Sartre said that hell is other people, but hell is actually being stuck in the company of someone of a certain age banging on about the TV they used to watch as a kid. Thankfully, Luke Haines has previous where it comes to reanimating what could potentially be seen as nostalgia fodder, always bringing an intelligent twist, as 2011’s 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s attests. Fifteen years after that cult classic, we’re back predominantly in the 1970s, a fertile period for the Haines’ imagination where the Baader Meinhof gang are still bringing some much needed glamour to domestic terrorism (Haines also recorded the 2014 concept album New York in the ‘70s featuring songs about Alan Vega and Lou Reed, among others).
Tag Archive: Luke Haines
As unlikely as it may seem, the pairing of Luke Haines and Peter Buck has proven to be a fertile one. Of course, we had enough distractions in 2020 to include the meeting of a stadium-honed US guitarist with a British outsider art-rocker on our bingo cards. Yet when Buck bought one of Haines’ paintings, the connection would lead to a debut album, Beat Poetry for Survivalists (2020), and its sprawling, experimental sequel, All the Kids Are Super Bummed Out (2022). Across both records, it emerged that Buck and Haines had found harmony in an encyclopaedic musical knowledge and a shared conviction that rock’n’roll is best pursued in prolific practice.
The sense of a band caught in motion energises this marvellous third entry in their self-billed…