There is a new Luke Haines and Peter Buck collaboration out, and I highly recommend it. All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out was created along with longtime Buck partners-in-crime Scott McCaughey and Linda Pitmon and it’s a snarling cauldron of bizarre imagery, psychedelic guitar rock (Buck is very much on form here), glam, Haines’ signature trenchant societal observations and Lenny Kaye! I reckon this one is even better than the first one, which I liked a lot.

I caught up with Luke Haines via email.

Love the new album. It’s even better than the first one. Was this also recorded via the internet, or were you all able to be in a studio together while you were touring in the UK?

I’m glad you dig the album. We all do too. The album was all recorded remotely. Primarily because when we started recording (mid 2020) we were in the pandemic. So, like many people we were just sat around at home , and thought, ‘well we’ve got an album to do -better get on with it. Maybe, well all be in the same room for the next one. Maybe not.

Such eclectic subject matter bouncing from one topic to another—as opposed to the concept albums of your recent past—what inspired this crop of  lyrics?

Well, as I said we were deep in pandemic, so my mind was certainly concentrated on making some kind of statement. But what kind of statement can anyone make in a pandemic. Anything ‘lucid’ is doomed to being trite or histrionic. We’re (maybe still) actually in the abyss. So I think the lyrics are a collection of pop art psychosis. Or junk art psychosis, a bit like that scene with Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, when he’s making a model of the mountain out of mashed potato. That scene is essentially what this album is.

When you’re collaborating at a distance and writing songs, do the lyrics come first, a hummed melody or a riff or…? How does that work?

I listen to Peter’s demo and just start singing along. I usually have the bare bones within a few goes. If I can’t come up with anything him or Scott just send something else. The ‘process’ is not at all precious.

As easy as they are to do, very few artists can put together a truly unique and/or witty collage—a notable exception being Cold War Steve—what’s the “message” of your most excellent collage work on the packaging?

There is currently an obsession with NFTs and AI created art work. Whether AI yields anything worthwhile in the future who knows. I have no interest in digital art forms. I wanted the sleeve to look very analogue – so collage and oil paint is as analogue as it gets. The cover is if anything an amalgam of the last album as well. It is Apocalypse Beach, it’s just that when we recorded the first album Apocalypse Beach was a fantasy – now it is a reality.

Congrats on winning my coveted “Best Album Title of 2022” award. Truly fantastic. Who came up with it?

Thank you. I’ve never won anything before. Sadly, I have to admit that Peter came up with the title. His neighbour, a doctor, said to him pre-vaccine, that he’d been dealing with infectious diseases all his life, but with this one ‘All the kids were super bummed out.’ Never let a global pandemic get in the way of a great album title. I’ll take the award anyway.

The song on heavy rotation on my turntable is the title track. That’s a fucking good one. That weird shrieking monkey sample really freaks out one of our dogs. You guys (and gal) should get your Pink Floyd on again for an entire album of dark psychedelia. That’s my advice. Take it or leave it.

Yeah we’re really into apes. The ape section probably should have gone on longer. That was me with my commercial head on, ya know – ‘if we have five minutes of apes they won’t play it on the radio, better cut it down to two minutes of apes.’ I’‘m totally up for the early Floyd. Syd was great of course. Their best stuff was from Piper up to Atom Heart Mother. I’m an Ummagumma, man. Great album!

American tour?

We’d like to do an American tour. Visas are kind of expensive but it hasn’t been ruled out. So there’s that and because of Brexit it’s now really complicated playing in Europe. I’m kind of stranded in the UK.

I saved this one for last: What the fuck is going on in the post-Brexit United Kingdom?!?! 

I’m glad you asked me about this one. I have the answer: Now that the Queen has gone the royal family are in a perilous position. The Queen was the last one who had direct lineage to the royal family’s Prussian/German heritage. She was the last one that shored up the monarchy’s ‘safe’ position after World War I. That’s all gone now and they are rudderless – they’ll be gone in ten years time and that is gonna be the game changer. Once they’re gone all bets will be off. Factor that into an equation that takes in the English Civil War of 1642, the Essex witch trials, the treaty of Versailles and Maastricht and therein lies the answer. Keir Starmer (or whichever motherfucker it is) will need to fund a think tank of academics and historians and find an algorithm that will ‘lead us out of Brexit,’ which is all the fault of Loaded magazine and those ‘culture’ arseholes who were writing about ‘cool Britannia’ in the ‘90s. They all write for the Guardian now or are on the radio where they moan about Brexit, and blame the people who voted for it, not realising they were largely responsible for putting the Brexit vote on the table in the first place. You cannot mess with culture. The clue’s in the name!

Good lord, it’s worse than I thought…

All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out, out now on colored vinyl via Cherry Red and Drastic Plastic