Thursday, February 17, 2011

Laughter In The Dark - On Bad Vibes, Betrayal, And Baader Meinhof

I don't think about the late nineties very much, but every now and then it occurs to me that there's a story there I was actively engaged in missing the point of, mostly due to being young, drunk, and in the grip of a Thompson-inspired obsession with America. Now that I'm actually in America - and just a stone's throw from both Richard Nixon's grave and the very same Interstate 15 Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo rode to Las Vegas - I've found I have a very different perspective on the cultural touchstones that defined my teens.

A small part of this concerns my relationship with one Luke Haines, singer-songwriter for 90's indie act the Auteurs and later responsible for the mighty Baader Meinhof, a bleak yet curiously funky concept album about terrorism. Sometime in mid-1995, I picked up the second Auteurs album, Now I'm A Cowboy, from a small record store in Borehamwood that has since gone the way of most small record stores. I liked the album, but not beyond it occupying a spot in my collection and being listened to once or twice a year. This is the way things stayed until about six years ago, when - upon listening to Now I'm A Cowboy for the first time in a very long while just a few days before I left England forever - something clicked. The CD joined a select few I bothered saving from the trash and my sister's post-departure eBay profiteering.

Later, when the novelty of moving to the States began to wear off and the monotony of waiting seven months for my work permit was just kicking into high gear, I found and downloaded the other three Auteurs records (of which After Murder Park is the best) and stumbled upon Baader Meinhof, which has remained on my iPod ever since, occasionally aired in public to almost uniformly puzzled responses.

Luke Haines was, by reputation, the pretentious, miserable bastard of the mid-nineties Britpop scene. I was peripherally aware of this when I was a teenager because I read a lot of awful British music magazines, but the full extent of Haines's misanthropy wasn't clear to me until I learned more about him and began to both understand and appreciate his output. Consistently misunderstood, with a dark, bone-dry sense of humor that flew well beneath the radar of Britpop's Benny-Hill-subtle brass sections and Beatles rip-offs, the Auteurs frontman was nonetheless an egomaniacal and spiteful bastard. Which was one reason I was excited when I learned that Haines had recently penned Bad Vibes, essentially a biography of his experiences in the years '92 through '97.

I finally got my hands on Bad Vibes yesterday, and having finished it off this afternoon, I can join many of my friends in recommending it. What inspired me to sit down and write this, though, was the darkly funny postscript, in which Haines wanders through Camden on the day of Princess Diana's funeral, sensing a change in the mood of the country and feeling slightly smug that the Britpop phenomena has finally gone to ground and that the wince-inducing days of 'Cool Britannia' are numbered.

I may not have fronted a mildly famous indie band or released several rather good records, but I clearly remember that day and that vibe, just as I remember all that came before and all that followed. In fact, that particular time in England may well be the hinge on which a large part of my life swings. It's interesting to note that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England a mere five weeks before I was born, and that the eighteen years of Conservative rule that followed (miners' strike, Poll Tax riots, and all) was my childhood. When Tony Blair rose to lead the Labour party and the idea of a 'third way' entered the language of British politics, I was losing interest in my dreary, substandard North London education and starting to understand my life through writers we should have been reading but weren't. I came of age in May '97, sitting in front of the television well into the night, watching in shock and delight as those Tory bastards fell like so many dominoes, with just the tiniest part of my mind nursing the feeling that has since come to dominate the deeply cynical and apolitical thoughts I tend to express thirteen years on - nothing will change; they're all the same.

Surprise! Tony Blair, New Labor, and the 'third way' turned out to be as much a hollow sham as 'Cool Britannia', Britpop, and the idea that England's football team had a real chance of winning whatever the next major tournament was. The fun stopped when Diana was killed, and while Tony and cronies were able to drag their honeymoon period out that much longer as Elton John warbled and a nation cried as one for a woman who came to represent far more in death than she ever had in life, it was clear to most of us that the party was over and nothing much had changed. As Hunter S. Thompson so often noted, Alphonse Karr was right.

I have never forgotten the way I felt the night when Labor won the '97 election, and I have never forgotten the lessons I learned from the years that followed, when I flirted briefly with radicalism before beginning what has been a long and unpleasant journey to the way I feel about England and the way I feel about politics. As an adult, I have little good to say about either, and when I listen to the lyrics of Luke Haines, particularly the obsessive refrains of After Murder Park, it's hard to believe I ever did.

But it's not the sense of betrayal that interests me so much as the fallout. From a personal perspective, my life took a very jagged path from '97 onwards, and while it would be a tough sell to attribute all of this to politics, music, and a dead princess, it certainly makes for an interesting backdrop to a boy fumbling his way to an addictive personality and a relentless cynicism that almost never fails to piss people off, especially when they're related to me. Anybody that knows me well enough to have discussed politics or - batten down the fucking hatches - religion knows how this looks and sounds, so I'm not going to re-hash it here except to say that the future, to my mind and from a purely political and cultural perspective (I suspect me and mine will make out just fine, thanks), looks pretty bleak.

Of course, the slightly less joyful honeymoon of David Cameron and his merry band of fucking liars is in full swing as we speak, and it's safe to say that the upcoming nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton are perfectly placed to be the feelgood moment of this new era, the event that makes us proud to be British and reminds Johnny Foreigner that our quaint traditions are a sign of our mighty sovereignty and not the last embarrassing flourishes of a nation whose greatness is all in its past.

That said, there's a sense that things are a little different this time around, a bitter edge that wasn't there in the summer of '97. We blew it at the World Cup, all the music in the charts is American and/or shit, a lot of people aren't happy about the economy or the way the election went, and it seems as though a few more voices than usual wish the royal family would just fuck off.

So maybe Luke Haines and Alphonse Karr are wrong, and maybe there's more to it than fatalism and laughter in the dark. Ultimately, I'm just glad to have come to an understanding of that particular part of my life and a better idea of just what it means to me to be English, an idea that - much like my appreciation of the Auteurs - only matured after I'd left. posted at 1:29 PM ---------------------------------