Luke Haines

Luke Haines ranks among the keenest and most productive British songwriters from his era. After starting out in a succession of little-known 1980s outfits such as the Servants, he steered the glam noir of the Auteurs, the fractured funk of Baader Meinhof, and the predominantly somber pop of Black Box Recorder while also issuing recordings under his own name. Across the final seven years of the 1990s he delivered six albums that stretched from solid to outstanding, beginning with the Mercury Prize-nominated New Wave (1993) and reaching the sleek, bleak How I Learned to Love the Bootboys (1999). Following Black Box Recorder’s second album, The Facts of Life (2000)—whose title track climbed the upper reaches of the U.K. singles chart—Haines launched a busy and characteristically offbeat solo trajectory that averaged one full-length project each year. Most of those albums took conceptual form, directing his caustic wit toward subjects that ranged from exaggerated tales of Dickensian criminality (Oliver Twist Manifesto) through the golden age of British wrestling (9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ’80s), Atomic Age relics (British Nuclear Bunkers), post-Brexit tension (Setting the Dogs on the Post-Punk Postman), and a hallucinatory vision of chemically altered youth culture in decline (All the Kids Are Super Bummed Out).

Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry and The Oliver Twist Manifesto appeared within weeks of each other in mid-2001; the first served as the soundtrack to the darkly comic film of the same title, while the second married Haines’s typically biting and downcast melodies to springy hip-hop-inflected production. In the week of its release, Haines declared a week-long National Pop Strike during which any musician could surrender his or her materials and gain amnesty for all “crimes” committed against pop. Two years afterward he bypassed a conventional best-of package with Das Capital, an orchestral reworking of Auteurs material. Luke Haines Is Dead (2005) later surveyed his career to that point across three discs of highlights, B-sides, and radio sessions.

His second proper solo album, Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop, arrived in 2006. The following year he issued the memoir Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall, which irritated former associates—he identified Auteurs member James Banbury solely as “the cellist”—and longstanding adversaries alike. In 2012 Haines released the characteristically idiosyncratic 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and Early ’80s together with the career overview Outsider/In: The Collection; these were followed in 2013 by the conceptual adult fairy tale Rock and Roll Animals and, a year later, by the ambitious concept album New York in the 70’s. During summer 2014 he collaborated with artist Scott King on the theatrical work Adventures in Dementia: A Micro Opera, whose narrative followed a Mark E. Smith impersonator on a caravan holiday; the brief six-song soundtrack appeared in January 2015, while the electronics-driven British Nuclear Bunkers arrived that October. His sixth album in seven years, Smash the System (2016), abandoned the conceptual frameworks of earlier projects in favor of a more singles-focused yet equally idiosyncratic collection. In 2017 he assembled his first solo-career retrospective, Is Alive & Well & Living in Buenos Aires: Heavy Frenz the Soloanthology 2001-2017. I Sometimes Dream of Glue (2018) returned to narrative-driven territory, presenting fourteen surreal songs about a rural English village inhabited by two-inch mutants fond of solvents. He next joined forces with another cult figure, former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, to write and record Beat Poetry for Survivalists (2020). Buck also contributed to Setting the Dogs on the Post-Punk Postman (2021), a sharply witty set that captured the mood of post-Brexit, mid-lockdown Britain and featured an additional appearance by Julian Barratt of the Mighty Boosh. Haines and Buck reunited for All the Kids Are Super Bummed Out (2022), an atmospheric reflection on the drug-soaked aftermath of an earlier generation’s youth culture that included guest contributions from Scott McCaughey (the Young Fresh Fellows and the Minus 5), Linda Pitmon (Steve Wynn and the Baseball Project), and Lenny Kaye (the Patti Smith Group).