Last year the author met Luke Haines, the man behind the Auteurs. The meeting place was a pub in London’s Muswell Hill, the setting for the Kinks’ songs on their album MUSWELL HILLBILLIES, an area made for Ray Davies’ little people observations. Haines has lived here for many years, and when we spoke he said he had no problem not being a pop star like he was in the ’90s, but one of those guys who nobody willingly sits near on the bus. “Better a freak who makes art than a pseudo-star who’s also a freak but doesn’t want to admit it,” he said, draining his beer, putting on a hat and striding back to his quarters, half Mark Twain , semi slightly deranged art teacher.
Only a few in Muswell Hill know that this man once had half the kingdom at his feet. And if they know it, they don’t care: PEOPLE ‘ROUND HERE DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT – that’s a basic attitude of the people here. Now this attitude is also the title of the retrospective of the albums that Haines recorded for subsidiaries of EMI from 1993 to 2003, including the four works of the Auteurs and his solo recordings DAS CAPITAL and the record under the name Baader Meinhof.
As strange as the lyrics were, Haines’ songwriting was gripping
But first to the auteurs. Their story is a crazy story from a time when guitar bands were as popular in England as truck drivers are today. After Haines’ group The Servants failed, he recorded a demo tape under the new name with songs that lyrically differed significantly from the love songs of the competition. While she mourned her love affairs and cried into her pillow, Haines sang: “I took a showgirl for my bride”. With a lot of self-confidence, he distributed the cassettes to record companies, the return was almost zero. That changed overnight. The commercial success of alternative rock and grunge bands from the USA led to British labels scrambling to find native guitar groups. The Auteurs were there.
Their debut album NEW WAVE came out in 1993 and peaked at number 22, which sounds less spectacular than it felt for Luke Haines, who thought his songs would make the charts as unlikely as the rise of Muswell Hill’s AFC the fourth tier of a local hobby league into the Premier League. But it succeeded, despite obscure references to European art movements and American trash, with lyrics like “I want to kill your sister with some business advice” and a ballad from the perspective of a professional valet.
A sarcastic look at the music business
As strange as the lyrics were, Haines’ songwriting was just as gripping: The early auteurs played subtle glam pop, which was based on T. Rex, Bowie or Roxy Music and he combined it with the power of post-punk and the lyrical sophistication of indie pop combined. The second album NOW I’M A COWBOY in 1994 was even better. The songs played in Chinese bakeries, told stories about French girlfriends and about the US comedian Lenny Bruce, who was reborn in the body of the silent film star Rudolph Valentino: “Lenny Valentino” – the single just missed the top 40 by a hair’s breadth.
Haines’ third album AFTER MURDER PARK was produced in 1996 by Steve Albini, whose direct recording technique took the songs from pop to rock. The lyrics deal with all sorts of murder stories, the motives are varied, one is: “Married To A Lazy Love”. Nick Cave turns a similar approach into a business model with his MURDER BALLADS, the auteurs take a commercial dive for the first time, with AFTER MURDER PARK being their most rousing record. The whimsical fourth album HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOOTBOYS followed in 1999, whose sarcastic view of the music business already anticipated Haines’ solo works. As early as 1996, he surprised audiences with the Baader Meinhof project, which retells the Baader-Meinhof complex as an indie funk record – one of Haines’ best ideas.
Also part of the box is DAS CAPITAL, subtitled “The Songwriting Genius Of Luke Haines And The Auteurs” and thus actually a capitalization of the catalogue, but not as a best-of, but with orchestral new recordings of some favorites. Anyone who knows and owns the albums still needs the box: Cherry Red has filled the six CDs with more than 60 bonus tracks, including B-sides, demos, remixes and acoustic versions.
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