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As requested, a review...

How often do you amble into a gig, get handed a program, which, among other things, tells you when the intermission is, and get directed to the café/bar until the auditorium opens? I guess that'll be the London Symphony Orchestra's influence :) Mind you, the text on the back of the program was bizarre in the extreme[*].

ChrisC and I obediently went down to the bar (where Pintwatch observed the list of drinks, discounted the idea of bottled Stella, and ordered a coke) and people-spotted for a while. Definitely, as we expected, an older audience and, also as suspected, predominantly male. People in suits, people dressed fashionably, people in scarily offbeat clothes, and people in your average jeans-and-t-shirt.

The church has been converted by the LSO in a rather strange way - once inside, pretty much none of the original architecture is visible. The main hall is large and lofty, but only slices of the old bricks can be seen between the funky metal pillars and strange drapes.

Slightly late, a contingent of 9 string players shuffled on stage, closely followed by three Auteurs and Luke Haines. They kicked off with Baader Meinhof, and proceeded to run (not in order) through all the songs off Das Capital (missing out Bugger Bognor, which I doubt anyone would have minded really). A couple of songs in I was feeling a little disappointed - there seemed to be something lacking, and I was wondering if I'd just never noticed before that Haines doesn't have that good a voice. Additionally, the sound quality was a little disappointing. I'd been assuming that the LSO would have a good sound system, but of course I don't imagine they usually need to mike people, so it probably isn't relevant. There was a persistent hum off Haine's guitars, and the whole sound was rather muddy.

However, four or five songs in they kicked into Unsolved Child Murder, and suddenly everything seemed to be right. The rest of the first half went fantasitcally, although the sound was still a little inferior. The string arrangements are the lush-sounding kind, which probably bore the players to tears, but which sound wonderful in an overblown kind of way. A little pretentious ? Perhaps, but delivered in a way that really enhances the songs.

I've been told in the past that Haines deliberately tried to avoid live performances as he hates doing them, and I wonder if the earlier shakiness was down to nerves.

After the intermission, the stage had been reset, and the string players were gone. Haines and his Auteurs came back on stage, and immediately began to belt through the tracks off the Baader Meinhof album. Intermittendly during the first half, a bloke sitting further down our row had been shouting for Mogadishu, his voice standing out a mile in the politely-clapping audience. Once it became apparent that Baader Meinhof tracks were the order of the day, yells of MOGADISHU became more frequent until (thank goodness) it turned out to be on the setlist.

Somehow, having ditched the strings, the four of them suddenly managed to pull a huge, fat rock sound out from somewhere, and the songs came out as crashing new versions. There's Going to be An Accident, in particular, sounded absolutely fantastic. I presume at some point they'd done some sound-checking during the intermission, as the annoying hums had gone, too.

I began to wonder if my theory about nerves was correct, as Haines appeared to get much more comfortable joking and mucking about between tracks. And dealing with the incessant shouts of MOGADISHU.Having played most of the album, he pointed out that it was not[**] the kind of evening where you got all of Ziggy Stardust in order, and moved on.

There were a couple of Haines' solo tracks (How to Hate the Working Classes and, er, something else), and a couple of Auteurs-era tracks. A wonderfully snarly version of Your Gang, Our Gang, which I think was the closing track. Shouts for an encore produced a strange song which appeared to be a hybrid of Oliver Twist and The Oliver Twist Manifesto. And then it was clear things were over, and people began to file out politely.

Haines gigs are a rarity. This is a big shame.

[*] Dear Ticketholder,

It is my pleasure and duty to welcome you to my inauguration into the rock n roll hall of fame, here tonight, live at St Luke's. Of coruse, being of a modest disposition, I shall not be mentioning it during tonight's performance and would be grateful if you, the audience, make no reference to this momentous event.

This is, in many ways, a homecoming. After three arduous years of popstrike, with only a dozen of so Black Box Recorder-related scabbing incidents, I do hope you will forgive me for any light-heartedness or ebullience. I am no, after all, a free man. On the subject of freedom and forgiveness, I have only just noticed that there are no "original" Auteurs amongst my backing band. ust as some of these so-called "original" autuers were dismissed on the grounds of diminished musical responsibility, I feel the present arrangement works very favourably.

Enough.

On with the show,

Your friend and fan,
Luke Haines.

[**] This "not" was inexplicably missed out of the first draft of this. Thanks to ChrisC for pointing it out. Missing out (or randomly including) "not" seems to be my favourite typo at the moment, and is almost certainly going to get me into trouble ;(

However. Following recent conversations (both on here and the real kind), in which people variously went "Who?", "Woo!" and "Ewww!" at Luke Haines, I feel like we need some kind of independent arbitration on this, preferably from a person of known musical judgement. So