Will no-one think of the Christing children? Vinny Peculiar may look like a character from Graham Fellows’ discard pile, but he bloody means it man. Imagine this being your dad: middle aged and zany in a cheap suit, grey hair bouncing with every wacky strumathon and screwed up facial expression. Kind of a cross between Joe Jackson and a children’s entertainer having a nervous breakdown, even before ‘Sperm Donor’ it’s watch through fingers stuff. And yet… in his desperate desire to interact and entertain there’s a twisted kind of enjoyment to be had here; Vinny’s impossible to properly hate. Pity maybe.
Luke Haines practically cups the audience’s balls from the get go. Opening withthe admission that his new song about missing kids features no death and is thus a sign he’s lightening up, a hint he’ll play ‘Unsolved Child Murder’ later, and an unexpected run through of early Auteurs gem ‘Showgirl’ as second song: yeah, that’s the crowd fully lubed. It’s a weirdly entertaining evening: Haines may interrupt one song to ask the balcony to stop singing along, but he’s on unnervingly jovial form throughout, cracking wise to a degree that belies his image as a dour misanthrope, however false and one-dimensional that caricature may be. It’s a set that’s nicely complementary to the Black Box Recorder reunion earlier this year: none from that band, but a pretty representative mixture of the old and the new solo material, Auteurs menace, even a Baader Meinhof obscurity to please the odd lurking man at the back. Music from the new LP ’20th Century Man’ shows Haines’ obsession with unglamorous ’70s iconography is becoming maybe a little too monomaniacal, with props to Peter Hammill and Klaus Kinski, and there’s a weird moment where the coda “this is the North; we do what we want” is added to one song, a nod to a similarly obsessed writer: Haines becoming David Peace’s musical wing.
These are pretty small quibbles though. The rasp and dark humour are in fine form, and as ‘Lenny Valentino’ bashes itself out, guitar problems leading to the ending repeated three times, grinningly, we leave, like Haines, smiling.
