Luke Haines - Wot A Rotter

Monday night, English Southern Man Luke Haines ventured north of Watford Gap to Manchester, and I got to see him play live for the first time. The Deaf Institute is a terrific venue, best described by the adjective ‘intimate’. Though not as dangerously overcrowded as last week’s Morrissey gig at Leeds Academy (i.e. there was still room to breathe), the room was still pretty full… but I reckon that was 150 people max (probably closer to 120). I was surprised to find Haines couldn’t draw a bigger crowd, because as far as I’m concerned he’s everything you want from a rock star. Dark, sarcastic, intelligent and angry, but with a warm, witty stage presence, and a nice line of self-deprecation – as you’d expect from the author of Bad Vibes.

Though Haines probably wouldn’t thank me for it, I can’t help but take the Morrissey comparison further. He’s a true individual. A Luke Haines song could only be a Luke Haines song, with recurring themes of death, shame, depravity, fading glamour and lost innocence common throughout his work, not to mention that old “what it means to be English” chestnut, and a curious obsession with the darker areas of recent history - from the Yorkshire Ripper to Baader Meinhof to Gary Glitter.

Yet despite such bleak subject matter, you always know where you’ll find Luke Haines's tongue. Either in his cheek or raspberrying in your face. Satan Wants Him for it too… while Beelzebub rejected Moz’s soul years ago.

“I wrote this song with Billy Joel,” Haines says, introducing 21st Century Man, the bastard son of We Didn’t Start The Fire, and title track to his excellent new album. What follows is a typically caustic jaunt through the decades of Haines’s life, namedropping The Green Cross Code Man, Yasser Arafat, Bobby Sands and Bernadette Whelan (a David Cassidy fan killed in a front of stage crush - but I had to look that up). It contains some of Haines most cutting and amusing lyrics to date...

"I was a star in waiting
All through the 80s
Thatcher tried to get rid of the coal
The whole country went on the dole
Susie Lamplugh disappeared
David Bowie lost it for years
Died a death in his slap-bass phase
Everybody else died of AIDS..."

"What can you do when you've made your masterpiece?
That's what I did in the 90s
Yeah, I was all over the 90s
I was all over in the 90s."

Not the case, Luke. This old Billy Joel fan still loves you, and so did 150 people on Monday night in Manchester. Long may you moan...