In January 1996, Luke Haines’s group The Auteurs released a post-Christmas record called “Unsolved Child Murder”. Haines also simultaneously released, as a solo project, a single, “Baader Meinhof”, for which the press release was, with no further explanation, a page of the Anarchist Cookbook explaining how to make a nail bomb. Neither record was a commercial success. As Haines remarks in his memoir Bad Vibes: Britpop and my part in its downfall, at this point in his peculiar career he was “gaining something of a reputation as a contrarian”.
Just a few years earlier, Haines’s group had been beaten by only one vote to the Mercury Music Prize, the winners being Suede, who went on to considerable success. Indeed, The Auteurs’ first album, New Wave, story-driven, guitar-based indie music brooding on failure and faded glamour, utterly at odds with the dominant trends of grunge and acid house, is periodically hailed as the origin of a movement that saw bands like Suede, Oasis and Blur achieve unprecedented sales in the mid-1990s. Haines knows the myth—he occasionally contributed to it—but Bad Vibes comes to bury Britpop, not to celebrate it. He remarks simply that “I am none of the following, but have been described variously as the pioneer of, the godfather of, the man who invented, the butcher of, and the forgotten man of Britpop”.
The story of how it all went so triumphantly wrong, Bad Vibes is bracingly unsentimental, and told with a stylish wit unusual in this genre. After the Mercury Music Awards, Haines watches aghast as his contemporaries slide with apparent ease into wealth and celebrity while he stumbles from one fiasco to another, defiantly refusing to play anyone’s game. He is unsparing in his account of his mistakes and his infinite capacity to alienate people with influence; and he is equally unsparing about everyone else. Haines’s lyrics—intelligent, erudite, dark, pitiless—were always sung as if his vocal cords had been excoriated by the passage of so many caustic remarks. His prose achieves the same aristocratic contempt.
Written throughout in the present tense, in order to avoid “the dubious benefit of good old hindsight”, Bad Vibes is particularly scornful of Damon Albarn from Blur, and his then girlfriend Justine Frischmann, the lead singer of the punk-oriented band Elastica, who are described as “A pair of greedy hobgoblins, knocking down small children in their path, batting away passers-by and anyone they perceive as a possible threat to their rise to the top”. As the pair prosper, Haines notes, “the full idiocy of the era has yet to be felt. But already I loathe the vicars-and-tarts-forced-jollity of the Blur-Elastica alliance. The head boy and head girl appear to be doing rather well for themselves. I had more of a Carrie-style ending in mind for the nauseating couple”. By the time Blur’s mockney, laddish album Parklife is released—“nothing if not a masterclass in media complicity”—it is Haines whose life has become a slasher movie:
“1994 … the public aren’t going to put up with another mod revival are they? Surely not. Oh God, here comes Phil Daniels. Not content with the full horror of his acting he’s going to torture me with his appearance on Blur records. In years to come they will refer to this kind of collusion as an Axis of Evil. Bandy leg dancing. Dick Van Dyke dahn at the dogs. Parklife! Parklife!”
By the end of the year, Haines has—perhaps deliberately—broken both his ankles in order to get out of a dismal international tour.
He describes Oasis as “crap new comedy band” and “unpleasant Manc peasants”, and their hit single “Don’t Look Back in Anger” as a “brainless oafish anthem about nothing at all”. Aphex Twin is a “one-man-tidying-a-shed electro-yokel”. Donna Matthews of Elastica, “although she doesn’t realise it”, is “a negative Welsh Timothy Leary figure”.
Sometimes Haines’s disdain for others is based on his tenacious belief in the genius of his own work, as when, at the Abbey Road studios, Paul McCartney pops by and asks to hear what the band have been recording: “I like McCartney, he’s sweet enough and interested. We’ve just finished recording ‘Unsolved Child Murder’ and ‘After Murder Park’ but politely decline the ex-Beatle’s request. I don’t want him to be the first person to hear these songs. They’re too good for him”. But at other times, Haines’s perfectionism is turned even on himself: “The record company loves it. The band loves it. Steve Albini loves it. It’s just … the aftershock of listening to a condensed version of the raddled state of my own mind over the last 12 months means that I can only draw one conclusion: that this album stinks like a fucking corpse”.
Despite the smell of burning bridges behind him (his chances of appearing on television, for instance, are finished when first he quietly says “Fuck. You. Cunt” to the “obnoxious bully” Chris Evans at the end of the pilot for TFI Friday; and then dresses one of his band as a member of the IRA for the music show Hotel Babylon), Haines eventually emerges a happy man, relieved that the era is over and that his own, highly individual projects are still workable and successful. He describes himself, quite fairly, as “making wilfully anti-commercial music and taking it to the very edge of the charts—like a vagrant walking up the garden path then lurking on the patio while inside the bourgeois dinner party continues as normal, trying to ignore the bitter face pressed against the French window sneering at them”.