Pete Doherty And Carl Barâtfounders and main songwriter of Libertines, at the beginning of their careers, as tarantulatous, exuberant and sharp kids, they gave interviews in which they raved long and nostalgically about such a ship Albion – archaic name for Great Britain – of which they were, according to them, helmsmen. They said they would sail to Arcadia, the land where rock ‘n’ roll is all there is to it, and where “cigarettes grow on trees and benches are made of denim” (John Hassal, NME , 2002). But the glorious Albion has always been a singular ship. She only sails the stormy seas.
THE Libertines in their first run from 1997 to 2004 they thrived on a dangerous creative drive that was at one with chaos, driven by the love/hate relationship between Pete And Carl, made up of jealousies and alternating protagonisms on stage, of Pete’s toxic habits with crack and heroin which led Carl to oust him from the group; the pinnacle is Pete that, while Carl he is on tour in Japan, he is arrested for robbing his apartment of a vintage guitar, a harmonica and a computer. This ongoing tension gave rise to a punch-in-the-face debut like Up The Bracket and to the next The Libertines, which remained at the top of the UK charts for years, whose sessions were presided over by bodyguards to prevent the two from jumping on each other. Also Anthems for Doomed Youth of 2015 second Barât it is “born of complexities”. A band that has turned its own spiral of self-destruction into a work of art, often representing it in the songs themselves: “An ending fitting for the start, you twist and tore our love apart” they sing Carl in Can’t Stand Me Nowto hear back from Pete “No, you’ve got it the wrong way ’round, you shut me up and blamed it on the brown”. Sparks like in the most consuming loves.
The question arises spontaneously: What Became of the Likely Lads? After nine years since the last album, now that Pete he stopped using hard drugs, replacing them with the only thing that vaguely compares, that is, large doses of glucose and saturated fats; now that the restless and turbulent age is a memory, and there are wives and children at stake; now that the waters are calm, where can two sailors who sail only when the sea is stormy dock?
The two tackle questions like these head on in the album. Run Run Runwhich has the shaky and rowdy feel of a hit by Up The Bracketopens with the words “It’s a lifelong project of a life on the lash”, a life drinking like sponges around, but then in the chorus they sing “you better run, run, run, faster than the past […] if you want the night to last”. “The worst thing,” she said Barât on the song, “it would be stuck in a run-run-run routine, constantly trying to relive our past.” Traces of the Libertines there are still some in their twenties Oh Shit for example, which however turns out to be less effective and authentic, as if the chaotic frenzy of the debut was reconstructed in a fake and artificial way. But the rest of the album seems to be able to escape from the trap of the past.
Changing but without betraying yourself, it’s all there: the fixed points have remained, like the obsession with Englishness and the sociological, cynical eye on the caricatural deformations of the country – and the album cover already contains a human sample of them: this time we look at post-Brexit England, a stepmother as infamous and sad as Degas’s absinthe drinker. All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade: now that the front has stopped, we remain on the lookout to observe, on the Victorian terrace of the Albion Rooms Studios, at 31 Eastern Esplanade, Margate, on the Kent coast.
In MustangPete paints Traci, a working-class but proud mother in her Juicy Couture tracksuit, who has a drink while the children are at school and dreams of driving a Mustang every night. Merry Old England instead it is an ironic welcome song for Syrian, Iraqi and Ukrainian immigrants. Congrats on the winding journey; welcome to where there are only chip packet residues and puddles on the ground, and the chalk cliffs, once white, turn gray from the sodium. And if there is nothing new on the Margate front, wars are taking place further east of the Eastern Esplanade: Have A Friend refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the bombing of Odessa, on the Black Sea. “Follow the tracks in the mud down to where the sea is Black with blood / And tears, like the bombs, they fall without warning”.
Witty phrases that stimulate the intellect, classic Libertines, but it is in music that we break away from the tried and tested formula. Flashes of unusual experiments: Baron’s Claw lights up with jazz trumpet phrasing, while Be Young makes a foray into reggae rhythm. The ramshackle garage rock is pushed to the margins and the bold, medium-slow tempo ballads take center stage, traveling accompanied by piano and epic string sections. This is the case of the poignant and dark Night Of The Hunter“a Shakespearean tale of blood and revenge,” as he called it Pete, whose melody goes so far as to quote Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It is the case of Shiver, which wraps itself in a harmonious circle almost to mimic the decadence of beloved Albion. “Liz has gone away,” he says Pete thinking of the late Elizabeth II, “the giant courtesan with the tiny hands”. The monarchy is powerless in the face of the decline of empires, and what remains is a shivering resignation: “just let it die, sit back enjoy the ride”.
Doherty And Barât they have given another form to what they do best: telling stories. THE Libertines they started by putting their cursed lives to music. This album proves that you can write good songs even when you don’t live the stories yourself and at your own expense like bandits, and you don’t take drugs or rob anyone. We simply narrate with a melody underneath.
In Man With The Melody – an artfully constructed song, with the pace of a sinister music box that opens into epic passages in the middle of the verse – to ward off both “angels up in the sky” and “demons in the sea”, Pete sings: “No you can’t catch me, ’cause I’ve got the melody”. A storyteller who has sailed among the waves, you may tie him to a pier in the port, but you won’t kill him. You don’t kill him as long as he has a guitar and something to tell.
