PARK LIFE

Rip It Up, Issue 224, 1 April 1996, Page 18

PARK LIFE

“I’ve always wanted to be in the slipstream of pop. I’ve never really thought we’d have anything to do with the mainstream, ”

And Luke Haines, it seems, has got his wish. His is a story of bad luck, bad timing, near misses and great songs. The Auteurs appeared at the same time as Suede, and were pipped by them by only one point in the Mercury Music Prize. What was worse was they were continually lumped alongside Suede as a sign that rock ’n’ roll was returning to the Bowie/Roxy Music mannerisms of the early 70s. “I never liked the Roxy Music or Bowie comparisons as that wasn’t where I was coming from,” continues Haines from London. “We got lumped in with Suede and I can see why, as there weren’t really any other groups doing what could be called songs. But Suede’s thing was more to do with Roxy and Bowie, and they’d probably admit that, whereas we came more from the Modern Lovers, the Go Betweens and the Fall. When we started I thought we were like the Modern Lovers. I always wanted to be in a band like that.

pening wasn’t leaning towards songwriting. It wasn’t a particularly revolutionary record or anything new, but it was a return to something that hadn’t been done in a while, or in a cool why.” The new album, After Murder Park, harbours four songs about murder amongst its overall desolate, intense power. As fine as it is, it is unlikely to haul the band out of the slipstream. “We seem to get good press but not huge record sales. I think we’re fairly dislikeable. We’ve never pandered to the whole thing of appealing to 14-year-olds, as that’s the new market in Britain. I don’t think a 14-year-old could get anything out of After Murder Parkas I didn’t write it for them.

So, you’re saying it’s the 14-year-olds that are responsible for the current popularity of Blur and Oasis?

“I think Oasis straddle the whole thing as the whole market is buying Oasis, but I think Blur appeal to quite young kids. The same with so-called second division bands, like Menswear, and Echobelly, and all that kind of crap is aimed at kids.” So, what kind of audience do the Auteurs get? “We get a weird audience. It tends to go across the board, but there’s a noticeable presence of angsty 20-year-olds, and it seems to go up to 55-year-olds [laughs].” So, the band will be doing the ritual tour to promote the album? “No, we’re not actually touring. We’ll be doing sporadic gigs. I think touring is a waste of time in a lot of ways, in that people probably get more bad than good gigs because of the pressure situation of touring. I like playing live when it’s the right occasion. What I don’t like is getting in the tour situation of seven gigs in and you don’t even know which town you’re in. That’s when it

It sounds as if it’s going to be one of the great cult albums.

“All of our albums have been cult albums anyway. It’s difficult to work out what market a record is going to, and anyway, that’s not my job. Even our two previous albums would’ve been too difficult for the 14-year-olds, as you’re looking at lowest common denominator stuff — no disrespect to 14-year-olds the world over.”

“I see our first album as a return to songwriting, as for quite a few years what had been hap-

becomes a pointless exercise in a tax loss for the record company. Touring wears everyone out too much, and I want to put out more records this year, so I could invest my time better in writing and recording.” The Auteurs had a hit single in the lost classic ‘Lenny Valentino’, as it did respectable business in the Top 20, but even this is a hard luck angle. “It was a great radio record, and it got loads of radio coverage, but it was maybe a year before the time of indie records selling a lot. ‘A year later and it may well have been a huge hit,’ he says. The reason the second album was quite glossy was probably because of ‘Lenny Valentino’, as it took us into another league.” The second album, Now I’m A Cowboy, couldn’t be given away locally, it littered sale tables everywhere. A fine album with more than its fair share of good songs, it deserved to sell more than it did.

“It sold a lot more than New Wave, but people always think it didn’t. But I don’t know whether it should have sold more. It came out at completely the wrong time. It was like a sophisticated rock record that came out when things like the Blur album and the first Oasis album came out, and we were the antithesis of that, but people could relate to them much more. So, it got lost in that, but it did what it needed to do, so it didn’t really matter.

“I don’t think the Blur and Oasis hysteria damaged us that much, as we’re not in that market. If you’re setting yourself up as wanting to be liked by everyone, then you have to play certain rules of the game. The only people gaining anything out of the r/Oasis hype are the record companies and the media: The two bands aren’t gaining anything out of it.” Producing After. Murder Park was the godfather of grunge, Steve Albini, late of Nirvana, the Pixies and Wedding Present. A lot of people doubted the union of Albini and the Auteurs would pay off, It has. “He gave us an edge we hadn’t had before and he encouraged a more direct approach. All of the songs were written and arranged before we recorded the album, so he had no part in the arrangement or production. His thing was the engineering, actually getting the sound of it, and he came through with his sound. “I think at first he was a bit bemused by us. We did a couple of songs with him just after Now I’m a Cowboy to see if anything could happen, and it did, so we were happy to do an album with him. We could have lost quite easily, as on the third album people can start sounding really stale, when they should do something kind of reckless and throw caution to the wind.”

So often these days first albums are the best, as after that many bands find they have nothing left to say, nothing new to offer. “That’s true,” agrees Haines, “and a lot of that’s due to the press, as if they pick up on a band, they go crazy over their first album, and there’s really nothing left to say after that for the press. This has happened to Blur now. At last the NME and the Melody Maker are tired of them. I think they’ve squeezed every last drop out of them, so as a press phenomenon, they’re- pretty much dead.” Fact time. After Murder Park took a brief 13 days to record at Abbey Road studios. Paul McCartney occasionally popped his head around the door, probably to make sure they’d paid their thousand quid a day studio expenses. The album has 12 impressive, often depressing songs. Uneasy listening. “It was pretty obvious it was going to be depressing. I broke my ankles jumping off a wall in Spain, so I wrote most of it in a wheelchair. Most of it was written in recovery and that’s where the strange moods come from, as I was basically stuck in the basement of my flat. Calling it a basement sounds like a Gothic horror film, but my basement’s OK. anyway, this is the most personal record I’ve done. It’s a lot less sarcastic and even less cynical ”

GEORGE KAY