Music

Luke Haines has been sniping at the sordid hypocrisy of pop culture from the sidelines for 15 years under a range of guises, including The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder and Baader Meinhoff. And, if this latest collection is anything to go by, time has only sharpened his capacity for entertaining and perceptive vitriol. Vaguely articulate pop is often lazily described as ‘literate’, but this loosely themed LP about ’70s Britain displays a deeply satisfying sense of dimension, vision and clarity of purpose which entirely justifies this description.

Highlights include ‘Here’s To Old England’, which forensically dismantles the rose-tinted recent past as a kind of negative ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ (‘God bless Enoch Powell, rickets and TB’). ‘Bad Reputation’ laments the fate of The Glitter Band, ‘Walton Hop’ that of Jonathan King. But the clincher is the queasily hilarious ‘Leeds United’ which conflates the fortunes of the football team with those of Peter Sutcliffe. Framed by hideously appropriate musical schmaltz, the evils concealed by banality are laid utterly bare as our protagonist stops for a pint in Chapeltown on his way home and wonders what his houseproud spouse will make of his dishevelled appearance. ‘When I get home my wife will kill me,’ he moans. Nice.