Luke Haines

Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop

(Degenerate Music)

Alexis Petridis

The Guardian

It seems almost spiteful to bring up Luke Haines' name at a time when music journalists are impelled to write articles predicting what new artists are going to be big next year. Casting the bones of rock and pop is a thankless enough task without being reminded of previous disasters in musical forecasting, and musical forecasts come no more disastrous than that emblazoned on the cover of a now-defunct weekly 14 years ago. There was Luke Haines, glowering above a headline that claimed his band the Auteurs were about to achieve untold commercial success.

In fairness, Haines didn't disappear in quite the same way as, say, Terris, a gobby Welsh band who were supposed to take over the world in 2000, then vanished off the face of it so completely one began to suspect the involvement of the Chilean secret police. Nevertheless, it swiftly became apparent that the music weekly's prediction had perhaps erred on the side of rashness. Within a couple of years, all talk of untold commercial success had ceased. Haines threw himself off a 15ft wall while on tour in Spain, breaking both his ankles.

The British public proved curiously resistance to the idea of making a Christmas hit out of an Auteurs single called Unsolved Child Murder. There was a moment in 2000 when it looked like the prediction might belatedly come true - his post-Auteurs band Black Box Recorder had a Top 20 hit with a single called The Facts of Life - but the moment swiftly passed, hurried along by Haines' decision to give an interview in which he called the band's record label "fucking cunts".

Six years on, with no sign of his intriguing-sounding projected stage musical about notorious property tycoon Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, even the musicians who collaborate with him seem to view Haines as synonymous with commercial failure on such a scale that thinking about it too much can bring about a pronounced case of existential despair. A few weeks ago, on the Guardian website, you could find John Moore, his former Black Box Recorder cohort, blogging about meeting an old friend while touring with Haines. "She is now a highly successful solicitor," he lamented. "I, on the other hand, am playing saw with a man who sings about Gary Glitter, Peter Sutcliffe and Sir Oswald Mosley."

It would be a sad story, were it not for the fact that Luke Haines is such an extravagantly talented songwriter, both unique and, one suspects, uniquely unsuited to mainstream success. It's a fact underlined by the title track and lead single from his 11th album: for Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop, Haines called upon the services of sometime Sugababes and Rachel Stevens producer Richard X, then put him to work remixing a song that references transgressive performance artists the Viennese Aktionists, the 1914 Vorticist art journal Blast, Hungarian photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Nazi anthem The Horst Wessel Song. Despite the producer's ministrations, the charts remained mysteriously un-busted.

It sets the tone for the rest of the album, which manages to be both accessible and deeply unsettling, matching crunching glam-rock guitar riffs and huge choruses to subject matter most songwriters would steer well clear of. The Walton Hop makes blackly comic capital from the topic of the teenage disco frequented by convicted child sex offenders including Jonathan King.

Pop-related paedophilia crops up again on the closing Bad Reputation, which retells the story of Gary Glitter's downfall from the perspective of a member of his backing group, aghast at the effect The Leader's sexual proclivities are having on his own standing. It offers perhaps the most improbable singalong chorus of the year: "Gary Glitter - he's a dirty old man, ruining the reputation of the Glitter Band." Leeds United is both naggingly catchy and about the Yorkshire Ripper murders. In the same way that the topics explored on Haines' remarkable terrorism-obsessed 1996 album Baader Meinhof suddenly seemed far less esoteric five years after its release, it makes for pretty queasy listening in light of current events: "In the House of Lords, the Chamber of Horrors at Madam Tussauds, out with the old, we've got to make room for them all."

Occasionally, Haines' desire to provoke verges on the suicidal. That Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop was released to a response muted even by Haines' standards may have less to do with its quality than with the presence of Heritage Rock, a viciously funny satire apparently aimed at the handful of magazines that usually champion him. Then again, one of the artists lovingly alluded to on the title track is Wyndham Lewis, the brilliant painter and sculptor whose belligerence effectively scuppered his own career, leaving him, as one contemporary put it, a "lonely old volcano".

It's a description that fits Luke Haines pretty well, but as Off My Rocker proves, when he erupts, it's still pretty spectacular.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006