Tuesday, March 06, 2012

And Now I Post About An Album About Wrestling

Luke Haines
9½ Psychedelic Meditation on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early '80s (2011)

Yes, Luke Haines has released a concept album about British wrestling. I think I would get more out of this if I was more familiar with the subject. I am old enough to remember the people these songs are about, but I had very little interest in the subject so it's all a bit mysterious to me. For the benefit of younger or American readers, British wrestling is a bit less comedic than American wrestling, but my impression is that the games were equally scripted. Whenever I saw wrestling on the TV it would feature a load of chubby blokes laying into each other while an audience of grannies bayed for them to tear each other apart.

The subject does make for the kind of bizarro 70s Britain subject matter that Haines loves, but I am far less interested in this than in, say, 1970s West German terrorism. I therefore find this record a bit hard to get to grips with. I also suspect that maybe, just maybe, the songs here are not as good as on other recent Haines records. The production might also be a bit unexciting.

image source (includes further reviews of interesting stuff, including a record by Matt Berry)

An inuit panda production

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