A record about the 1970s. Ho hum. The front man of The Auteurs, Luke Haines, is quick off the mark, though, in telling us he's not one to wallow in nostalgia. "This is a record of anti-nostalgia. To me, it's an incendiary device planted in a car boot sale. You can almost picture a slow-motion sequence of Donny Osmond dolls being blown to bits." He's referring, however extravagantly, to one of the albums of the year, How I Learned To Love The Bootboys.
In the hands of someone less capable, an album about the 1970s would have ended up as something that you'd only be able to buy courtesy of a television ad, but with The Auteurs what you get are 12 riveting tracks about glam rock, sew-on patches, Raleigh bikes and Asti Spumante. Fascist skinheads gather as power strikes and food shortages loom. Abba and Starsky And Hutch don't get a look in. The tone is set, dramatically, by the opening track, The Rubettes, which samples the lyrics to Sugar Baby Love but still manages to suck out all that song's pop euphoria and replace it with something quite dark. The following songs see the events of the decade, and indeed nostalgia itself, laid bare with the sort of astuteness that has distinguished The last four Auteurs albums.
Dismissed in poppier quarters as "truculent", The Auteurs were initially feted as an instant replacement for The Smiths and their debut album, New Wave, missed out on the 1993 Mercury Music Prize by just one vote. Suede more or less displaced them in the indie favourites stakes, and while the band still released albums of note (particularly 1996's After Murder Park - which was produced by Steve Albini), Luke Haines spent more and more on time on side projects such as Baader-Meinhof and Black Box Recorder. This new album, though, is a gripping return to form. "With these songs, I'm just trying to make the point that all we do is assimilate the past," says Haines. "I hate all that stuff - the idea of a golden past to be relived at any opportunity." Profoundly unsentimental, and at times quite cruel, How I Learned To Love The Bootboys is as much about 1999 as it is the 1970s. A great album.
Told you so: as predicted in this here oblong column, Talvin Singh has won the 1999 Mercury Music Prize. There's a lot made about the "new Asian underground" sound in music today, but what distinguishes Talvin Singh's OK album from the pack is its ability to float between many genres and idioms. Brought up in East London, Singh has moved between many different musical worlds - from breakdancing to electro music, to listening to The Jam and Secret Affair to learning to play the tablas within the conservative world of Indian classical music.
"When you go to India," he says, "it doesn't matter how good a tabla player you are - you're British, not Indian. They never accepted me as being Indian. When I come back here, they never accepted me as being British. That's why I feel my music has so many ambient textures." Created in between travels to Okinawa, Bombay and New York, recorded in Brick Lane in London, OK is quite unlike anything else out there at the moment. Moody and spaced-out - give it a go.
OK is on the Island label.
