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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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Luke Haines interview
The Independent, May 1999
“I WANTED to make a pop record,” says Luke Haines, somewhat wistfully. “I thought I should make one last pop record before I got too old. There’s nothing worse than 30-year-olds making pop albums. It’s like watching Paul Weller on his Vespa, you know, it just makes me want to cringe. I could never take a guy on Vespa in a parka seriously if he was 21, but once they’re into their 40s, dear oh dear. . .”
The statement is concluded with Haines’ trademark mirthless cackle and equally habitual pull at a pint of Guinness. Haines, a prematurely elderly and delightfully curmudgeonly 31, is talking about “How I Learned To Love The Bootboys”, the imminent fourth album by his band The Auteurs.
“I should stop talking like that,” he mutters. “I’m past that thing of being horrible about other people’s records. I just don’t care anymore. You get through that. Bad comedians - in fact, pretty well all comedians - annoy me much more now.”
THE eternally and instinctively contrary Luke Haines may just be the finest songwriter produced by Great Britain in the 1990s. His rigorous disdain for musical fashion and amused contempt for the music business have not abetted popular recognition of the fact, but it is difficult to name a contemporary who has produced such consistently intelligent and interesting music.
The Auteurs’ 1992 debut album, “New Wave”, was an early reaffirmation of the lost values that eventually erupted in the Britpop renaissance of the mid-90s. Its follow-up, “Now I’m A Cowboy”, employed pop music as a weapon of class war a good two years before Pulp’s “Common People”. The third Auteurs album, “After Murder Park”, produced by Steve Albini, allowed the listener an idea of what might have resulted had Ray Davies ever joined The Pixies. As if that wasn’t enough, Haines has also recorded, under the name Baader Meinhof, the best concept album ever made about 1970s terrorism (1997’s “Baader Meinhof”) and, with vocalist Sarah Nixey and former Jesus & Mary Chain drummer John Moore, collaborated on two albums by Black Box Recorder (1998’s terrific “England Made Me”, and a follow-up due later this year).
“This album is an exorcism, really,” decides Haines, asked why “How I Learned To Love The Bootboys” is so obviously and explicitly concerned with his own childhood. “I could have written political songs for the 90s, but we pretty much covered that with Black Box Recorder. I could write about terrorists, but I’ve done that, or write about stardom, but I’ve done that. . . I’ve never done a record that dwelt as much on a particular period of time as this one. There’s obviously a certain amount of me getting into my 30s involved, as well, yeah.”
Luke was born in Surrey (“tedious”) and grew up in Portsmouth (“dismal”). He describes this childhood as nonetheless “happy, and totally ordinary”, but spends his new album dissecting it with the clinical impatience of a coroner with a hangover. The music is pretty much the “Retarded glam rock” that Haines promised when he was telling me about the record when we’d last met a year or so ago: it echoes the queasy, demented easy listening of The Specials’ “More Specials”, Denim’s “Back In Denim” and Pulp’s “Different Class”. Also in common with those records, the lyrics on “Bootboys” abound with the tawdry iconography of 70s Britain, and as such are firmly in keeping with a convention that has underpinned classic British pop from The Kinks to The Smiths to Blur: nostalgia for something the narrator hated at the time and doesn’t miss now.
“England in the 70s was an awful place,” he says. “Whenever you see documentary footage, it was so. . . grim. Power cuts, black and white television, everything closed all the time. Terrible.”
So why go on about it?
“I don’t know, I just can’t leave it alone, and this. . . ,” he smiles winningly, “this is why I think the record succeeds as a pop record, but as an artistic statement - although I hate artistic statements - it fails, because it reveals something, and I don’t think you should ever reveal anything about yourself. I think that’s the crux of bad art, because it’s based on the idea of art being born of pain and suffering, which is just rubbish. If you never reveal anything, that’s good art in my book. On those terms, I’ve let my guard down, but so be it.”
As Luke implies, “How I Learned To Love The Bootboys” is largely autobiographical. The first single, “The Rubettes” (it lifts from the annoying white-hatted troubadours’ hit “Sugar Baby Love”) recalls an awkward pre-adolescent listening secretly to the radio beneath his bedcovers, before rising to the typically withering punchline “You developed late/Weren’t the 90s great?”. “School”, as Haines starts explaining before stopping himself (“I shouldn’t talk about these things, I just shouldn’t”), was inspired by a trip home to the funeral of a classmate. “1967” is named after the year of his birth and appears to be narrated from the perspective of his own father (“My wife’s expecting/A Surrey midwife will deliver the child”).
“Armchair psychologists will have a field day,” he agrees. “Things like ‘1967’ and ‘The Rubettes’ were conceived as totally anti-irony songs, because I was, and still am, completely and totally sick of irony in music. ‘1967’ is a song about my parents, yeah - people who have no concept of irony, which I think is a great thing. People who laugh at something because it has a punchline and it’s funny, and then go and make dinner.”
HAINES claims to remain utterly unconcerned with his relative lack of commercial recognition.
“I am convinced,” he says, “that at some point The Auteurs, or whoever I am, will be huge, and from that moment on I’ll be known as the ‘Whatever’ guy, ‘Whatever’ being whatever that record is. If it’s ‘The Rubettes’, I’ll be the ‘Rubettes Guy’, and I’ll have to do that Don McLean thing of just refusing ever to play it live.”
In two songs on the new album (“Some Changes”, and the closing track, “Future Generation”), Haines writes himself into the lyric as a character, albeit with lashings of redemptive self-mockery. “Future Generation” is especially mordantly hilarious, a gloomy, hollow declaration of his certain belief that he remains a good distance ahead of his time (“And of course I love the old songs,” the song’s vocal whispers, in the defiant croak of a broken, venerated Broadway star, “from ‘New Wave’ to ‘Murder Park’/The next generation/Will get it from the start.”)
“I had this idea,” he explains, utterly unabashed, “of writing a kind of hymn to myself, mostly because no other fucker was ever going to do it, and just making it the most egotistical and self-mythologising thing you’ve ever heard. The idea is, yes, that there will be statues erected of me in my home town, and that all the kids will be making pilgrimages. . . “
He takes another sip at his Guinness and grins.
“I mean, we must be due the 1992 revival any minute now, surely.”
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