Formerly with 90s indie act The Auteurs, then art-pop trio Black Box Recorder, Luke Haines has long enjoyed journeying off-piste. A misanthropic provocateur whose 2009 memoir Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall 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 9 1⁄2 Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s and Early 80s 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 9 1⁄2 Psychedelic Meditations as a TV drama, but ended up making an album in his front room instead. He had old World Of Sport 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 Inside The Restless Mind Of Rollerball Rocco sets the troubling tone, with Haines singing, ‘I was trying my best to understand, how a beautiful bouncing baby grows up to be an ’orrible man.’ The song sees him add a lysergic twist to the true story of wrestler Les Kellett retiring to run an infamous Bradford transport café called The Terminus.
“I thought maybe Les could be like a Sufi dispensing the sacrament to younger wrestlers from his thousand-trip bag,” Haines said. “I imagined Rollerball Rocco coming to seek knowledge over this awful food in this awful setting.”
Although 9 1⁄2 Psychedelic Meditations lasts just 30 minutes, boy does it take you somewhere. For all its flights of fancy it’s not ironic; rather it finds Haines rooting for the hard-grafting, often veteran grapplers whose mysterious lives were regularly beset by injury.
“The reality is that wrestling had very little to do with psychedelia or music,” Haines explained; but by making those worlds collide he created something very progressive and very unique.
Nice, too, that, in an oblique nod to artist Peter Blake getting Kendo Nagasaki to sit for him, Haines painted 12 acrylics of his favourite wrestlers for the Grapple Calendar, which accompanied the LP’s physical release.
