50. THE AUTEURS – “The Rubettes” (1999)
This song is now as old as “Sugar Baby Love” by The Rubettes was when Luke Haines borrowed its hook for “The Rubettes”. It’s been squatting in my head for those 25 years; it was one of the first records I wrote about on Freaky Trigger. It’s an odd song to have dwelt on for so long, not one of the group’s most famous, certainly not a hit, and from an album which tended to be overlooked in favour of Black Box Recorder, which wore its cleverness on its sleeve a bit more.
Haines is a brilliant lyricist on his day, but his brilliance is largely in suggestion and implication – on Baader Meinhof, the record “The Rubettes” is the pop cousin of, he’s making things which are not so much songs about the Baader Meinhof Gang as sigils designed to evoke or recover a mood of paranoia and violence and terror and fascination. Recover, but not necessarily explain or understand – the past, especially the past of your childhood, is so drenched in emotional association you can never quite see it clearly. Ancient, formative connections wait in your synaptic underground, ready to overload you with inchoate feels. Just before sitting down to write this I saw a photograph of an Acornsoft videogame from 1980, which I had never played or knew existed, but just the font unmoored me and left me, for a few seconds, desolate.
If you’re reading this then pop music was probably a supreme generator of these buried Proustian energies for you. Like anything powerful and barely understood it caused its own folklore and customs, rituals to describe and channel the ineffable. Making lists, obviously. But also the powerful idea of pop as a kind of secret friend – the adolescent smuggling a transistor radio into bed to listen after lights out, the music helping them navigate a difficult age.
This is the central image “The Rubettes” takes and twists, superimposing sexual awakening – what else do teenagers get up to under the blankets? – with pop awakening and suggesting both of them are writing cheques some people are unable to cash. “The Rubettes”’s chorus, a death’s head singalong of a tacky 1970s pop song, is built to trigger nostalgia and to mock it. The rest of the song is a string of suggestive phrases and double-edged lines: the subject of the song, if something this slippery has one, is a social inadequate, unable to cope in the adult world of discos and dancing.
But that world itself is deeply repressed, banishing the sad songs under its metaphorical bedclothes. “Weren’t the 90s great?” Haines sings in the most venomous way possible, and the song’s video – a collection of 70s news footage and Test Cards with Haines himself inserted at points – suddenly spools forward to take in Thatcher, John Selwyn Gummer, Peter Mandelson… nostalgia may be false comfort but modernity is hardly inspiring, mostly offering a future where all possibilities have been sold off to someone already.
“The Rubettes” video reminds me of Adam Curtis, and Britpop bands in the 90s had been like characters in a Curtis documentary, imagining they could use the past, mastering its forces for their own end. But – oh yes – this was a fantasy. The Auteurs appeared in 1992 as contemporaries of Suede, a band who looked backwards in a way that felt exciting, playful, sexy. Seven years on, with the long Britpop hangover beginning, “The Rubettes” felt like an acid comment on a shallow era which had ended up drowned by the past it sought to invoke.
So how does it feel now? It’s still lodged in my head, it’s still making me think, and I still love it as a performance. Luke Haines has no stronger a voice than any other British indie singer, in fact considerably weaker than many: he sounds like a discontented goblin. But “The Rubettes” is him taking his voice’s sickly qualities and writing a song that uses them perfectly. “Rock and roll will never die” he sings, with a consumptive malignancy that lets you know its survival was ensured by monkey’s paw.
Other parts land differently now. When Haines sings “at least you’re still alive”, it sounds, and is surely meant as, a mockery, but now I think hey, fair enough. When this song came out I was restless and desperate to avoid nostalgia. Now I understand I can’t, but I can still flatter myself and think I can use it well, walk those spaces between reminiscence, regret and reaction and surprise myself still. I knew “The Rubettes” would be the first song I picked for the UncoolTwo50 list as soon as it was announced – sitting right at the end of an era of pop, casting a retrospective curse over it. But I also knew it would be at the bottom of that list: its cynicism can only take me so far.