Luke Haines Interview @ The Cluny

6.11.09

Interviewed by Mark Corcoran-Lettice & Ben Lowes-Smith

Your new album, 21st Century Man/Achtung Mother, is a double album. How much of a conscious decision was it to make that the case?

Well, it’s not so much a double album as two albums – if you were to take the Achtung Mother tracks and mix them up with all the 21st Century Man tracks, it’s wouldn’t really work, it’d be fairly incoherent. I had all these incoherent tracks, which became Achtung Mother, you see.

Your last two albums seem to have warned against the fetishism of nostalgia, is that a concern of yours?

It’s not a cultural concern, but it is a personal one: maybe it’s something I keep going back to. I don’t really mind repeating myself, that’s part of it. You develop a voice and a style, and you don’t necessarily do completely different things all of the time! Not that I’m making an excuse for my records all sounding the same – I don’t care if they do or not – but that’s just what I do.

I couldn’t really agree with that…you had a more electronic period in the late 90s, was there a concerted effort to go back to a glam sound recently?

The glam sound…really, there’s only a little bit of that, the first time I really did that, was on Bootboys. I don’t think the early Auteurs records really had that, only briefly really early on when we were aligned with Suede with this ‘New Glam’ tag, but the records never really sounded like that to me. I only really did that consciously on something like ‘The Rubettes’, and then I maybe came back to it on Off My Rocker, where it’s a bit more developed and a bit more pronounced.

One thing that seems to tie together the last album and this one are these songs about these cult, misunderstood figures – ‘Peter Hamill’ and ‘Klaus Kinski’ on 21st Century Man, the Glitter Band on the last one [on the song ‘Bad Reputation’]. Is there something that keeps you interested in them?

Yeah…well, the Klaus Kinski song is probably much less about Klaus Kinski than it is about me, really. It starts off with Klaus Kinski, and then jumps off somewhere else, and it’s quite autobiographical, and the Peter Hamill song is more of a straightforward homage. I had a track that sounded very much like something from [Peter Hamill record] Nadir’s Big Chance, and the only way I could justify it was just to call it ‘Peter Hamill’, and be done with it, otherwise people who’ve heard that album would say, ‘Luke Haines is just ripping off Peter Hamill now’, so it seemed a good opportunity, since I’d inadvertently ripped him off, to make it into a tribute track.

On the cover of the new album, you’re pictured imitating [early 20th century dadaist poet] Hugo Ball – do you consider him a 21st Century Man?

Hugo Ball was obviously a 20th century man – that original photograph would have been taken in the 1910s – it wasn’t saying that I am Hugo Ball! That period though interests me, when people seemed to flaunt all conventions, which I think maybe doesn’t really happen now. It’s quite difficult to try and invent anything new, certainly via music, and there are couple of homage’s on the album to that period. The track ‘Russian Futurists Black Out The Sun’ is a homage to a futurist opera called ‘Victory Over The Sun’, which is about two cosmonauts who were going to wage war against the sun and create a new reality. To me, that’s having a go, writing an opera about waging war against the sun…I can’t better that, so I thought I’d just doff my cap to it.

On that note, I understand that you’re in the process of writing a musical at the moment…

No, I wrote one a couple of years ago. But you weren’t to know, it hasn’t been performed.

Oh, right!

It was for the National Theatre in London, I spent a year writing it – it was called ‘Property’, and it got a long way, but ultimately they didn’t want to put it on, they probably thought it was too crazy. I didn’t, I thought it was very entertaining…

I understand that ‘I’m A Rich Man’s Toy’ from the Now I’m A Cowboy record was sent to Kylie Minogue people’s, which I thought was funny…

Well, they didn’t think it was so funny! I used to do that occasionally, just pitch songs to people.

Are there any contemporary pop you’d want to do that for now?

No [laughs]. I’m not very interested in modern pop music in any way really. I’m out of the loop really – I’m a man in his forties, and invariably I’m not very interested. I’d have to take an interest in young groups, which really would be a bit weird at my age, finding out what all the twenty-year olds are up to. My attitude is, good luck to them all, and I’ll leave you alone.

That’s a shame, I had a dream once where Girls Aloud covered ‘Mogadishu’ from the Baader Meinhof album, which I’d quite like to hear…

That’d be good, yeah, but I think that’s probably going to remain in your dreams, I’m afraid.

The Baader Meinhof album itself came out in 1996: do you think it would be possible in today’s climate to release an album like that in 2009?

I would have done it. I would have done it now, if I had just had the idea, but I wouldn’t have had the idea now. It’s a younger man’s record really – my interests at the time were terrorism, and music I hadn’t really heard before, like Funkadelic and Lee Perry, so it was a kind of art project. It wasn’t an endorsement of anything, it was just, I have this set of lyrics, and in my head it goes with this funk music.

There’s been some talk of a fourth Black Box Recorder album, is there any news on that?

It’s not going to happen. We recorded a single, but I think we all feel uneasy, and I don’t really want to be a group, or hide behind a group name. I think you can still do rock’n’roll when you get to a certain age, but you have to acknowledge that you are that age. Nick Cave does it well, obviously, while Morrissey doesn’t do it well: a fifty-year-old man still singing about gay adolescence …I’d be interested in Morrissey if he did a fifty-year-old man record. That’s the way old songwriters used to work, you’d be singing it from the view of a sixty-year-old, not from the view of a twenty-year-old.

Your Britpop memoir ‘Bad Vibes’ came out this year, and I’ve heard that there might be a second volume…

Yeah, I’m in the process of that at the moment. Chronologically, it overlaps a little with ‘Bad Vibes’, because when I wrote that I wasn’t planning a second, so it goes over and into a bit more detail about the start of Black Box Recorder, and it goes on to about 2002-03.

A friend wanted us to ask, what is the song ‘Secret Yoga’ about?

Someone else asked me that the other day, actually. It’s about the Aum Shinriyko cult in Japan, who did the sarin attack in the subway, and the chant in it is a version of one of their chants. Basically, the Aum cult works on being at a higher level of Buddhism, which equates to a higher level of being where life is not sacred, so the chant in it is based on an Aum chant.

Another question we’ve been given is just four words: Winston Churchill’s State Funeral?

Hmm, yeah. Do you know what that refers to?

Is it some unmade record…?

Yeah, on the internet, it seems to have become this myth, even when people say it doesn’t exist on Wikipedia, someone always puts it back on, but it never existed. The title’s not come from me…I kind of admire whoever came up with it, because in a way I wouldn’t have minded doing a record called The State Funeral of Winston Churchill or something, but it’s nothing to do with me. It still lingers on slightly though.

Earlier this year, a fan-fiction called ‘Truth and Lies in Murder Park’ came out: have you read it?

I have received a copy, but I haven’t read it. The guy who wrote it [Tim Mitchell] interviewed me many years ago, at the time he was writing a biography of me, and I agreed to be interviewed for it, and he seemed like a good chap…and I thought nothing more of it. Then ‘Bad Vibes’ came out and started to get some press, and then this popped up! I think he wanted to do a kind of dual promotion on it, do some interviews for it, but I said I can’t do that, because it’s a separate thing. He sent me a copy out of courtesy, but I haven’t read it, and the reason I haven’t read it is because I don’t want to read a book about myself. Where am I supposed to read it, this thing that’s got my name on, it’s pretty preposterous…I’ve got a family, and my wife would just laugh at me sitting there, reading a book about myself. Preposterous.

You also featured quite heavily in a graphic novel about Britpop that came out a few years ago, ‘Phonogram’, can you tell us any more about that?

I don’t really understand graphic novels, it’s not my kind of thing. I saw where the guys who did it were going, and had a look through it, and quite liked their take on it – although I would say that I disagreed with it, as is probably clear from my book – but they seemed to have enough imagination in it, so I agreed to write an introduction to it.

With Oasis having split up and the Blur reunion on hold, does it seem odd to you how your contemporaries seem to have ground to a halt while you’re still making albums?

Well, the members of Blur are pretty successful in their own right, and Brett Anderson’s still making solo albums. A lot of the glut of that period has gone away, but I always expected it to. I just carried on making records, and whether anyone buys them or not, I couldn’t care, I’ll just get on with it.

We’ve been given a few slightly stranger questions to ask you…

That’s fine, fire away. Just don’t expect the answers to be entirely cogent!

There’s a man coming tonight who’ll probably be wearing a straw hat, standing outside your dressing room, and he’s propositioned a pint with you, if you fancy?

Absolutely not! [laughter]

We just thought it fair to give you warning! He also wants to know if you like Sunny Delight…

I’m not really familiar with Sunny Delight, to be honest.

Slightly more seriously then, I did notice on the new album, there seemed to be a praise for suburban life that’s perhaps not been there before, in ‘Love Letter To London’ and ‘Suburban Mourning’…

It is actually my most upbeat record I think…I think the first album, ‘New Wave’, was quite upbeat, but it’s not a record from a man who’s reached a certain age but who’s ruined his life. I do think ‘Suburban Mourning’ is the most upbeat thing I’ve ever written, and there is no twist to it, and that was very deliberate.

There are some critics who are interpreting this record as being a bit of an epitaph, is that the case?

I think maybe they think, he’s written a song like ‘21st Century Man’, he’s written a memoir, and now they’re just waiting for me to cark it or something! I don’t know.

You will keep making records then?

Well, yes. The thing is, I don’t have the means to put out records as regularly as I used to do, where I had a major record label and I could go in, say ‘I’m making a record now’, and they would go ‘Okay, here’s a truckload of cash, go and make that record’. The music industry’s changed, and it’s a bit harder for me to make records, to try and pull everything together. I always use professional recording studios, which cost money, rather than just doing it at home or something.