It’s hard to imagine Luke Haines cheering for The X Factor
hopefuls but that’s how Britain’s most acerbic songwriter now gets his
Saturday night kicks. “I’m a high-culture, low-culture man,” says the
singer, who once tilted at the Christmas No 1 with a single called Unsolved
Child Murder. “I know the difference between my Karl Krause [German
philosopher] and my Carl Dreyer [Danish film director] but I like a bit of X
Factor too.”
Perhaps ITV could replace Simon Cowell with Haines, 42. He has after all
passed judgment on his cultural inferiors in a highly entertaining memoir, Bad
Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall.
But when we meet in a Camden Spanish bar to talk about 21st Century Man,
his new solo album, Haines is at pains not to make disobliging remarks about
his contemporaries. “The bigger names got a slightly rough ride but it was
overplayed. Some of those people just pretended not to have read it,” he
says.
It was Haines’s group the Auteurs who signalled a way forward from American
grunge in 1992 with pithy, narrative songs in the Kinks tradition. When Blur
and Pulp picked up the mantle Haines was swiftly evicted from the Britpop
party, his lyrical obsessions and persona too sour for the gurning merriment
of Cool Britannia.
Trying the patience of his record company, the Surrey-born singer recorded a
concept album about terrorism under the Baader Meinhoff name in the carefree
pre-9/11 days. Despite a daring raid on the charts with the candy-coated pop
of Black Box Recorder, he pursued every avenue likely to lead to
“cult status” rather than become the platinum-seller his admirers believe he
could have been.
Documenting these years in Bad Vibes, it was Haines’s dismissals — of
Oasis, “derivative northern boors”; Justine Frischmann, of Elastica, “a
drag, an ambitious media arriviste”; and most cutting of all, Chris Evans,
“shallow, bullying manchild, a jumped-up
kissogram-turned-light-entertainment colossus” — that unsusprisingly
attracted headlines.
“Attack’s the best form of defence, I just had to spill the beans,” Haines
sings on Our Man in Buenos Aires on the new record. “I said Thom
Yorke had a fright wig and Radiohead were a hard-rock band. Both things were
true in 1993. There’s nothing wrong with that, I had a fright wig.”
The legacy of Britpop, he concludes, was a competitiveness that pushed his
musical barbs out of the mainstream. “It became that if you weren’t selling
as many records as Oasis there was no point in existing.”
There’s even talk of a film option for Bad Vibes. “I think it
should be animated. Or maybe it could be like that Dylan film (I’m Not
There) with six actors playing me.” Who would he cast as the hero? “I
could get someone from Hollyoaks to play me.”
21st Century Man is an “upbeat” album from a Haines boosted by
fatherhood and marriage to Siân Pattenden, a writer and illustrator. It has
glockenspiels tinkling away on the Radio 2-friendly opener, Suburban
Mourning.
“It’s about being middle-aged, accepting that I’m an exile and liking it.
Fatherhood means I’m not an idiot any more. Is the pram in the hallway the
enemy of art? No, it’s the internet in the study. I toyed with calling the
album Exile on Haines Street but no one wants to live with a pun like
that.”
21st Century Man is an album of songs about “wilful exiles”. Klaus
Kinski, the lunatic German actor who enjoyed a tempestuous screen
parternship with Werner Herzog, is lauded. Names culled from the newsreel of
Haines’s fevered imagination include Wearside Jack, the Yorkshire Ripper
hoaxer, and John Stonehouse, the Labour minister who tried to fake his own
death.
It’s the Haines version of those I Love the Seventies . . . shows
that clog up unloved satellite television channels, “where someone who
patently doesn’t remember watches a clip and goes ‘Oh yeah, I remember Trumpton’.
It’s dangerous, we should all have our own memory of things.”
Isn’t Haines too young to really remember the 1969 Moon landing that he quotes
in 21st Century Man? “Billy Joel referenced it in We Didn’t
Start the Fire. I’m taking his idea and moving forward with it. I like
Billy Joel.”
English Southern Man hails Stanley Spencer, painter of biblical
fantasies in Berkshire. “He painted Christ in Cookham. This is a man who
sees resurrection everywhere. That’s fanaticism not English parochialism.
That ties him to Klaus Kinski. He thought he was Christ. He did a one-man
show in Germany.” He adds: “The North has been well catered for in popular
and non-popular music so I’m creating my own southern mythology.”
The title track delivers Haines’s crisp summation of the 1980s. “Suzy Lamplugh
disappeared, David Bowie lost it for years — died a death in his slap bass
phase, Everybody else died of Aids.” But he doesn’t want a feud with the
Thin White Duke. “The collective memory of my generation is that David Bowie
did lose it in the Eighties quite badly. It was quite a fall. But he got it
back in the Nineties.”
While the Thatcher years prompted protests from pop’s leftists, they quite
appealed to Haines. “They were pretty good because it made people work. Art
is always good when you have to struggle. Never give an artist any money. I
never thought of myself as a liberal.”
Haines has even written an as yet unperformed musical, Property, in a
National Theatre workshop, about the dying days of the last Conservative
Government. “It’s the history of the rotten underbelly of Britain. It’s
about a ruthless property developer and follows Conservatives like Jonathan
Aitken, imagining what they were up to in the Sixties. It was a bit too nuts
for the NT but it was very entertaining, I thought.”
With Property lost for now, Haines will keep ploughing his singular
furrow. “I keep going back to themes, like a dog going back to its own
vomit. I’m a 42-year-old man. Getting grumpy about new groups is ridiculous.
I’m setting out my stall of contentment on Suburban Mourning. I
wrote it about an idyllic day, when nothing could get in my way, even the
Satanists next door.”
After two decades on the fringes, could this finally be the breakthrough
Haines No 1? “Chris Evans might not play it on Radio 2 though, given the,
er, history.”
21st Century Man is out now on Fantastic Plastic Records
Your Comments
Order By: