English Pop

In London, walking 200 yards can take you to another country. You can drop several socio-economic classes. Time travel from steel and reflective glass to medieval stone. Emigrate from Little Lebanon to Little America with no need for a green card.

Therefore it should not surprise me that travelling a couple of miles to Kilburn always feels likes an expedition. A feeling enhanced by the fact NW6 never ranks in my mind as a destination of choice. It is a place I only ever go to for specific reasons. There has to be a mission element to get me walking down Kilburn High Road.

Tonight the mission was simple. Enjoy a curry and watch the sardonic pop monsters that form Black Box Recorder play their first headlining gig in five years. If I had been able to accomplish the two objectives simultaneously, the evening would have probably taken on mythic proportions when recalled years from now.

Indian food should be a sensual, satisfying experience, but too often in England it is reduced to little more than the serving rubbish smothered in a generic curry sauce.* Looking at the garish signage and its Life On Mars wood-panelled walls should have put me off eating at Vijay. However I had heard rumours of good vadai and dosai and Ragam had already taught me the value of disregarding appearance when looking for decent southern Indian food.

While no Cleveland Street miracle, Vijay’s food was good. Its heat came from chillies, the tingle on the tongue from freshly crushed spices. The selection of vadai and coconut chutney comfort for my soul frayed by lack of sleep. Surreal Girl pined for her cauliflower Manchurian, but I think even she might be persuaded to make a return visit.

The gaudy retro of Vijay was echoed when we got into the Luminaire. Unintended and without irony at the restaurant, the mirrorball scattering light off of velvet and black walls, the union jack backdrop emblazoned with gold lettering shouting: ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Not Dole’ were wonderfully deliberate. The effect was like being in a working man’s club taken over by students putting on a punk benefit for striking miners.

The Luminaire might lack Bush Hall’s Edwardian pomp and finery, but it has a wonderful intimacy. It also has a militant no talking while musicians are playing policy which I adore. Even when packed to its 300 capacity, it now gives BH a close run for title of my favourite music venue in London.

Support to Black Box Recorder was a skeleton crew Madam. This meant the band imagined as duo featuring a chantreuse called Sukie with Pat Butcher style earrings and cellist called Sarah who I would have instantly fallen in love with if I had been sixteen. Between them they performed songs of noir romance and corroded hope which veered from the achingly beautiful to nail scratch sharp.

Without any undue poncing around, Black Box Recorder came on stage a little after 9:30pm. John Moore and Luke Haines looked like aged Teddy Boys, Sarah Nixey the polished, posh divorcée who has enough glamour and Machiavellian nous to cause a lot of trouble. They exuded something between a childhood gang taking secret delight at a bit of undiscovered mischief and a disturbing menace a trois. It looked promising.

From the opening anthem swell and lines: ‘The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It’s been there forever, it’s never going to change’ I instantly remembered why I am devoted to BBR. They are pop. English pop. Pop about England’s peculiarities of place and people, about the hidden menaces of the home counties, the unspoken terror and insecurities of childhood, the ablation of living somewhere like Southend-on-Sea.

From joining ‘the order’ in Wonderful Life to ‘keeping your mouth shut’ in Straight Life and ‘doing the decent thing’ in Brutality, the class, coldness and conformity I have spent my life kicking against were all paraded. Tonight the brilliant chill running through England Made Me was more inescapable than ever. The disappointment that Jackie Sixty did not get an airing softened by compensation of new song Do You Believe In God?

The convulsing guitar crash of the boys was just about kept in line by the caramel ice of Nixey’s vocal. Despite the extra guts of a live performance, you were constantly reminded of just how powerful and splendid a proper pop tune can be – even if it is about Lord Lucan. The Black Box Recorder school of song remains a triumphant mix of sugar and razor blades. Five years on, they are a still a bloody good reason for a Kilburn expedition.


*What I usually refer to a ‘dirty curry’ though the term ‘Jacksinated curry’ is also apposite.

Bad Vibes

My copy of Bad Vibes, Luke Haines’ autobiography has been read twice. Two readings is actually quite restrained. Given I have wanted to read some form of Haines’ biography for more than a decade, it would be easy to repeatedly gorge on his words.

Bad Vibes is never less than honest, never less than hilarious. The prologue is entitled: Is it ever right to strike a dwarf? From that line on, laughter is often the only response to the ridiculousness and terror Haines saddles to the stuttering trajectory of his career.

As you might expect from someone whose songs have chronicled everything from English cant and Euroterrorism to unsolved child murders, Bad Vibes does not offer cosy reading. Subtitled Britpop and my part in its downfall, it delivers a caustic perspective on the nineties British music scene. It is razorblade writing and few escape getting cut, least of all Haines.

It is devastating survey of the period. Where appropriate there is grudging respect for his contemporaries. Genuine songwriting ability is always acknowledged. Jarvis Cocker and Pulp are relatively free from attack. However, perishing insults abound.

Suede are ‘baked beans and sulphate’. Matt Johnson ‘a dim bully’. The David and Victoria Beckham of Britpop – Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann – are a 'gruesome couple … greedy hobgoblins’. Best of all, Oasis are accurately labelled ‘derivative northern boors’. Never a truer word said, except when Haines admits that at times he is acting like a ‘fully fledged cunt’.

What Haines provides alongside such insightful wit, is the truth of the time. Truth despite the fact it is at best uncomfortable and unflattering. There is no easy retreat into hindsight. This means he also records himself as capable of brutal stabs of spite and staggering explosions of stupidity.

The voices in his head which help lead him to shatter his legs. The bad acid he takes which convinces him he is Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, being pursued by a violent peasant mob led by Kula Shaker. Surprisingly insane incidents such as these appear to be the least of Luke Haines problems.

Between 1991-1997, Haines was his own worst enemy. Young, beyond talented and a prize arsehole. His ramshackle approach to drink and drugs regular saw him in casualty or busted by foreign cops. He short circuits chance after chance for careerism and greater success. Despite this, he creates arguably some of the best music of the time.

You could look at the book as a musical horror story. Haines occasionally manages to be the antihero. More often he is the monster at its core. You read page after page worrying for the safety of Alice Readman, his then girlfriend and bassist in his band The Auteurs.

The device of capturing the state of the charts during the period of the chapter is a nice touch. It reminds us whatever insanity Haines inflicts on his life, nothing beats the shameful spectacle of Jimmy Nail being number one in the charts. Nothing is ever quite as awful as Robson and Jerome.

Bad Vibes is a glorious ride. Its only failing are a spluttering out end and the fact it is not labelled Volume One. You read it and quickly divorce any sense of Haines as the grotesque person he once was from the perfection he has achieved in his work. His genius will outlive the stories in this book; his genius will outlive any personal fuckwittery. We can only hope that if any of us wrote an autobiography, we could say the same.

Matters Hainesian

Advice for readers concerned with matters Hainesian:

It is now beyond pencil. Luke Haines will be at The Roundhouse’s Freedom Studio on Tuesday, January 27th 2009. He will be reading extracts from Bad Vibes, chatting with Andrew Mueller, taking a Q&A and playing a short acoustic set. Lucky old Camden to be so blessed.

I already have tickets and must now make good on my promise to send the Roundhouse box office staff a barrel of biscuits.

A City of Dirty Pissing Bastards and Thieves

5:30am. Coach 16, Seat 11. Dosed up on mocha and the Kronos Quartet. After a couple of minutes of tunnel turning the window into an unflattering mirror, I am gifted an A13 dawn.

The blades of a giant industrial windmill carve the air, there is a concrete road in the sky funnelling unrelenting traffic and I am on a train that travels under the sea. For a moment, this feels like the sci-fi future I dreamed of in 1976. I am moving through a landscape where UNIT trucks are sodium hour ghosts and Luke Haines’ ESP kids lie in wait for the perfect psychic ambush.

We move under the Thames and reverie stops. Kent is resistant to imagination. Its acres of sky dead to any possibility beyond the Monday morning commute. A landscape so bland, the black of the chunnel is actually a relief.

The milk chocolate brown of ploughed fields and verdant pasture that greet me on the other side are constant to the first ring of the Belgian rustbelt. When the last warehouses, container mountains and failed chemical plants eventually splutter out, Brussels’ ugly suburban sprawl begins. A choking catalogue of grey, narrow houses lined up on streets like a grubby second-hand paperback collection.

This morning every stairway and corner of Gare du Midi reeks of urine. I survive one pickpocketing attempt before I even descend to the Metro. A second happens somewhere between Troon and Kunts-Wet. I catch the would-be thief breaking the zip of my bag. Instinctually I stamp down on his hand. There is an awful, sickening crunch of bone. He screams out and drops my passport. Curses, pushes out of the Metro carriage before I can do anything else. As I struggle to pick up my stuff, I miss my station. Later, when it begins to rain, I discover the only thing I lost in the scuffle was my beloved monkey hat.

It is entirely irrational, unreasonable and ridiculous, but when I am let down by Brussels, I take it personally. I feel like shouting: “Both my grandfathers helped liberate you from fascism. Is it beyond you to be something other than a city of dirty pissing bastards and thieves?” Of course, I do not actually shout at anyone, just adopt a sullen face and stomp along till I get to Treurenberg hill. I can forgive a lot when I hear the 49-bell carillon of Cathédrale St Michel & Gudule.

Around St. Mary’s in a Wheelchair

There is no need to go into details, but I am currently unable to walk without the aid of a stick. My system flooded with analgesics from the hospital, the throbbing is tolerable. However, there will be no psychogeographic walking, cooking or vertical fun for at least 10 days.

This morning, as Surreal Girl pushed me in around St. Mary’s in a wheelchair, visions of Luke Haines crowded my mind. I would not want anyone to think I had jumped from a wall to get out of my upcoming journey to Australia. Nor would I plunge onto concrete to make myself so twisted with pain I could generate words as menacing as those found on After Murder Park. Yet as I faced the prospect of spending the next two months in plaster, I knew there are those who would have made such links.

Hospitals present a landscape of terror for me. Their architecture always seems designed to concentrate a sense of mortality, the walls between life and oblivion become paper thin. Recursive corridors with fractal linoleum are guaranteed routes to dread. Everywhere is filled with a cloying tang of disinfectant and the constant wheeze of machinery.

Today the fear was held at bay. Not since my mother would accompany me as the gurney was wheeled from the ER room to the oxygen tent during childhood asthma attacks has anyone been there with me. For the first time in years, there was someone to hold my hand. I will always love her for that.

Secrets & Lies Korean Style

The temporary break in the Royal Mail strike has meant post being delivered canalside again. Now any package that does not contain dubious chemicals is reason for joy, but one unexpected parcel this morning had me dancing while still in my boxer shorts. Given it had my publisher's logo stamped all over it, I knew it was safe to rip open, but I was not expecting what dropped onto the table – a Korean edition of Secrets & Lies. The slip from my editor simply said with wonderfully precise irony: ‘Your fame spreads!’

Shamefully lacking any fluency Korean, I have no idea how my name translates or whether they have kept in my song nods in the picture captions. It would be shame if the references to The Ruts (Babylon Is Burning), Bowie (Station To Station) and Stiff Little Fingers (Alternative Ulster) have all been lost. Then again, given I am not sure how big Luke Haines’ exquisite Baader Meinhof project was in South Korea, it might only be a loss to one soul in Seoul.

There is one thing I can say with absolute certainty about Secrets & Lies Korean style: it looks beautiful. The cover is fabulously eccentric. Does having Harold Wilson, the tail of an Apatosaurus and an upside down George W. Bush grasping John Kerry sell books in South Korea? Having a pipe smoking Cary Grant and a praying Bill Gates on the back certainly works for me.

Inside it is almost as if a manga-influence runs through the 456 pages. Halftone dots and dashes of gravure effect as design elements, pictures erupting with the impact of a good graphic novel splash. The layout simultaneously gives my words both kinetic energy and gravitas. Even the backpage flap advertising the Korean edition of Conspiracy Theories reminds me of the ‘Next issue’ trailer used by DC. I adore it.

Who Would Win

Yesterday I sent Sean Twist the proposal for my latest book idea called Who Would Win. I had put the proposal together quickly over the weekend after an editor picked up on something I said when machine-gunning ideas around. Today Twist sent an email pointing out that not only am I ‘certifiably insane’, but that the pitch is: ‘a brilliant idea’.

Today, 10 minutes after being sent the four-age proposal and two sample spreads, my potential new editor sent me the following email: ‘Looks great, reads really well. I'm going to push to get this into work soon. How much you want to write it?’

All this unexpected praise for a book I do not particularly want to write.

Now I know that sounds like the usual bout of author whining, but there are many books I do want to write. I want to write books combining travel and the exploration of secret history, travel and the exploration of folklore. I want to write a biography of the indole alkaloid ibogaine, a biography of Luke Haines. From Sherlock Holmes XIII to The Far Lands, there are a couple of novels gestating in me that I would love the chance to deliver to a publisher.

However, at the moment the only book a publisher seems to want from me is a ‘funny book’. I know I have said in the past that the only ‘funny book’ I wanted to write was ‘Who would win a fight between Mahatma Ghandi vs. Mother Teresa?’ It is just that now there is a real possibility someone will pay me to write that exact tome, I am doubtful about bashing it out. I am just not convinced I can do 200 or more pages of droll.

I will readily admit I get a mild buzz out of the proposed book’s central concept and with the right co-author it could actually be quite enjoyable to write. There is also the fact I could do with some funding right now. Of course, when the potential editor says: ‘How much do you want to write it?’ what he really means is: ‘Ask whatever you want, at most we will only offer you enough to pay the rent for three months.’ There is possibility of agent involvement in the negotiation to make things more equitable, but at the end of the day the size of any fee will not decide the issue. The real question is whether I want to do something that merely entertains or should hold out for a deal to publish a book I actually feel is a good use of trees.