BELLIGERENT, sarcastic musician and whimsical pop cultural commentator Luke Haines will be in York on Sunday night for a show at Fibbers.

The former frontman of the cult bands The Auteurs, Baader Meinhoff and Black Box Recorder is calling the event An Evening With Luke Haines, so what lies in store?

"It will be an all-encompassing show: songs and chat; telling jokes like Dave Allen; tipping my vape cigarette; doing a bit of reading; maybe a bit of painting, or maybe staging a one-man renaissance breakdown," says Haines, who reckons he is probably making his York debut.

"We performed quite often in Leeds but never in York. I hadn't played for a while and people were telling me I should get out, and I now have this new chap arranging things for me who said I should play in the north, so I'm making this great leap and seeing how the altitude suits me."

Haines will be performing solo. "I like it this way as it allows me to go all over the place on my own," he says. "Though I like playing with a band too, it's restrictive as you have to play the songs they've learned.

"I'm used to doing it on my own, when it's a test of whether you can perform without anything to hide behind. The point is, you can do anything, and once you grasp that, it's better, especially now that I'm older [Haines is 49].

"I like the idea that you have a professional phase in your career, and I'm not in that anymore. I think musicians get interesting when everything is open and you can do what you want, like Julian Cope, though I'm not sure that people quite trust that, but we'll all be dead soon, so does that matter?!"

Haines is a singular, avant-garde artist with a DIY manifesto, dedicating whole albums to such subjects as British wrestling in the Seventies, the New York music scene of that era and British nuclear bunkers, not forgetting his Leeds United EP in 2007.

"All rock'n'roll should be good and righteous – I've drawn up a list of what's righteous, like Soft Machine and The Incredible String Band – and as long as you're pulling out strong righteous vibes, that's good," says Haines. "I've always believed in the healing power of rock'n'roll and everything I do is done through the prism of rock'n'roll."

Once a Britpop doyen, now Haines is happy to be an outsider. "Nowadays no-one is selling records; record sales have gone down to match mine, but luckily the people who buy my stuff are slightly older and still buy records, so that's all OK," he says.

They will be interested to learn that, at some point later this year, Cherry Red Records will be releasing a box set of Haines's solo work: three CDs of material already issued and a fourth CD of unreleased work and rarities. "I've not come up with a title yet, but it will all be chosen by me, and there'll be stuff from when I was 17 and six songs from Property, the musical I wrote that kind of got lost in the National Theatre world of committees, but I ended up writing a double album's worth of songs anyway."

Luke Haines plays Fibbers, York, on Sunday; tickets cost £17.50 at fibbers.co.uk or on the door from 7.30pm.