By Paul Whitelaw
REVIEWS
The musician and author Luke Haines, formerly of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, is a self-proclaimed freak and proud. This, his fourth book, is his freak manifesto, a righteous celebration of gloriously weird cult rock’n’rollers who weren’t born to conform.
Part memoir, part alternative history lesson, Freaks Out! revels in skewering received wisdom and classic rock narrative orthodoxy, the “middlebrow stranglehold of cultural mediocre thinking” that Haines loathes with every fibre of his pasty-faced being.
Like all unabashedly opinionated curmudgeons with a sincere love of art and a healthy sense of acerbic humour, Haines is often right and often wrong, but he’s almost always entertaining. Key quote: “Rock’n’roll is a deadly serious business. It’s also very funny.”
The book begins with a roll call of people who won’t understand or enjoy it – Keir Starmer, Noel Gallagher, PE teachers – before careening into a concentrated sprawl of thoughts on the freak flag-hoisting likes of Gene Vincent, poor old Johnnie Ray and the doomed Tyrannosaurus Rex percussionist/uber-freak Steve Peregrin Took.
We’re also treated to typically serious/not serious theses on how Haines’ beloved childhood favourites The Shadows invented psychedelia, how The Beatles unwittingly created the male genius myth and thus ruined rock’n’roll forever, how Britpop begat Brexit, and why The Doors are indisputably one of the greatest stupid bands of all time.
Haines clearly doesn’t care if you agree with him or not, as freaks are above such polite considerations. When he casually dismisses the entire output of Prince as worthless, without any attempt to qualify that statement, he’s fully aware that some readers will be annoyed. That’s the joke: an outrageous opinion presented as a fact so empirical it requires no further elucidation.
Haines is a genuinely funny nuisance, and he can write. Imagine Lester Bangs if he was reared in lower middle-class Portsmouth on a diet of Metal Guruand Apache. Get your freak on, people.
Little Richard, the big bang of rock’n’roll freakdom, was a magnificent and unique cat whose many contradictions and epoch-shaking genius were laid bare in Charles White’s riveting 1984 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard. This latest edition features bonus chapters, previously unseen photos and an exhaustive discograph
