| Luke Haines/Outsider Music Volume 31 |
| Written by Jon Horsley |
| Wednesday, 08 September 2010 14:08 |
 Shabby Culture has already broken a few stories,
grabbed a few headlines. We had the Mercury nominations before anyone else, the
plan for Bob Dylan’s next few albums before he even knew what they were. And
now we bring you a certain world
exclusive. An album review of the 31st volume of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music.(The kindly readers among you should excuse the confusion and pretension present in this review. It is, after all, a confusing and pretentious project.) In order to preserve the "sacred scarcity" of rock and or roll, Haines has released 50 different takes of the same album. Each one an individual half-hour performance featuring several songs pulled from a pool of 15. Each CD is live. There are no edits – one CD apparently contains him answering the door to the postman. Crucially, each one was available for the princely sum of £75. To put that into context, it’s about seven CDs by Coldplay*. So what’s it like, the 31st volume in the series? Unpeeling the plastic cover and seeing the cheap, signed CDR inside is unsettling. There’s the feeling I have been conned. Who could put it past arch-misanthrope Haines to lie? To just claim this is an individual performance? And there could easily be more than 50**. After all, if that’s true, he’s pulled in just £3,750, almost certainly even less than he received for his book Bad Vibes. But perhaps this suspicion is only included in the 31st volume. Perhaps number 40 contains disappointment, number 5 pure rage and number 17 post-masturbatory guilt. (Haines would never include contentment, we all know this, the poor fools who have shelled out £75). Haines is well aware of the relationship between a performer and his fans. He knows that he’s creating a club of fools, willing to overspend on songs that will inevitably see daylight in a more complete form. (One song, Enoch Powell, is introduced with the words, "This is an embryonic version of a song called Enoch Powell".) But it also contains one key part of every confidence trick in the world: no one wants to look a mug. After you’ve paid the exorbitant amount of cash, you’re sucked in, aren’t you? You can’t call him a chiseller without being the chiselled. But what’s worse now, here with this 31st volume of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music, is that even if the premise is true, then I’m alone. I can only be objective. If we take Sartre’s Being And Nothingness as our guide here (and why shouldn’t we? We made our excuses above), there’s a gap spelt out between hearing the record and describing it. There’s consciousness in the way of everything that you’re reading. (See? I decided to write that. I did.) My ears are defining sounds that yours will never hear. And that cost me £75. Of course this is always the case – speakers are different, MP3 compression rates etc, I could upload this performance to the internet and you would hear different sounds. But nowhere is this spelt out as clearly as it is by this project. There’s no point in my describing it, really. Who are you to judge what I’ve heard? All you can judge is the purchase price. You have no clue. I have total existential liberty***. This is not comforting. And so the CD goes in. There’s a brief intro from a commendably tired-sounding Haines. Tired from recording 50 albums, of course. He doesn’t sound tired from booze or jet-plane flight. He kicks into The Art Supergroup. It’s class. Or is it? Am I gifting it with more than it deserves because I’ve paid out all that money that I could have spent on 75 downloads by Sum41? It’s just him in good voice with a guitar. He segues straight into Thee (sic) Art Supergroup, a strange underpowered ballad, over before I can really be bothered to make a judgment. And straight away we’re off wheeling into the Angel Of The North – a typically sneery, late-period Haines anthem eulogising the North/South divide. It’s catchy, clever and his voice sounds better than ever. But hang on. Is it just too mean-spirited, thoughtless? And anyway, surely we all know that it’s Gary Rock And Roll will be released as a glam-rock stomper. Uh huh huh. It’ll probably become the best song on his next album. I can already hear the swaggering rock menace, the loud guitars, the driving drums. All that I’m adding in my head, and it’s really good. I’m now convinced that I could do a better job arranging this than Luke Haines. The foetus of Enoch Powell is introduced and it’s genuinely good. This one, for certain, for definite, is a good song. There’s no denying it. It’s a wonderfully crafted pen-picture of middle-England bitterness. This is a song that I feel I can confidently stand by. In Nausea, Sartre’s main character felt nauseous at the thought of trying to describe all the colours, the shades and subtleties of a tree to someone else. How could they ever understand what he saw if it could take him his whole life just to describe a fraction of a single tree? Here, I must stand up and say "Jean-Paul. The important thing is that there is a tree. Ignore that and you’ll get hurt skiing." Enoch Powell is that tree. Objectively, the performance of Enoch Powell on the 31st volume of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music is a fine, fine song. In a search for truth, relativism allows you to fire hundreds of bullets against a barn wall, then draw a target around one and say you hit it. Epistemologically speaking, this is a safe bridge of a song. It can hold weight. A song about meeting the "lead singer of a band called Suicide", Alan Vega Says, follows. Vega tells him the song is going to be a hit but Haines ripostes, "I’m too lazy to write my own melody/So here’s one I stole from the TV". It feels great, but it only adds to the confusion. Jesus Is Right On can’t begin any better, kicking off with the brilliant couplet, "I discovered Jesus on a train bound for Seven Sisters/I want to go holy and be home in time for EastEnders." If the album had begun with Modern Life Is Easy, the 31st copy of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music would be a different record. It’d be clear you’d been cheated. It feels like there is no gusto or guts to it. But perhaps the performance is fading. Perhaps the listener’s relationship with the record has switched again? No. Hearing it again, it’s just weedy. Me And The Birds is the strangest moment of a strange experience. On the 31st copy of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music, Haines introduces it then pauses and adds, "I warn you that it contains a bird whistle." It does. It appears to be a song about the silent fury of a serial killer having cocktails at the "Premier Travel Tavern". "Me and the birds are going out tonight/Their legs are bare, mine are wrapped up tight/They’re going to do some damage to the Blue Lagoon/I’m going to do some damage to a half empty room." "Grand finale," says Haines and begins The Art Superheroes. God, it’s good. It wants to reassure me because Haines knows about the relationship between me and this record. He knows. He wants to prove that he’s not all bad. He wants me to know I’m right. He wants me to believe. He wants to believe. He’s a superhero. He’s not getting away with it. We’re both getting away with it. I can enjoy the record. I know I’m right. Are you with me? Who’s with me? "The art superheroes are hanging around. And art superheroes will never let you down." *Unless they’re on sale, in which case it could be up to 15. It’s more difficult than X+Y. **Email us if you have a copy. We can draw up a full list and CHECK. ***Except, of course, for all those friends who wish to come round in order to listen to my copy of the new Luke Haines art project. Yeah. Exactly. Auteurs
Bad Vibes
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Comments
1. Thee Art Supergroup
2. The Angel Of The North
3. Gary Rock'N'Roll
4. Enoch Powell
5. Leeds United
6. Gorgeous George
7. Alan Vega Said
8. Jesus Is Right On
9. Me And The Birds
10. The Art Superheroes
So no Haunted Man, Modern Life Is Easy or the short spoken one about British tourists whose title escapes me now. In their place we got an excellent new song Gorgeous George which is partly about Kendo Nagasaki (and hence why Leeds United was played before it.) I really hope someone did properly record this; like Jake said, Luke did give the OK for vol #51 to be bootlegged.
No postman.
Overall though I really like the album, there's no sense of these songs being throwaways. When playing two vols back-to-back you get the sense of an overall OM template, since 90% of the track listing / order is common to both. I guess they're all variations on a pre-planned theme rather than random compilations.
thanks for the review
gdpreston - owner of volume 23
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