OFF HIS ROCKER

Misanthrope, malcontent or just cranky? Luke Haines and his unique brand of dark-hued pop have always defied convention, and he likes it that way, says Brian Boyd

LUKE Haines invented Britpop. Sort of. With his band, The Auteurs, he released an album called New Wave in 1993 which was in radical contrast to the dominant acid house sound of the time, and more in the vein of a Kinks or Small Faces album. It was a big influence on Suede, who were a big influence on Blur etc.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Britpop success. During a promotional tour, Haines deliberately decided to jump off a wall and break both of his ankles to scupper the band's progress. "I did it to finish the tour and get the insurance," he says. He ended up in a wheelchair for a year and wrote the downbeat After Murder Park, which was described on its release as "the ultimate anti-Britpop album".

The incident led to Haines being unfairly branded an intractable malcontent with a grumpy and misanthropic world-view.

Haines was never going to be a Damon or a Noel. A genuinely talented but idiosyncratic artist, there was always just a tad too much stark realism going on in his work compared to his peers. Put it this way, one of his favourite lyrical obsessions is German terrorism of the 1970s, and he actually created a side-project called Baader-Meinhof, which recorded one eponymous album.

But he never strayed that far from classic pop. The Auteurs' How I Learned to Love the Boot Boys, which followed the Baader-Meinhof project, was one of the best albums of the 1990s. But again Haines moved swiftly on and formed Black Box Recorder, a weird mix of trip-hop and bleak electronica.

Whatever the musical backing, Haines's lyrics always got him compared to Jarvis Cocker and Morrissey.

"I suppose I am that English sort of songwriter," he says. "But whereas Morrissey is that northern kitchen-sink thing and Jarvis plays the Yorkshire perv, I'm very south of England. The only people I could really identify with were all those acts on the Harvest label in the 1970s and people such as Roy Harper.

"But my so-called misanthropy has always been overplayed. It's down to a specific cabal in the media who try to tell us how to think - and I always just see myself as a free-thinker. I'm someone who is interested in all the different genres of pop. I can never overstate how little I'm interested in rock'n'roll. And I can play around with the mainstream.

"Once, with Black Box Recorder, I actually wrote a hit single - mainly because I was sick of people saying how I would never be able to have a hit."

Whether solo or with The Auteurs, Baader-Meinhof or Black Box Recorder, Haines always fuses almost classic pop structures with scabrous lyrics. He's like David Lynch re-cast as an English songwriter. Someone once said that listening to a Luke Haines record was like "eating a beautiful apple and then finding half a maggot in it".

"People think the songs are far more misanthropic than they actually are," he says. "It's all artifice. All the songs are character-driven."

A few years ago Haines called for a week-long National Pop Strike, during which time any musician could turn in his or her musical wares and receive an amnesty for any and all "crimes" against pop music. "That was a gag based on the fact that there's never been any heresy in terms of pop music," he points out, not unreasonably.

Earlier this year he released the Luke Haines Is Dead career retrospective, an illuminating account of a protean talent. What stands out is how Haines has almost always chosen the path of greatest resistance. He could have surfed the Britpop wave with his early Auteurs material, but instead went off-road musically.

"Listening back to that compilation, I was surprised at how the stuff I didn't really rate that much at the time really stood up. It's the sound of someone doing what they think should be done. It could be because I sort of gave up listening to music back when I was 23. And as for today's bands. I don't think I've put a CD in the CD player for about five years now. It has been said of me that I have a pathological desire to rub people up the wrong way. But that's not necessarily true. There may be a part of that, but it's more me going my own musical way."

Fans of his Bootboys album will be glad to hear that his new solo effort, to be called Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop, is a return to the sound of that landmark record: "It's going to be 10 pop-art postcards."In typical Haines fashion, he says that the album will be released "in the first quarter of next year".

On tour these days, Haines has dispensed with the need for a band. "I can't be bothered with other musicians. It's a vaudeville show, just me and my guitar. I can throw in what I like, play songs from all of the different bands and even take requests from the audience. The people who come and see me now really substantiate my belief that I am truly unmarketable - they are all sorts, you can't identify any one type.

"There's a lot more freedom in just playing solo. if something doesn't work, you can just instantly switch to something else. In many ways, I'm preferring it to playing with a band."

He has yet to decide what label will bring out Off My Rocker. "When I look at it now, I've been on EMI, Virgin, Sony, Nude, One Little Indian at some point. I'm fast running out of labels. Their problem, not mine."

Luke Haines plays the Empire Music Hall, Belfast as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's on October 24th