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alexsarllIf you haven't been keeping up with Luke Haines' recent ventures, he's just released 50 albums. Which so far as anyone can work out are 50 versions of the same album, Outsider Music each recorded live in one take, and each costing £75. I don't have it, no. There's various Bill Drummond-style rhetoric about this restoring the sanctity of the physical album &c, but given the old bastard has always made an art out of wilful perversity, I suspect a large part of it is making a few grand quickly while seeing what the fans will put up with. In much the same spirit, last night he played the new material live at the Hoxton Pony, a venue whose name is in a sense honest, but perhaps a little too disguised by the Cockney rhyming slang. The intro tape doesn't seem to be able to stay at the same sound level for a whole song, and two of those songs are by the Doors. And the support is a berk who is apparently from a band called Silvery, and who seems to have been booked just so Haines can remind himself how much he hates Britpop because his stuff sounds like something which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
steve586 would refuse to play at Nuisance. Haines himself is sounding a little odd on account of some missing teeth, and horribly plosive because he's doing stuff with the mic which even I know how not to do. It is, in short, not the ideal setting. On top of which, as Haines says while introducing the song about a friend who met Alan Vega of Suicide, "the new songs were rather like the old songs". One song, more recent even than the Outsider Music stuff, is introduced as part of a forthcoming concept album about seventies wrestling, and concerns the domestic arrangements of Kendo Nagasaki. From anyone else, you'd know that intro was a joke. But from Haines? (Suggested heckle: "Play the one about the seventies!")
Haines is in that spot a lot of artists get to where they've found their territory and, if they do get any new fans, it'll be through a critical rehabilitation rather than a sudden shift in the material. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I was listening to the new Twilight Singers album on the way to the gig, and there's not a surprise on it, but that doesn't stop it from being the third best album of the year so far (not the faint praise it may seem in mid-January, the H Bird and British Sea Power records are excellent). But if these songs really don't get any wider release...well, most of them I won't honestly feel as gaps in my life, the exception being the brilliant 'Enoch Powell'.
And then we get the old songs, and a reminder of why we put up with all this because yes, the man has written several dozen absolute and eternal classics, and here's a selection. Most terrifying is to hear 'Future Generations' in the company of a fan born in the nineties*, proof that Haines was, as usual, right when he first sang "the next generation will get it from the start".
I hadn't even been planning to go to that show until mid-afternoon; I had other plans, and I'd assumed it was sold out. And by that point I'd already reached my standing goal of doing at least two things per day beyond pootling around on the net or reading a comic or two or other minor stuff; I'd filled in my tax return, and I'd finally watched Videodrome (which is basically just 'Blink - The Queasily Sexy Years', isn't it?). This in spite of having developed a problematic addiction to "I am the man who arranges the blocks" after having heard it at Bright Club the night before, with which I had thought I should re-familiarise myself given I'm performing at the next Wilmington one on February 15th.
*edit: Actually 1989, I am informed, and unlike Wikipedia I trust people to correct their own biographical data. But I feel the point stands.
steve586 would refuse to play at Nuisance. Haines himself is sounding a little odd on account of some missing teeth, and horribly plosive because he's doing stuff with the mic which even I know how not to do. It is, in short, not the ideal setting. On top of which, as Haines says while introducing the song about a friend who met Alan Vega of Suicide, "the new songs were rather like the old songs". One song, more recent even than the Outsider Music stuff, is introduced as part of a forthcoming concept album about seventies wrestling, and concerns the domestic arrangements of Kendo Nagasaki. From anyone else, you'd know that intro was a joke. But from Haines? (Suggested heckle: "Play the one about the seventies!") Haines is in that spot a lot of artists get to where they've found their territory and, if they do get any new fans, it'll be through a critical rehabilitation rather than a sudden shift in the material. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I was listening to the new Twilight Singers album on the way to the gig, and there's not a surprise on it, but that doesn't stop it from being the third best album of the year so far (not the faint praise it may seem in mid-January, the H Bird and British Sea Power records are excellent). But if these songs really don't get any wider release...well, most of them I won't honestly feel as gaps in my life, the exception being the brilliant 'Enoch Powell'.
And then we get the old songs, and a reminder of why we put up with all this because yes, the man has written several dozen absolute and eternal classics, and here's a selection. Most terrifying is to hear 'Future Generations' in the company of a fan born in the nineties*, proof that Haines was, as usual, right when he first sang "the next generation will get it from the start".
I hadn't even been planning to go to that show until mid-afternoon; I had other plans, and I'd assumed it was sold out. And by that point I'd already reached my standing goal of doing at least two things per day beyond pootling around on the net or reading a comic or two or other minor stuff; I'd filled in my tax return, and I'd finally watched Videodrome (which is basically just 'Blink - The Queasily Sexy Years', isn't it?). This in spite of having developed a problematic addiction to "I am the man who arranges the blocks" after having heard it at Bright Club the night before, with which I had thought I should re-familiarise myself given I'm performing at the next Wilmington one on February 15th.
*edit: Actually 1989, I am informed, and unlike Wikipedia I trust people to correct their own biographical data. But I feel the point stands.
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Date: 2011-01-20 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 11:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 12:42 pm (UTC)This is exactly what I was thinking, and it's one of the reason I didn't go. (That and having to leave Leeds on a shitty megabus straight from a meeting and only just get there on time. And that I've sort of grown out of the Haines stalking period of my life.)
He seems to just be being obscure and difficult for the sake of it these days, rather than because some greater purpose or art or passion is behind it. That and wanting to make a few bob and contempt for the fans, like you say.
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Date: 2011-01-20 04:25 pm (UTC)On a related note, what was that you crossposted from Twitter recently about a John Moore novel?
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Date: 2011-01-21 08:27 am (UTC)But, anyway, yes. He sent me the draft of his novel to have a look at. It's not bad, I'm about half way through it now. It reminds me a lot of England, England by Julian Barnes. It's quite self consciously whimsical and 'amusing' though, which grates a bit, and has some concerning assumptions, but I'm hoping that these will be undermined in the dénouement or something. Annoyingly I thought of much more apposite and amusing ways of describing it in the pub the day before last, but there you have it. Hopefully someone will publish it for him.
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Date: 2011-01-21 09:39 am (UTC)That sounds interesting, and he's probably already thought of this, but Snowbooks would strike me as a natural home for it, and they already published the novel of his old Idler colleague Matthew de Abaitua, so he might have an in.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 12:14 pm (UTC)They don't show the tits on the video
Date: 2011-01-20 07:29 pm (UTC)Re: They don't show the tits on the video
Date: 2011-01-21 09:39 am (UTC)Re: They don't show the tits on the video
Date: 2011-01-21 10:51 am (UTC)Re: They don't show the tits on the video
Date: 2011-01-21 10:52 am (UTC)Re: They don't show the tits on the video
Date: 2011-01-21 11:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 05:02 pm (UTC)The name did ring a faint bell, so that would explain it.