That's a lyric from The Auteurs' "How I Learned To Love The Bootboys", one of the best albums of last year and one of the most unremittingly pessimistic, but undeniably accurate, albums ever written about England. It's an ironic reference to the class-consciousness which affected British television back in the days of two BBC channels and one commercial, the perception of BBC: sophisticated and ITV: vulgar, and I suspect it's referring to middle-class children watching the commercial network when they Weren't Supposed To. Luke Haines could have come up with a better target, of course. ITV is one of the very few areas of British life that has indisputably regressed since the 1970s - which would you prefer, Carlton or Thames? It's not a question I'd even need to ask. But even Thames were responsible for the reprehensible likes of "Love Thy Neighbour", and it's that side of British history that Haines is dissecting, a Britishness that is now officially hidden and untouchable.
Tom and myself were talking yesterday about the intent of "Johnny and the Hurricanes" - his argument was that the key lyric "I had a dream in black and white, the future's 1955" refers to the late 90s, where everything seemed to have already happened, pop seemed to have closed up and finished, become one big pastiche. Personally, I think it refers to the second austerity period of post-war British history (roughly 1973-82 ... from the virtual collapse in office of the Heath government, to the moment when Thatcherism really took over), the return of repression, the years of the three-day week and the so-called winter of discontent, and the title is a reference to incompetent pub bands trundling their way through "Red River Rock" and "Beatnik Fly", some of whom elevated themselves to TOTP (just watch the clips of Darts or Showaddywaddy sleepwalking through "Come Back My Love" or "Pretty Little Angel Eyes", and shudder). I can well imagine that, after the joyous rush-for-the-future of the 60s, the era of Backing Britain, the Beatles, and a succession of self-confident, highly expressive images in corporate promotion (http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/motorail.htm) the 70s seemed like a letdown, a throwback, a regression. I'm sure that if I'd been there in January 1974, the dying weeks of the Heath administration, doing my homework by candlelight, television closing down at 10.30 pm, freezing because of the regulations on temperatures of central heating, I would have felt like the 60s had been a foolish mirage of optimism, and the future would have seemed like a perpetual 1955. What stands out about "Johnny and the Hurricanes", the song, is the utter absence of any sentimentality - Haines declares his intent unequivocally with the line "I come to bury you, not exhume". He's raging his way through the cultural ephemera of forbidden British history, and pissing on it all. His burrowing through the past is intended to give us one nightmarish reminder - a Never Again of an album - and then to have it all forgotten again, forever.
The lyrical themes of the other songs do not surprise, but neither do they disappoint. Sexuality as a subject of shame ("Lights Out"), suburban gang mentality driven to its extreme (the awesome Glitter-referencing "Your Gang, Our Gang", which, like most of the album, perfects the razor-sharp neo-glam sound Morrissey never quite managed on "Your Arsenal"), a flashback to the 1953 Coronation coupled with an autopsy on a National Front activist ("The South Will Rise Again") and a brilliant combination of self-hating anti-nostalgia and self-worshipping ironic quasi-nostalgia ("Some Changes"). Special mention has to be made of "1967", a comparison between the calm middle-class life of Haines's parents and the identikit new rich that make up so many of his generation, and "The Rubettes", arguably the definitive mythologisation / destruction of constipated, revivalist suburban dreaming.
It ends with "Future Generation", which reads like an epitaph for Haines's entire career as the face of any pop group, and was perhaps intended as such. The final claim - "This music could destroy a nation" is painfully not meant as such. He wishes it could, and his bitterness is at least partially caused by the knowledge that TOTP2 and Capital Gold will continue exactly the same tomorrow. Overall, "How I Learned To Love The Bootboys" is an excoriating masterpiece, a wake-up call to a nation still drowning in a self-serving, self-defeating, clinging myth of its own past.
Haines's Black Box Recorder project has brought him his first noticeable commercial success this year with the single and album "Facts of Life", the former a sashaying, ineffably cool guided tour of exactly the same English restraints and restrictions chronicled on "... Bootboys", but presented utterly differently. Sometimes the entryist tactics can go too far on the album, which is a disappointment on repeated listenings - "French Rock'n'Roll" is a rather pointless Gainsbourg pastiche, and "Goodnight Kiss", an account of clandestine relationships under British seaside piers, is an ill-fitting close to the album, which fails to ignite or evoke its subject particularly well. It's interesting that several tracks that appeared only on the "Facts of Life" CD single ("Brutality", "Watch The Angel, Not The Wire", "Start As You Mean To Go On", all of which I reviewed over on http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~tewing/singlesb.html at the time) are superior to much of what made it onto the album itself. But it includes at least two masterpieces - "The Art of Driving" is a superb example of mythologising the ostensibly bland, and "The English Motorway System" is sheer, glacial and untouchable, one of the very few English Kraftwerk records ever made (telling how most such records seem to include the English word for autobahn in their titles, so "The English Motorway System" is suburban Kraftwerk, Saint Etienne's "Like A Motorway" is ruralist Kraftwerk, and there might just be others, though not to my knowledge).
Haines is the sort of songwriter you need in any country, as a corrective to the idiot joy showland of the mainstream media's rebranded nationalism. He'll be valued more in 20 years' time than he is now, I suspect - he suffered from reaching a new creative peak in the mid-90s, at the height of the subtle, gentle demand for a reassuring portrayal of Britain, creating a mythical past of agreement, consensus and togetherness. Where he goes from here is anybody's guess - like Chris Morris, he could fade further and further into the background of his projects, sugaring the pill so much that ultimately his involvement will be almost unnoticeable. Ideally, he'll push himself back to the forefront in the end - I can easily imagine him writing a superb account of the 1980s, their many social injustices and reprehensible political policies, as they become sentimentalised, rewritten and glossed up in the new decade (already, analogies are becoming obvious - Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran are being laughed at in the way Slade and The Sweet used to be, and a myth is developing that video ownership became universal in the 80s much quicker than it did, similar to the myth about colour television spreading so much quicker in the 70s). Whatever he does, he's a key member of British music's "1993 generation" who is now more relevant than ever. And how many others can you say that of?
Robin Carmody, 19th June 2000
Tom Ewing's view:
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~tewing/auteurs.html
It all goes back here:
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/music.htm
And ultimately, here: