Tim Booth is not a man who has ever been unduly troubled by contemporary notions of cool and un-cool. In the early nineties, when Nirvana were storming the barricades, Primal Scream had the nation under an acid-drenched groove and Kevin Shields was in the process of reinventing guitar music with Loveless, Booth and his cohorts in James were encouraging patrons at Student Union discos all around Britain to literally sit down to the strains of the anthemic stadium rawk number, er, ‘Sit Down’.
Later, when Blur, Pulp and Oasis were making singalong indie fashionable once circa 1995, Booth was ensconced in a studio experimenting on avant garde sounds in the company of David Lynch’s long-term composer, Angelo Badalamenti. With James having gone their separate ways after the really rather good Millionaires, Booth wandered off on a sabbatical from the music business, taught dance and drama, earned small roles in a few Hollywood movies, before returning to the fold once again with Bone – where his Queen-like disdain for the prevailing yoof-culture zeitgeist is again very much in evidence.
Just as Freddie Mercury never taught twice about donning skin-tight lycra when the late ‘70s demanded he dress down for success, Booth has an impressive disregard for the current vogue for stripped back, skinny-suits ‘n’ ties garage rock. On the cover of Bone, pictured on a sun-kissed beach, the shaven-headed, highly camp looking Booth most closely resembles either a Michael Berryman fanatic at a Hills Have Eyes convention or a sartorially illiterate gay club scenester auditioning for a Right Said Fred tribute band.
The music is a no-less tragically un-hip cocktail of slick widescreen rock, Peter Gabriel-style ethnic rhythms and Pet Shop Boys-flavoured Euro dance grooves. Really, if Booth was invited to an ‘80s nostalgia party, you just know that he wouldn’t go dressed as Boy George or Tony Hadley or Simon LeBon, but something even more archaic and wilfully gaudy, like that old Channel 4 logo.
But goddamnit, as befits a protégé of Eno, the man knows his way around a studio. ‘Wave Hello’ bounces joyfully from the speakers in the manner of U2’s ‘Elevation’; ‘Bone’ shuffles along on a hobo blues riff and harmonising chorus that brings to mind Beck circa Odelay; whilst ‘Redneck’ offers some Teutonic to the troops courtesy of an array of stellar techno beats.
In one of the final scenes of Casino, Robert DeNiro, dressed in pink shirt, hip-hugging slacks and cream-leather slip-on shoes, steps into his car. The vehicle, as if in emetic revulsion at his choice of attire, promptly blows up. If Booth had climbed into that self-same automobile, he probably would have landed somewhere close to the outer reaches of space where the Mars 2 Beagle Space Probe currently resides.
But the idea that sharp dress sense results in class music was always a profoundly flawed equation. Just ask Menswear.