“It is thought that new work drawn from the Scrolls is unlikely to surface until such time as the social and political news in the English-speaking world ceases being so far-fetched, and emanating from such an implausible and unsympathetic cast of characters.”
~ The North Sea Scrolls Wikipedia page
“I’m not a historian, I’ll say what I want to.”
~ Luke Haines, ‘England, Scotland and Wales’, The Oliver Twist Manifesto, 2001
I don’t remember where I was when I learned that one of my problem children, The Puddle’s 1985 mini-LP Pop. Lib., had been mentioned in the British internet by one Luke Haines. Favourably, given the company we’re keeping.
ST: 1967 is almost the perfect pop record and its lyrics are a work of raw genius. Yet, if you ask 99.9% of people on the street if they were aware of its existence they’d have no idea what you were talking about. Does that piss you off?
LH: 99.9% of people on the street are unaware of ‘Jane From Occupied Europe’ by Swell Maps. 99.9% of people on the street are unaware of ‘Oar’ by Skip Spence. 10% of people on the street have heard of Mark E. Smith. 99.9% of people remain unaware of The Fall’s latest album. 100% of people on the street are unaware of ‘Pop Lib’ by The Puddle… make that 150%. Speaking of Simon Cowell, a friend of mine got talking to him a few years ago. My friend mentioned Scott Walker. Cowell hadn’t heard of Scott Walker.
50.1% (or 50.150150150150154%, depending on your view of percentages) more obscure than other leading rock obscurities! But such respect awakes a reciprocal anxiety – what if I don’t think his work is any good?
Luckily, it’s checked out over the years.1 The first thing I heard on the then-sparser “internet” was ‘Junk Shop Clothes’ from the Auteurs’ first LP New Wave, and it’s lovely, with all the attributes of decent songwriting, and a lyric and performance that mixes empathy and cruelty and a bit of know-it-allism into an engaging, insinuating drop (this exquisite mix is the Haines house blend). Then I worked out that Luke had been part of Black Box Recorder, one of my better MySpace follows back when the internet was still cool. I saw he’d recorded a defiantly unfathomable bit of historical revisionism called The North Sea Scrolls with my hero Cathal Coughlan, plus journalist Andrew Mueller narrating between songs. Then I read Bad Vibes, which made me laugh more often and immoderately than any book I’ve ever read. Then, I somehow, miraculously, found a copy of his double CD compilation Outsider/In in JB Hi Fi New Lynn. This artifact, miraculously durable for its fragile format, stays in play in our car 10 years later. Like Taylor Swift, Haines comes in multiple eras, and the era I find most fascinating is sampled (except for Black Box Recorder) on the second CD of Outsider/In; which covers the Auteurs’ final album How I Learned to Love the Bootboys (1999), the first few solo albums, the re-recorded compilation (Haines was doing this value-added stuff before Taylor Swift discovered it) Das Capital (2003, subtitled The Songwriting Genius of Luke Haines and the Auteurs) and the 1996 Baader Meinhof concept album (credited to Baader Meinhof).2 Across Baader Meinhof’s 10 tracks 70’s terrorism, at the time seen as the sexier side of the brutality that permeated the decade I grew up in, is entertainingly and revealingly conflated with 70’s soccer hooliganism and 70’s pop fandom in a musical stew of 70’s sounds (funky clavinet, fuzz guitar leads, tabla, glissando strings), creating a retrofuturist 70’s sound-that-never-was. Baader Meinhof played well in the ISIS years. Ever wondered why local yobos would go somewhere horrible to join a terror death gang? All the answers are here.
Do you remember Petra Schelm
She was nineteen when she was gunned down
I remember when I was sixteen
The acid was danger red
Fire magic in my head
Walking around with heavy manners
You're going home in a fucking ambulance
There's gonna be an accident
Follow me down
Down on the escalator
Department stores, friends like yours
You’re gonna get it sooner or later
Das Capital reinvented Luke’s greatest hits, well, some of his best songs, from the Auteurs era and some new work, with strings and other grandiose instrumentation, combining several of them into the ‘Das Capital Overture’. (has any other songwriter written an overture?)3
‘Satan Wants Me’ is a learned analysis of the British occult tradition, inspired by Robert Irwin’s classic comic novel (1999).
Satan wants me for my mind
To marry his daughter, have a child
To lead a magic life
Satan wants me, not you
L. Ron Hubbard, Anton LaVey
Got the potions but couldn't play
The blues like Jimmy Page
Satan wants me, not you
‘The Mitford Sisters’ (originally titled, Haines perhaps overestimating his audience, myself included, ‘Michael Powell’) might be my favourite Luke Haines song, telling, a little inaccurately so as to get at more of the truth, the story of said sisters.4 Nancy, the novelist, whose clever myth of a glamorously horrible aristocracy deserves some of the credit for the Tory party’s appeal to the British working class in recent decades, appears in Freaks Out!; and then there’s Unity, who shot herself for Hitler; Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, the Labour MP who became the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and was jailed with him (at the insistence of Nancy, who was by that time in cahoots with the Free French); and Jessica, the Communist, whose husband Esmond Romilly was lost over the North Sea in a bomber on his way back from Hamburg in November 1941, this death being the subject of the middle section of the song, which, like Nancy’s droll, romantic books, captures the tragic Arthurian essence of an England divided and imperiled, then both saved and lost, in ways historians can’t.5
Many years later, Jessica, known as “Decca”, would record a fine cover version of Paul MacCartney’s very best (certainly, his most Hainesian) Beatles lyric.
In the Das Capital ‘Overture’, but not on the album proper, is a snippet of a song called ‘Discomania’, an electropop ditty about the “Silent Twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons, which Haines recorded a few times (perhaps while considering a Baader Meinhof style concept album on the theme); this definitive version, from the soundtrack to the film Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry, is on the Outsider/In compilation.
Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry ends with ‘Essexmania’, a 6 minute club track that riffs on the title track from How I Learned to Love the Bootboys. Whereas the first three Auteurs records were (augmented) guitar band records, Bootboys found Haines, with a great set of songs and ideas, experimenting with synths and other electronica; a few years later his first solo album proper, The Oliver Twist Manifesto (2001), would be described on allmusic by Andy Kellman thus:
“it offers relatively ornate electronic-pop realized by an elite songwriter in his mid-thirties -- one who has been keeping his ear to the streets. There's more than a gentle nudge toward the production techniques of visionaries Mannie Fresh and Timbaland; witness the jittering beats in "Oliver Twist" and the laser zap-zaps in the title track for two major examples.”
In other words, I appreciate this Haines era because, at a time when I was very much hors de combat and unable to distinguish an Aphex Twin from a Chemical Brother, he was entwined with the musical zeitgeist, this being a time when the groundwork for ‘20’s pop was being laid. And I recognised this without knowing anything about it back in 2015, when I thought I heard a knock-off instrumental version of this song, ‘The Spook Manifesto’, coming from the TV, which was playing Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
What I was noticing, for the first time, was trap beats. The percussion, or whatever the fuck that is, in Luke’s song mimics the Roland 808 hi hat, and the bass the slow bending pull of its bass drum, closely enough, in 2001, to mimic a style that hardly even existed yet (T.I. had started working on it in that year with the excellent ‘I’m Serious’, and would define the sound with Jeezy and Gucci Mane a few years later). England versus America.
Luke Haines reads the list of freaks, freak enablers, and non-freaks at Rough Trade West, Apr 4, 2024, filmed by Hayley Theyers.
So I’m pleased to see Lana Del Rey listed as a “Freak” in the lists at the end of Freaks Out!, because I first started appreciating trap beats through songs like this (from 2015’s Honeymoon, her deepest cut of an album):
Luke in Freaks Out! is constantly debunking the male genius myth (to be a male genius, be fucked up, dig into your addictions, get more fucked up, and die or be otherwise taken out of action after a few great albums). If that’s the male genius myth that got us through the male genius period (Lennon to Cobain, after that diminishing returns)6 what’s the female genius myth today? I’d like to propose Lana as the archetypal example. Be fucked up, become a hotbed of feminine chaos, make this not-ok self both the lens and the subject of your art, and use the administrative genius expected of every woman to command the forces, male or otherwise, needed to perfect said art for as long as you like. If the precedents of the male genius myth were the Thomases, Chatterton and De Quincey, the precursors of the female genius myth are Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great.7 There’s even a word for such a practice in cinema – auteur.
In the final chapter of Freaks Out! there’s an appreciation of two Billies. One is “Freak enabler” Billie Eilish, whose appreciation of this Black Box Recorder song has given it new life. Check the wonderful ‘Night of the Hunter’ video by Clio Barnard.
I remember Poppy, grounded after experimenting with wildness as a teenager, playing Black Box Recorder’s ‘Girl Singing in the Wreckage’, a song she’d discovered independent of us, on repeat in her room.
The other Billie is Billie Piper, whose “horny ‘swingbeat’ classic” ‘Honey to the Bee’, written and produced by Jim Marr and Wendy Page, inspired Black Box Recorder’s one big hit, ‘The Facts of Life’. I remember an interviewer in the 1990’s asking me one of those either/or pop questions, “Madonna or Christina Aguilera?” and giving the only answer I could honestly give at that time, “Billie Piper”. 30 years later, it’s still the right answer, because Piper, together with her childhood friend (and Succession writer/producer) Lucy Prebble went on to create the best TV series of recent times, I Hate Suzie, which is both a commentary on life as a B-list celebrity (and life as friend, husband, etc. of one), full of excellent pop critique, and the feminist statement Barbie thought it was, smarter, more just, more anguished, and actually funny.
Luke Haines, in song and word, reconnects me with so much I’m already connected with, adding a lot more I don’t know, about the freaks of history and the freaks, and their works, that hold pop and art together; his examples, in his songs as in his books, pop from the narrative like the freaks pushing history to hell in a handcart in an Adam Curtis film; like Curtis he has a sympathetic eye for the half-mad visionary we find at, or near, the heart of all important developments. Some of the best chapters in Freaks Out! are accurate reportage (like the “meeting your idols” semi-cautionary tale of the Incredible String Band), some are wild fantasy, like ‘In The Future Nobody Will Be Famous for Fifteen Minutes’ which somehow comes closer to the truth about the future prospects for music than any detailed sociological analysis of the “pop” phenomenon. I’d love to join in with my own ideas about why post-punk existed before punk (in my version it was called krautrock) and why a revival no longer signifies the death of a sound (the recent nostalgia revivals of shoegaze and rap-metal acts were contemporaneous with the reinvention of these sounds by younger artists). But it’s not my job to digest for you a book, and, thus far, a trilogy, you should be reading for yourself.8
Algorithmic Bob - Felt - Stained Glass Windows In The Sky
It’s still checking out - give the double disc 2022 collaboration with Peter Buck All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out a listen if you doubt me.
Not the only time one of Haines’ cottage industry marketing ploys has foreshadowed a megabucks Swiftian initiative. A few years back Haines was selling single-edition re-recordings of his latest concept album to collectors. Swift will be doing this with The Tortured Poets Department once sales of coloured vinyl abate, if she isn’t already.
At the time of writing Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department Overture’ had not yet begun its instantaneous climb to #1 in the Billboard charts.
There were some other Mitford sisters who did not distinguish themselves quite so flagrantly.
Nancy Mitford’s best novel is The Pursuit of Love; students of World War 2 might also appreciate her phony war entertainment Pigeon Pie. Fans of Mitford, and who isn’t, should read Lisa Hilton’s The Horror of Love, which places her work in the context of her long love affair with Gaston Palewski, trusted advisor to Charles De Gaulle and one of France’s top womanizers.
By the end of 2004’s Dig, the Dandy Warhols can still be heard insisting that The Brian Jonestown Massacre are the better band of the two, despite 107 minutes of documentary evidence to the contrary.
Haines follows in the footsteps of Albert Goldman, who debunked Thomas De Quincey in the dissertation for his English Lit PhD . Goldman later went on to debunk Elvis and John Lennon, and was plotting to debunk Jim Morrison when he died.
It just occurred to me that the one volume of the Luke Haines Trilogy that I haven’t set eyes on yet, Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll, covers the same Haines era as this column and no doubt could have made it far better informed.