Luke Haines

Gigs. Remember them? They were awful. You’d get to some dump of avenue, in a bad part of town (if a small capacity) or out in some apocalyptic wasteland (if an enormo-dome). You’d arrive too early and have to try and dodge some mediocre support band (who’d bought their way on to the tour) or queue for seven hours for a beer in a plastic cup. If you dared to speak while some awful act was plodding away, some goody-goody would hold a finger up to their lips, glare and shoosh you. An hour and a half later in the back of the venue, you’d stand gratefully nearer to death’s beckoning cold hand. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Yes. When Covid rampaged through the world like a Viking raid of death-cult realtors, the world was suddenly shorn of live music.

Remember when you were so nonchalant about the inevitability of Christmas privilege? Time off work for the holiday season, a few messy coke sessions with colleagues, maybe a boozy catch up with an old friend? Going out and about, buying your bourgeois real (dead) Christmas tree? Remember how you hated all that cornball Christmas muzak piped into the department stores: Slade, Wizard, Macca’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song”? Then along came Covid and Christmas was gone. You, my friend, were in lockdown. As each post-2020 festive season rolls into town, so will the new variants of Covid. The smart set decrees that it’s best we all hole up for the holidays and hide from disease and death.

The history of late-20th-century Japanese pop music can seem like an impenetrable forest to western minds. But stare past the trees and there is light from a parallel universe. The Japanese Group Sounds records of the mid-Sixties (the Spiders, the Tempters and er, the Mops) were heavily influenced by the original moptops’ Budokan Temple show of 1966 and surf bands such as the Ventures. The university campus hard rock of Tokyo’s late-Sixties freak scene — Les Rallizes Dénudés, Flower Travellin’ Band, Speed, Glue and Shinki — and the lysergic rock soundtracks to Shuji Terayama’s revolutionary theater plays by the great J.A.

Lately you may have noticed a conspicuous absence of pop stars ostentatiously cavorting and doing stupid stuff. This is for two reasons. One, the great distraction that is the entertainment industry — ‘The Spectacle’, as the French provocateur and Situationist Guy Debord called it — has been turned off. Two, the Pop Star currently has nowhere to do his or her pop thing. This is not for want of trying. During the early days of the pandemic, a battalion of pop stars fled to the internet to broadcast acoustic renditions of their new wares from their terrible minimalist homes. This culminated in the horrendous One World Together at Home concert.

The Beatles never had a proper Christmas number one, only seasonal number ones with unseasonal bangers: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘We Can Work It Out’/‘Day Tripper’ (1963-65) and ‘Hello Goodbye’ (1967). Though they never made a traditional Christmas record, the Fabs loved Yule — and you know you should be glad. Between 1963 and 1969, they recorded an album-worth of charming Christmas nonsense. Welcome to the semi-secret hinterland between the legal and bootleg worlds: the Beatles’ Fan Club Christmas flexi discs. The flexis have only had one official release since their private circulation to the ravenous Brit-Beatle fan club.

Pop music is tribalist by nature and divisive by desire. It was always the Beatles or the Stones, mods or rockers, burn the Beatles’ records or ‘hang the DJ’ and, most important of all, Bob Marley or Big Youth? (The answer is Big Youth.) Only one man transcended this nonsense: Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert. Anyone who has heard Toots but doesn’t dig his mighty soul skank should be cast into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights of good, hard thinking. Toots died on September 11 in his native Jamaica. He was 77, allegedly the victim of complications from COVID-19. The man may have gone, but his vibrations will live on as long as mankind has ears to listen and feet to dance.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.March 2013 I have written a song called ‘Lou Reed, Lou Reed’. It’s a hymn to the man in the title — a petition, as Jim Morrison would have it, to the gods of rock ’n’ roll. The song runs for just two minutes and consists of a three-note, sub-moronic riff and a two-word mantra repeated 71 times. The two words are ‘Lou Reed’. The song isn’t a hit, but it does cut a bit of a dash. The song’s subject even hears it. I hear from someone who hears that he heard it that he likes what he heard. Then, in October 2013, the subject of my song dies. My song, a throwaway, begins a strange afterlife.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Was there ever a more audacious album title than Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire? The name of the Kinks’ 1969 masterpiece could almost be described, in Sixties vernacular, as ‘far out’. But just two years after the lysergic hurricane of 1967, the content of Arthur was ‘far in’, even by the Kinks’ distinctly un-psychedelic standards. Not for them the late Sixties’ return to Americana of the Stones (Beggars Banquet), the Band (Music from Big Pink) and Dylan (John Wesley Harding).

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Wokeness, first conceived of by the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (1872-1949) had barely reached the mainstream when Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister died in 2015. Still, Lemmy had given considerable thought to staying woke. As a champion abuser of amphetamines, he’d spent more time awake and thinking than anyone since 1945. Perhaps his surprising death –– surprising, because he seemed indestructible –– was necessary in some Gurdjieffian way, to make room for the terrors that now occupy our psyches.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The Rolling Stones’ delayed tour is back on the road. Not the tour they delayed after Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree, but the one delayed because Mick Jagger had a heart attack. If you’re a boomer of advanced years and decayed taste, all this is no doubt a big deal, your last chance to see some of the last icons of the original and brief Rock Era, before you or they kick the bucket. Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. Except they aren’t the Stones. They haven’t been the Stones for years.