Interview: Luke Haines, musician

IT WAS 4pm one Saturday and under-appreciated pop genius Luke Haines was wrestling with an intractable dilemma. He wanted to revive the hoary concept album but couldn’t think of a theme that hadn’t been done or overdone – that didn’t involve the moon, robots, bleak dystopian visions, mods, diamond dogs, kids who don’t need no education, kids who are thick as a brick and one special child who, as we would have to say now, is hearing-, speech- and sight-impaired but sure plays a mean pinball.

Then the mordant wit behind the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder remembered how 4pm on Saturdays used to be about only one thing. How department stores were powerless to prevent their most lucrative trading day collapsing as high streets emptied early. How the Queen was among those who thrilled to the sight one large man in a leotard and vest sitting on the head of another. And how our hero, then eight years old, would dodge a ban on the viewing of ITV in his own house by nipping round to his cousins in time for the fabled welcome: “Greetings, grapple fans.”

Wrestling was massive once. We’re talking the pre-WWF version where the stars were Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy and Jackie Pallo (and further down the bill you once might have found one Jimmy Savile). But its heyday has long gone, so how was the album going to work? We look back and see only cartoon thuggery, naffness and flying false teeth. Plus sports are notoriously tricky subjects for songs, never mind an entire themed album’s worth, never mind that wrestling was only ever an almost-sport.

Haines, though, has pulled it off. The record is called Nine and a Half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early 80s and it’s brilliant. Given that Gary Glitter, the Yorkshire Ripper, Jonathan King, Lord Lucan and Suzy Lamplugh haven’t previously daunted him as subject matter – and he also boasts a song called Andrew Ridgeley, albums named after the Rubettes and Winston Churchill and once recorded as Baader Meinhof – maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

“The album is about the time before I discovered the dubious joys of rock’n’roll,” says Haines, a man often described as pop’s pre-eminent misanthrope. “It was an innocent time so I’m trying to look through child’s eyes and not be too sneering, which can be tough for me. But the real inspiration is my dad. He’s really ill now and so the past seems to be hurtling away faster than ever. I wanted to make a record that celebrated fading memory and, of course, wrestling.”

Young Luke was an only child growing up in a lower-middle-class Surrey household and his mother Joy especially disapproved of ITV, necessitating those visits to his cousins – “Surrogate big brothers” – where World of Sport, Dickie Davies and liver sausage sandwiches were always on the menu. But his father Mick, a civil servant, was happy to take the lad to see wrestling in the (wobbly) flesh after failing to interest him in football.

“Wednesday nights were wrestling nights at Portsmouth’s Guildhall and I’ve got vivid memories of the little old ladies who sat at ringside and, if their favourites were getting a doing, they would try to batter the other guys with their handbags. Where is the outlet for those crazy bats now? Quite often, things seemed perilously close to unravelling, as if the bouts would spill into the audience and turn into a mass brawl. That only made the nights even more exciting.”

Haines, now 44, knew right away what kind of album he didn’t want to make. “It wasn’t going to be a piece of reportage because the wrestling life, bless it, could be quite dull. Bumping around in a Transit, sleeping in seedy B&Bs, barely being paid – it sounds like the lot of a third-tier indie band. The difference being of course that wrestlers got the crap kicked out of them every night. Also, I didn’t want the record to be ho-ho ironic where I was stuffing it with period clichés and making fun of these guys. Why have I placed them in a psychedelic setting? Well, I just thought it would be fun.”

Alongside the better known ones like Big Daddy – “Real name Shirley Crabtree; he was going only one of two ways, wasn’t he?” – the album features wrestlers that might have been forgotten by all but the hardcore fans and 1970s pop-culture obsessives like Haines. “Johnny Kwango was one of the few black wrestlers. He was following in the footsteps of his mum but he’d really wanted to be a ballet dancer. ‘Cry Baby’ Jim Brakes used to hate it if an opponent touched his ears. And I remember Catweazle from the Guildhall – he was always running away and his party piece was when his false teeth would fly out.”

This isn’t the first time Haines has summoned up the ghosts of grapple. The cover of the Black Box Recorder album England Made Me featured Adrian Street, the glam rock wrestler, kitted out in Bacofoil and feathers emerging from a coal mine. “Adrian had this ‘hard poof’ look which I think he based on Brian Connolly from the band Sweet, but he admitted he didn’t know much about glam rock. He didn’t know much about Hells Angels either, although he was part of a wrestling tag-team named after them. Catweazle’s persona was his interpretation of the kids’ TV character.

“Kendo Nagasaki was eventually unmasked by a plumber who’d come round to fix his heating. You might argue that wrestlers reached out for cultural references and didn’t quite manage to grasp them properly, but these were heroic failures. They were ordinary guys working without an internet.”

Ordinary? Haines doesn’t really believe this. “We wear one-piece suits, we’re not like you,” he sings, “we are unusual men.” A number of them, include Nagasaki and Mark “Rollerball” Rocco – “Now retired, along with some of his old foes, to the Costa del Wrestling” – have passed on their gratitude for being remembered and Haines is delighted.

“I’ve never been a sports fan, really, so some might say it figures that I used to love wrestling. I remember the day I found out that the contests might have been a bit faked. It was like being told there’s no Santa Claus and I don’t like to talk about it, even now.”

lNine and a Half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early 80s (Fantastic Plastic) is out now.

• Nine and a Half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early 80s (Fantastic Plastic) is out now.