(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
In the 1980s in Britain, nostalgia for the hippie era reached near-manic heights with Luke Haines’ Auteurs. The singer alternated between the personas of Donovan and Marc Bolan. His songs were somewhat more refined than the average Brit-pop fare, if only because Haines tried to tackle deeper, more personal subjects.
They were revealed by the album New Wave (Hut, 1993), with the saccharine American Guitars, Showgirl, and Junkshop Clothes. In theory, the novelty of the Auteurs was Haines’ bitter and vitriolic outpouring, but in reality, the only notable fact about these songs was that they could not compete with the best of Brit-pop because Haines could not write decent lyrics, the band could not play well, and the choruses were weak. Consequently, the album masked the failure of their banal pop under intellectual pretensions (much like the father of all pop illusionists, David Bowie, had done).
The subsequent single Lenny Valentino is their most rock-oriented track, but it is not representative of the album Now I'm A Cowboy (Hut, 1994), dense with classical touches of piano, organ, oboe (James Banbury on cello) and even closer to glam-rock sensibilities (Chinese Bakery). For the most part, however, it consists of soporific ballads that rarely pierce the surface of self-contained melodicism. With this intricate and aristocratic work, the Auteurs attempted to carve out a personality in a genre that thrives on a lack of personality. Yet they lacked choruses, which their personality-free competitors boasted. Even the EP Back With The Killer Again, even more refined, failed to redeem the most ambiguous operation of Brit-pop.
After Murder Park (Hut, 1996), written during convalescence from an accident in which Haines had broken his legs and produced by Steve Albini, has the right mood (i.e., unhappy) but persists in imitating Marc Bolan and offering, alongside lyrics as ambitious as they are pathetically illiterate, a retro attitude, with nods to Mott The Hoople (New Brat In Town) and ELO (Unsolved Child Murders, perhaps the catchiest song of their career), and sometimes even to the mod-period Small Faces (Land Lovers). Light Aircraft on Fire and Buddha are the tracks that actually demonstrate Haines’ originality.
In parallel, Haines also launched the more experimental Baader Meinhof (Hut, 1997), again with Banbury on cello. Meet Me At The Airport and There's Gonna Be An Accident rank among his masterpieces.
Haines is also active in the Black Box Recorder.
If anything, How I Learned To Love The Bootboys (Hut, 1999) is even worse—weak and monotonous, desperately searching for a hit song (Rubettes as the chosen candidate).
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Luke Haines released two solo albums: the soundtrack
Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (Virgin, 2001) and the
bitter and sometimes brutal
Oliver Twist Manifesto (Virgin, 2001).
Das Capital (Virgin, 2003) is a career retrospective.
