Formerly with 90s indie act The Auteurs, then art-pop trio Black Box Recorder, has long enjoyed journeying off-piste. A misanthropic provocateur whose 2009 memoir ruffled feathers, he’s written songs about English motorways, 70s pop act The Rubettes, and a badger named Nick Lowe. But his sixth solo album was outré even by his standards.
The trippy, tragicomic is a concept LP celebrating the tough, marginalised lives of such famed British grapplers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks and Catweazle. “I think it would have taken a lot of courage for Catweazle – who was really called Gary Cooper and from Doncaster – to assume that character and make himself a laughing stock,” Haines told this writer on its release in 2011. “I chose to imbue the song with some sadness that might be associated with that.
” Haines had watched wrestling on telly with his dad as a kid. He originally envisaged as a TV drama, but ended up making an album in his front room instead. He had old grapple footage playing silently in the background while he recorded his sinister and/or blackly comic vignettes.
All of them view wrestling’s glory days through the distorting, transporting lens of psychedelia, with Haines utilising the sounds of children’s toys alongside synthesised strings and acoustic and electric guitars. By making those worlds collide he created something very progressive and very unique Opener sets the troubling tone, with Haines singing, ‘ .’ The song sees him add a lys.