Off His Rocker At the Art School Bop

A trip to the Luminaire is always a treat, probably my fave London venue these days.

Unfortunately I got there in time for the first act, Ben Parker. Dark blue Levi's with 2 inch turn-ups, white T with 1/4 inch sleeve turn-ups, unruly James Dean quiff, and a hint of George Michael around the stubbly jaw-line. There's a non-stop production line somewhere churning out these vacuous non-entities. I'd blame Chris Martin, but it's the whole accessibility thing these days, just 'cause anyone can set up a Myspace page, and record some songs in their bedroom, doesn't mean that they have to. If you can hold a tune on the Karaoke machine, it doesn't mean you should inflict yourself on an audience. He seemed to think affecting a Buckleyesque vibrato could excuse a song with a chorus like: 'These are changing times, so straighten crooked lines' repeated ad freakin' finitum. Or maybe I should just turn up later?

Next up was Vinny Peculiar, a pun for a name means your dead in the water from the get go, but he did have an ear for '60's British pop tunes, though witty songs in a Divine Comedy stylee delivered in a Mark E. Smith influenced Mancunian drawl have a limited appeal.

I've tried to see Luke Haines many times over the last few years, but something else has always cropped up, so I was delighted to catch up with him in this intimate venue. The set was quite short, but the power trio really powered through it, a chunk of stuff from the new album 'Of My Rocker At The Art School Bop' and a bunch of solo and Auteurs tunes for the afficiandos. The new stuff seems to focus a lot on the '70's; there was a song about how Gary Glitter's paedophile disgrace had erased the Glitter Band from pop history, Jonathon King's predatory nights at The Walton Hop, and the might of the classic Leeds United team. All were instantly accessible and catchy as hell. He was comfortable and commanding on stage, but seemed to hold the audience slightly in contempt, teasing them by asking them for requests, and then refusing to play them. He added a musical saw player for a few songs, which he seemed to enjoy. He's probably always going to be a cult figure, someone writing intelligent songs about English eccentrics (The Mitford sisters, Freddie Mills, The Rubettes) will find an audience, but a limited, educated. older audience, and you sense a frustration with that fact, and his inability to be able to, or want to, compromise in any way to break out of cult-dom.


Footnote: Haines was one factor in the emergence from my musical dark ages which ran through the late '80's early '90's, when I'd buried myself in a rut of work/family life and could see no point in external enlightenment. I heard 'American Guitars' from 'New Wave' on the David Hepworth show on GLR in '93, which helped with my audio re-think and made me want to find out what was happening musically. I borrowed 'New Wave' from the library, made a cassette copy and played it at work, and gradually my new musical dawn came up.