auteurtoauthor

Luke Haines writes the shuk out of rock’n’roll Prolific, moi?

It was around 2005 when I really lost interest in music. Temporarily, at least. I had stopped smoking ‘weed’. Cannabis in its many forms was something I really ‘dug’. I never smoked in the full-on Cheech and Chong, get-utterly baked kind of way. I just liked having a soft hazy fug between myself and reality. I also liked listening to music in a grass-enhanced way. Dope gave me loads of ideas, but it sapped the energy to actually get down to the business of songwriting. So, I stopped smoking weed. When I stopped ‘smoking’, I lost interest in listening to music. So I wrote a musical. Then I wrote some books.

It took me until 2009 to reconnect with listening to and recording music. I found a way back. I realised that I really liked super prolific artists. It seemed to me that there was dignity in a band or solo artist pursuing a long, strange career. I could completely empathise with the artist who, habitually, perhaps mindlessly, just plugged away. Until insanity, infirmness or death put a stop to their shenanigans. To all intents and purposes, this was me. Happily making records doomed to be forgotten; ephemeral, aimless. Commercially unviable. It kept me quite content.

I was on safe ground with the ultra-prolific artists that I knew: Neil Young, The Fall, Hawkwind, Lou Reed and David Bowie. But I needed more. Perhaps I had no critical criteria other than a group being super-productive. I knew where I had to go: to the Z section. Frank Zappa.