Bad Vibes is a first person, “I was that soldier” account of a life lived on the front line of the indie pop wars of the early 1990s. The story is necessarily a small one and our guide is petty, abusive, egocentric and a borderline sociopath. Things are not initially promising. But luckily Luke Haines is both scabrously funny and brutally self aware and Bad Vibes turns out to be a hilarious story of pop’s second rate winners and losers. But mostly losers.

It is a tale of a not so epic journey from obscurity to obscurity, via brief flirtations with real artistic and commercial success. Haines’ band, The Auteurs, were Britpop precursors who at crucial points found imaginative ways to blow their opportunities to hit paydirt. Chiefly it must be said due to Haines’ bitter egocentricity and his many self-mythologising grand gestures of self-destruction. It is fair to say these gestures never quite reach Wagnerian levels of gotterdamerung. Whereas history’s most famous Wagner buff ensured his own downfall was accompanied to the tumultuous sound of the destruction of Berlin, Haines’ nemesis arrives as he ruins a recording of TGI Friday by calling Chris Evans a c**t.

Fifteen years after the fact and having apparently left the accumulated bitterness behind him, Haines affects the distance of a retired Colonel retelling colonial war stories through the bottom of a brandy glass. He presents his young subaltern self as having been a sophisticated European aesthete forced to live in a prosaic world of boors, non-artists and hamfisted musicians. When it becomes clear his own pop career will not survive the rise of Britpop,  Haines’ elitism and misanthropy goes into overdrive. In retelling the story of his ultimate defeat at the hands of pop no-marks, Haines’ affectation of distance turns out to be the thinnest of thin veneers, as it seems Haines is still actually fighting the indie fight. Who else but a pop fundamentalist would even remember such unlamented luminaries as Marion and Kula Shaker yet Haines still manages to summon up the energy to despise them. The sheer pointlessness and complete absence of any sense of proportion is very funny indeed.

If it is about anything then Bad Vibes is mostly a book about the collision between the glamourous fantasy of becoming a minor pop star and the mundane reality of actually being one. In your head you are making high art and gallivanting or cavorting with interesting and beautiful people. Instead you are banging about with session musicians in second-rate studios, or sleeping in a transit van, or sucking up to journalists, TV execs and a parade of numbskull record industry bods, all of whom you despise for their philistinism. Haines being the misanthrope  he is, everyone bears the brunt of his crushing disappointment, elitism and arrogance. According to him the bullied are bullied because they deserve it, and no-one gets out unscathed, to be fair least of all himself. No-one that is except the long-suffering girlfriend, who if Bad Vibes is anything to go by, is now several steps closer to her inevitable beatification.

So a story of thwarted ambition, petty jealousies and hilarious bad luck, told in a humorously resigned fashion that could only come from this side of the pond. Without this very British self deprecation Haines might have been like the twisted youth on the edge of the high school photograph staring blankly at the popular kids while planning his bloody revenge on them all. With Bad Vibes he’s managed to have that revenge without going postal. Yet.

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