Luke Haines 'Freaks Out' Review by Kevin Quinn

Central Saint Martins PhD Candidate and co-founder of Post-Grad Interest Group Subcultures Kevin Quinn reviews 'Freaks Out' by Luke Haines.

‘History, as Marx reminds us, progresses by its bad side. In the very process of being pushed to the margin, the artist begins to claim visionary, prophetic, bohemian or subversive status – partly because those on the edges can indeed sometimes see further than those in the middle, but also to compensate for a loss of centrality. A movement called Romanticism is born.’ Terry Eagleton, The London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 8 · 25 April 2024

Luke Haines has been operating within/without the pop-cult(ure) confines for nearly forty years.

Ex-Servant, one-time Auteurcrat, erstwhile Baader Meinhof factioneer with a “moronic terrorism concept LP”, Black Box Recordist, silver-screen scorer[i], frequent collaborator[ii] and perennial conceptualist.[iii]

Forever skewering the sanctimonious, puncturing and pricking the pompous yet always with a gleaming glint in his vision. From deconstructing pop culture’s past to reconstructing rock heritage’s impasse, Haines has a singular slant on matters simply because he cares. These things are important and he wants us all to know just why.

It can be argued that to truly lambast with sincerity there has to be an element of pure affection for the target, a moon within the lampoon. In every sneer must lay a cheer.  Like fellow artisanitiser Ian Svenonious[iv] Luke Haines embodies this with aplomb.

Freaks Out!: Weirdos, Misfits and Deviants – The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock ’n’ Roll (Nine Eight Books) is Haines’ fourth book[v] and continues the theme of rich rewards of being in prime position when having to observe from afar. On the periphery is where you oughta be. Counter, under, other than. The result is possibly Haines most personal and funniest book to date.

Freak /friːk/

noun

1. 1. a person, animal, or plant with an unusual physical abnormality.

Similar: aberration; abnormality; oddity; monster; monstrosity; freak of nature

verb

1. INFORMAL

behave or cause to behave in a wild and irrational way, typically because of the effects of extreme emotion or drugs.

Similar: go crazy; crack; snap;throw a wobbly; go bananas

In Freaks … Haines combines snippets of amusing autobiography with a loving lens fixed upon a litany of unusual suspects, borderliners, ne’er do well dwellers, margin-soakers, fringe ‘n brackets, upfrontiers, edge-funders, the dropouts, with Haines panoramically purveying a phalanx of colourful characters who unconsciously broadcast their unwitting wares and ways unto the unwired, into the ur-weird, onto the warped wavelengths of those who tune(d) in. Inspirational individuals who were destined to be ‘freaks’.  The coulda, shoulda, mightabeens.

We are taken back to days of faking illness to catch daytime telly at its optimum and serendipitously having worlds turned upside down and out: ‘at 15 everything reinvents me’; nascent bands and politics where decision making is arbitrarily made over names and members as democracy doesn’t work, a despot is needed; scenes of violent skirmishes and inter-fan scuffling over politically charged lines. It evocatively provides a cultural context of the times Haines inhabited. The pre-Internet world was a vastly different terrain, many things were done differently there.

Sacred cows are slain, shibboleths are struck down, tarnished reputations are candidly salvaged and varnished observations are romantically packaged. Lil’ ol’ Prince gets a shoeing, cruise-crooner Jane McDonald gets a shoo-in. That’s the way it is.

As a prose-tinted recollection of a cultural past the book could be seen as a psyche-oh-demographic companion to Michael Bracewell’s 2021 psychogeographic trawl Souvenir.

Freaks … is also a manifesto or how-to manual for those seeking new cultural entry points or routes away from the confines of the humdrum, where the Internet sits as the quota-idiom tedium-medium as the monolithic message-transmitter.

A Freak-Indexterity

The Epilogue is an index that channels Nancy Mitford’s (in)famous categorising of class and language knowledge and usage (‘U and non-U’).

Haines unsnobbishley separates his freakdom into a beginner’s list of (F) Freak), (FE) Freak Enabler and (Non-F) Non-Freak. Some entries may astound, others confound, many will resound, it’s not fixed and it will inspire your own submissions.

For example, ultra-extravagantly in shoots Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s face-stockinged diva-deviant Martin Degville is a Freak, whereas that group’s ‘brains’ Tony James is classified as Non-Freak.

Haines ‘distinctly’ makes it clear that “this is not a list. Remember: lists are for shoppers, not Freaks and rockers”

As well as providing a handy 12-point warning to would-be readers on the back, Haines makes it absolutely clear that the wearing of shorts is a resolute no-go for a freak as is mandatory travelling by bus.  No taxis permitted. Rules are rules and these rules are made to be out-spoken.

Ailments and frailties (seen/unseen) have long acted as a spur or driver for unlikely stars. There’s Ian Dury’s polio and Johnny Rotten’s meningitis, handicaps and illnesses that inadvertently provided both with the fundamental resolve to survive and thrive in later contexts.

To this Haines also contributes Johnnie Ray. The ‘Nabob of Sob’, the ‘Prince of Wails’, the pre-rock and roll hearing-aid wearing quiff-hairing malfunctioning melancholic. Ray’s quiff is attributed as the beginning of symbolic malevolence before Elvis’s appropriation knocked Ray into touch.

‘Sweet’ Gene Vincent, leg-mangled black leather-clad hoodlum. Enabled by name-changing and supported by a crack-backdrop of musicians that all-together concocted a potent brew of the genius and the amateur. Vincent’s reign soon-to-be-toppled by the swishing follicles of the Beatles’ moptops. Vincent also makes an ‘appearance’ as a cat on Haines’ 2013 LP Rock and Roll Animals.

Song-Smith Morrissey, son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar. Avowedly unlovable, magnificently maladjusted and tragically misunderstood. If only the world would listen.

Haines makes the astute observation that it is in fact the satellite orbiters - as opposed to metropolitan trail-biters - who in their eternal desire to escape from the trappings of tedium and their quest to seek and find like-minded Others are the true creators and catalysts for cultural reform.

Haines terms these folk (including himself) as existing ‘nearby’, trapped in places of space which only become im-portals once the dweller has fled, their vantage point power obscured until those energies are activated in new settings.

Two images are selected and textually analysed by Haines (neither are printed in the book so Haines deploys recreations by six-year old Mercy Millar ©) to act as contrast in who, how, why, what, when and where ‘freaks’ really operate and truly agitate.

Firstly, the Welsh wrestler and son of a coal-miner Adrian Street captured with his father at the Bryn Mawr Colliery, South East Wales in 1973. Trumpeted by the artist Jeremy Deller as ‘the Greatest Photo of the Twentieth Century’ the image was used on Black Box Recorder’s 1998 “album/state-of-the-nation address” England Made Me.

Paul Morley: “anti-freak anti-hero”

However, Haines then takes his steady aim at those he sees as misrepresenting the freakworld and indeed capitalising upon and chastising it. Enter Paul Morley. In 1981 the New Musical Express[i] critic interviewed The Grateful Dead’s head-honcho, Jerry Garcia.

Twenty-something self-styled New Popagandist meets middle-aged narc-fuelled counter-culturalist. Haines draws attention to the power-play within. For all the immediacy and potency of the first image Haines posits this image as “the actual Greatest Photo of the Twentieth Century”.

What in 1981 to the ‘elite’ readers of the N.M.E. might appear as a juncture with the past and a generational mocking from the younger upstart is in fact reversed. It is Garcia who – with his knowing smirk – holds all the cards as Haines duly notes “freakdom trumps irony”. It is Morley who “in his post-ironic heart … thinks that somehow he is not lying in a field of his own bullshit”.

Neil Young on being middle of the road “Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there”  

Haines rescues pre-Beat boom twang-combo The Shadows from the middle of the road and six-string-King Hank Marvin in particular is elevated to axeman-extraordinaire. Hank’s intricate finger-picking an antecedent on the soon to emerge Merseybeat explosion and sonic precedent for later psychedelic wig-outs.

The Doors - and especially Lizard King Jim Morrison - are retrieved from the rock-crit slagged-off heap and their importance to the spectacle of rock theatre and good hair is rightfully reasserted.

Quite magnificently Eurovisonaries Bucks Fizz’s 1981 #1 ‘The Land of Make Believe’ gets it alt-dues. With lyrics written by none other than progressive-rockers King Crimson’s Pete Sinfield what is generally heard as sugary narcopop is in fact a covert attack on Margaret Thatcher’s aggressive policies. Don’t look a Trojan Horse in the mouth.

“...manifestos are passionate, always they command attention and use language for perhaps its most urgent purposes—the rattling of complacent minds.” (From the introduction to McSweeney’s Manifesto!)

This is an omnist[ii] manifesto where the deities and godheads are not necessarily who’d you expect or ‘polite’ society would probably choose to accept, but, a gallery of various vessels and vehicles of unheretofore voiceless form.

Haines embodies these outcasts, moulds the miscreants and reshapes the misshapen, painting a landscape full of plentiful horizons of sometimes undutiful denizens. You don’t have to like these characters or their contributions to pop-cult lore, but, you cannot deny their import, impact and immortality when set against today’s cascade of inhumanicured blandroids all vying for a slot on some sponsored stage or other. We all know what you’re ‘for’, but what are you ever against …

“A freak should never work”

Socio-politically it also covers the pre/post-Thatcherism years with all the ‘benefits’ of long-term unemployment leading up to Tony Baloney’s neo-Labouralism ‘Third Way’ and Britpop’s hypnarcotising sleight of hand which symbolised the “great freak cull”.

Haines scales the withering heights as he describes this ‘rebellious’ epoch as one of “deadened conservatism” as a swathe of leisure-clad panto-clowns coming across as “Freddie and the Dreamers on Blue Peter vibes”. The much-vaunted ‘indie’ revolution was indeed fossilised.

The story closes with Haines being at the epicentre of the web and floatsam of the online socialworld with one of his old songs, ‘Child Psychology’ getting name-dropped and Tik-Tokked by none other than post-teen blackscreen-Queen Billie Eilish. Needless to say financial recompense is sadly not forthcoming such is the no-payback world of the cultural trough of endless free content. Sharing isn’t always squaring.

Haines also places some optimism in some of today’s pop-ooh-la-la starlets who he hopes may contain some of that vital ingredient of FR>EA<K. We can but hope.

Time, place, freakquency

In the days before the jet-washing, personality-bleaching glare-stare of the web-net, these curveballs, goofballs and oddballs existed in the imaginations of their creators and in the mind-eyes of an awaiting public. Their potency and panache a result of the crossing vectors, between the existential need to be and the essential desire to be seen.

In an age where ‘difference’ is choreographed, coordinated and cynically cultivated this cast of characters are gloriously revelled for all their frailties, ailments, abnormalities, grand attendees at an informal training school. These are the templates. Take heed.

Ultimately, the message is that getting things wrong or being out of sync will ultimately stand you in good stead in the non-conformity stakes. Who wants to be like everyone else anyway?

If you only read one book this year that also features Japanese noiseniks Les Rallizes Dénudés (with a plane-hijacking bassist); Billies Eilish and Piper, Hawkwind, Big Youth, David Van Day, The Manson Family Girls, Scientology (“crap cult”), Morris dancers, an Andy Warhol image stand-in, Ivor Cutler, A.I. avatars and the tedious treadmill of techno-treated re-versions of recycled records from yore and a text that makes the intriguing arguments of how “The Beatles ruined everything” and how Select magazine’s 1993 union-flag brandishing cover is responsible for Brexit then it really must be this one.

Kevin Quinn