” - he is about to turn 30 and plotting his exile. Let's hope Haines gets around to telling us next about Buenos Aires, where he now lives a life as remote, presumably, from the cosy platitudes of Britpop as only he could wish.

Bad Vibesby Luke Haines
Heinemann £12.99 pp256

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