BOOK REVIEW: Freaks Out! by Luke Haines | The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in 2024.

Freaks Out!, Luke Haines, out now, Nine Eight Books, £18.65

The Life and Times of Little Richard, Charles White, out now, Omnibus Press, £16.99.

The musician and author Luke Haines, formerly of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, is a self-proclaimed Freak and proud. This, his fourth book, is his Freak manifesto, a righteous celebration of gloriously weird cult rock ‘n’ rollers who weren’t born to conform.

Part memoir, part alternative history lesson, it revels in skewering received wisdom and classic rock narrative orthodoxy, the “middlebrow stranglehold of cultural mediocre thinking” that Haines – an unabashedly opinionated curmudgeon - loathes with every fibre of his pasty-faced being.

Like all unabashedly opinionated curmudgeons with a sincere love of art and a healthy sense of acerbic humour, Haines is often right and often wrong, but he’s almost always entertaining. Key quote: “Rock ‘n ‘roll is a deadly serious business. It’s also very funny.”

The book begins with a roll call of people who won’t understand or enjoy it – Keir Starmer, Noel Gallagher, PE teachers etc. – before careening off into a concentrated sprawl of thoughts on the Freak flag hoisting likes of Gene Vincent, poor old Johnnie Ray, and the none-more-drugged or doomed solo career of original Tyrannosaurus Rex percussionist/uber-Freak Steve Peregrin Took.

We’re also treated to typically serious/not serious theses on how Haines’ beloved childhood favourites The Shadows invented psychedelia, how the Beatles unwittingly created the Male Genius Myth and thus ruined rock ‘n’ roll forever, how Britpop begat Brexit, and why the Doors are indisputably one of the greatest stupid bands of all time.

Haines clearly doesn’t care if you agree with him or not, as Freaks are above such polite considerations. When he casually dismisses the entire output of Prince as worthless, without any attempt to back that statement up, he’s fully aware that some readers will be annoyed. That’s the joke: an outrageous opinion presented as a fact so empirical it requires no further elucidation.

Haines is a genuinely funny nuisance, and he can write. Imagine Lester Bangs if Lester Bangs was reared in lower middle-class Portsmouth on a diet of Metal Guru and Apache. Get your Freak on, people.

Little Richard, the Big Bang of rock ‘n’ roll Freakdom, was a uniquely magnificent and complicated cat whose many contradictions and wild epoch-shaking genius were laid bare in Charles White’s riveting 1984 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard.

This latest edition features bonus chapters, previously unseen photographs, and an exhaustive discography.

Written with Richard’s full cooperation, it mostly consists of transcribed interviews linked by White’s contextualising interludes. This allows Richard and his associates to tell their versions of the truth, which are far more interesting than anything White – a rather prosaic writer - has to say. He’s such an awestruck fanboy, he never challenges our sometimes unreliable narrator.

That, however, works in the book’s favour. We spend unedited time in the fascinating mind of Little Richard, a devoutly religious man who never came to terms with his homosexuality and addiction to the Devil’s music.

He was constantly battling against himself, a sweet, eccentric, vulnerable, self-loathing enigma who also – quite rightly – knew he was the greatest. Little Richard is rock ‘n’ roll, the originator of that hard, fast, funky, glorious reason for living.

He was also a hilariously frank raconteur. The book is festooned with eye-popping anecdotes of a pornographic nature. You’ll never look at Buddy Holly the same way again.

Flaws and all, this is one of those rock biographies you really must consume.