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Didn't our beloved Luke Haines try a little too hard to reach for the acknowledged cult status?
I'm not sure if things were planned out to that extent (from what I remember, getting inro the charts was Black Box Recorder's raison d'etre, pretty much, or so they used to say interviews) but equally, I think it could be argued that Luke Haines was his own worst enemy for a lot of the Nineties. Stunts like allegedly breaking his ankles to avoid going on tour with The The were, while perhaps understandable, never going to make much sense to the wider record-buying public in the Britpop years. And then there was his habit of presenting himself as a much older man than he actually was, at a time the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Noel Gallagher and Bobby Gillespie, while never actually lying about their ages, seemed happy enough to play the Pop game, at least to the extent of not dressing up like curmudgeonly old buggers from the days of the Empire. But then again, a lot of this was probably driven by a genuine sense of rage on Haines' part - his image was basically a disaster, one that's really only starting to suit him now, in his late thirties, but could he have done any different? I'm prepared to believe that Nineties might have felt, at times, like this sort of malign entity that was out to get him personally, as thing after thing that he basically hated (Britart, Oasis, Tony Blair, etc) came to prominence, while his own star fell - for someone in a band that was initially lumped in with Suede and Pulp, that must have been a bit galling.
Though I don't suppose anyone should feel too sorry for him; he made a lot of great records, after all (which I think sold reasonably well - as far as I know he was never exactly starving in a garret) and he seems to be quite enjoying his status as a kind of literate, alt-rock Alf Garnett these days, performing residencies at the Edinburgh festival and so on, maybe planning an Auteurs comeback for when the time seems right, although he should possibly give this another few years. |
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