Paul Haig - Go Out Tonight

  by John Clarkson

published: 28 / 3 / 2008

Label: Rhythm Of Life Inc
Format: CD

intro

Unsettling and haunting tenth solo album from former Josef K frontman, Paul Haig, which takes a paranoiac look at going out for an evening to compelling effect

Edinburgh has always had a dark undercurrent. Its pretty postcard image-its castle high on a rock above the city centre ; the winding and narrow closes of the Old Town, and its many gardens and parks-belie an underhand malevolence. The history books of the Scottish capital tell of the likes of the anatomist Robert Knox taking into his medical faculty murdered corpses from the body snatchers Burke and Hare ; the witch Major Weir, and city elder-by-day, robber-by-night Deacon Brodie, all outwardly respectable figures, but beneath their public front each of a much more sinister purpose. Its literature too has focused on this duality, Robert Louis Stevenson with ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ ; Irvine Welsh with the drug addicted protagonists of ‘Trainspotting’ and Ian Rankin with his seventeen novels about the dislocated, alcoholic detective Rebus. Local newspaper headlines scream daily of murders, drug deaths and violent crime. In truth Edinburgh is probably no worse or for that matter much better than any other major city. The uneasy balance between its austere surface and its more malignant underbelly, and the tensions between light and black, and beauty and “the beast”, are, however, more pronounced and far heightened. While he has never mentioned Edinburgh by name in his lyrics, this darkness beneath the skin is something that former Josef K front man Paul Haig, who was born and still lives in Edinburgh, has focused a lot on in his work. In the late 70’s and early 80’s with Josef K, Haig sung obsessively about the absurdity of existence and told of only half-concealed feelings of nerve-worn angst and guilt. Now he has done this again with ‘Go Out Tonight’, his tenth solo album, which, after over a decade in which he concentrated just on making instrumental music, is his second album in the short space of less than a year to have words. ‘Go Out Tonight’, as it title implies, tells of going out for the evening. Yet beneath the glittering façade of the nightclubs and bars of what is obviously Edinburgh’s Lothian Road, a notorious weekend local trouble spot, there is little that is pleasurable about it. Haig creates an Orwellian vision of hell. The clubs are overcrowded. There are surveillance cameras on every corner. Any intimacy meanwhile is usually with strangers. It is temporary and brief, and you may pay a hard price for it by getting yourself killed. The front cover of the album captures it perfectly really. An androgynous-looking girl wearing a white fleeced hoodie stares coldly at the camera. She may be one of the beautiful people, or alternatively, with violence all of a footstep away, she may also be about to plunge a knife into you. This concept provides the backdrop to what is Haig’s most versatile musical offering in years, and a record which skips across the full depths of Haig’s changes in sound over the last thirty years. There are for fans of Josef K prickly, scratchy guitars on both ‘Stay Mine’ and download only single, ‘Hippy Dippy (Pharmaceutically Trippy)’. And there are crisp, thundering dance melodies too on ‘Trouble Maker’ and ‘Shut Down’, and white boy soul on ‘Believe’, which in turn take account of some of his 80’s albums such as ‘The Great White Hope’ and ‘Chain’. He throws in a couple of decent electronic instrumentals too on ‘Fantasize’ and ‘Data Retro’, both of which come across as natural successors to the ‘Cinematique’ albums, a trio of imaginary film soundtracks, which he recorded in the late 90’s and at the beginning of this decade. A last twist comes at the end of the album. The penultimate track, mournful electronic ballad ’Scene’, shows a disgust with going out, its superficiality and its disappointments, and a want for something better, but the final song, ‘Gone in a Moment’, a surprisingly upbeat and jaunty jangling guitar number, finds the album’s scenesters unable to abandon what is essentially an addiction, and, knowing that they are both living a lie and on a line, preparing to get ready to go out all over again. With ‘Go Out Tonight’, Paul Haig takes the on-the-surface fairly innocuous subject of going out and then drip feeds it with paranoia to both dynamic musical and lyrical effect. ‘Go Out Tonight’ is as haunting as it is unsettling. One may, having listened to it, never look upon a night out in the same way again.

Track Listing:-