Best Band in the World today...
Best band today, by a pretty wide margin - The Libertines
Beautiful Losers
Days and Nights with the Libertines - The Best Rock'n'roll Band in the World
The last cinematic redux promise of excitement in garage rock'n'roll by the Hives, Kings of Leon, The Strokes have petered out in chart-rigging, anonymous maverick songwriters and deadly dull careerism. Mercurial rock'n'roll is dead. However, the two bands at the end of the riot of 2001 - have destroyed all, killed ‘em all, fucked them all, deceived all - the White Stripes and the Libertines.
The Libertines, a dirty punk rock boy band of London fuck-ups have survived being championed by NME, rent boy rumours, the deadly Strokes comparisons to playing three sold-out nights at Brixton Academy with their fey boot boys' poetry of terrace shouts literati. In their songs - they imagine an England where everything is strange.
They obsessed over a rock'n'roll ideal of the Albion, a ship, head by lead singers, Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, which will take you to Arcadia, a never-never land where rock "means something". And in doing so, have become pop guerrillas, playing impromptu gigs in flats and on rooftops. All very novel, until Pete Doherty was fired from the group on their European tour. Doherty formed a new band "Babyshambles" and broke into Barat's flat and was promptly arrested.
As his doleful eyes stared out from the prison cell, from the magazines in England at that time, like Robert Mitchum in the San Bernardino courthouse, the Libertines entered into rock'n'roll infamy with Pete in jail, smoking a cigarette, making horror-eyes at the camera, looking cool and self-assured.
A few months after his released, I went down to Alan McGee's Death Disco. The Libertines had released their top thirty hit "Don't Look Back into the Sun", which immortalised Alan's club with the lyric "They play that song at the Death Disco, the one that starts so fast and ends so slow". He told me that he had just signed the Libertines to Creation, his new management company. He looked gleeful. The Libertines were the best band in the world, he said, and my
first job is to put them back together again.
Six months later, I find myself in his car, on a short tour around England with the Libertines.
In Birmingham we checked into the Britannia Hotel. The tour manager drifted
in with several others. He told Alan that the rest of the Libertines were still asleep on the bus that they had picked up Pete in Hackney -- without shirt, shoes and socks, and wearing several jackets. "I don't really think he knows he is on the tour yet". In the tour room, roadies, venue people and promoters sat in silence, eating catered food. I talked to John Hassle, the bassist, about their recent French tour and Serge Gainsborough. Carlos came in, and pulled Alan aside for a word. As we walked back to the hotel for a drink in the pub, I looked behind me, to see Carl whispering to the tour manager. I asked Alan if everything was all right:
"I don't know what will happen, anything could happen - they could break up, they could write their album, they could record their album, they could all die ... But make sure that you never enter the tour bus or dressing room if you are not asked. Don't break that boundary or you will piss the band off. I hope I don't end up on the tour bus, at all, myself. If I do, then things will really kick off".
Alan and I went back to the hotel for a drink and I watched him answer his
telephone, back and forth, watching the old men leaning up against the bar.
Alan was discussing the latest legal warning received by Brixton Academy: if
there were more stage invasions on this tour, all the Libertines gigs would
be pulled. As we left, two guys dressed as Alice in Wonderland were pissing
on the streets of Birmingham.
I took my place behind the sound desk, listening to the new Cherrystones garage-psyche compilation, which opened the show. Alan went to inform the band that they were not to incite a stage invasion. The Libertines had a legal warning from Brixton Academy that all dates would be pulled if a stage invasion were to happen.
As Doherty took the stage, he hypnotised the audience into shouting what he shouted, which tonight, was cracked punk rock psychedelia. The crowd swayed back and forth, before collapsing in a pile-up during the rockabilly nightmare of "Horrorshow". A girl screams "Help me, help me". A security reaches into the melee to pick her up; he loses his grip. She falls down again, with four men on top of her. One fan, face bloody, looks up briefly before being swamped by the crowd. People are being crushed against the steel bars of the sound desk. Security guards pulled bodies over the bars and onto the sofa behind me, piling them up, like happy shoppers in Altamont. As I looked around me during "I Get Along" - the club began to look like Vietnam. The youth of England, pissed, passed out and asphyxiated. The Libertines danced in their sick onstage.
I stumbled into the bathroom for a piss ... The guy next to me, in a torn
Fred Perry shirt, was shouting out "That was the best moment of my life --
you have to LOVE the Libertines, Libertines, Libertines..."
"Do you realise that your nose is broken?"
"Alright, so it is, it makes the gig even more classic."
"Why do you like the Libertines?"
"Because they are the best fookin' band, mate. You want to tell me they're
not."
"No."
He turns back and comes at me.
You think that's funny?
Yeah.
Getting paranoid now?
"Fuck you."
I give him two fingers before getting into the station; Love "Forever Changes" plays over the p.a.
A sparrow flies over head as acid drenched strings distort and vibrate the room. I walked up to the dressing room to meet the band who all fall into whispers when they see me. Pete is talking to Alan; his face is very white, like an African masque of the dead, where white symbolised the doomed generation. We walked out to meet the fans. Hands in the air, non-stop dancing fans, hundreds of them, filling every space. They all wore T-shirts emblazoned with Pete and Carl's faces or slogans for the Arcadia. Flash photographs went off, tear and urgent faces.
Alan: "Pete is a folk hero. I've not seen this level of devotion to the fans since Clash in 1977 or Oasis in 1994".
Back at the hotel, we all got drinks as the band discussed the faces in the
crowd. Before long, Pete, John and Carl, had started an impromptu
sing-along, where requests of covers of the Clash, Donovan, the Pogues and
Love were taken.
Roger Sargent, long-time believer, official photographer and confidante of the band, pulled me aside: "When was the last time you've seen a band play music after a gig?".
Carl and John knew any song you threw at them, like human randomised Ipods.
Pete disappeared upstairs with two of the fans, as people eventually
disappeared, leaving Carl and John, singing Jam and Velvet Underground
songs, discussing the new songs in the set list. Before long - Carl, a
natural mimic, was imitating blues singers and telling stories
"You know that I wear Joe Strummer's jacket on stage" to the sounds of
general disbelief. "Oh yeah, Jeanette Lee, who used to be the PIL bassist
was given
the jacket by Chrissie Hynde - who gave it too me."
Carl went and got the jacket. "I showed Mick Jones the jacket once - at an
after show - I got him in the bathroom. We were in the toilet and I said -
Mick I got Joe's jacket - do you want to see it?"
"Was Mick freaked out?"
"No. He was just going - "Wow" and "That's amazing" - as I pointed out the
holes where Joe used to pin the sheriff's badge. When we left - the
security
guard thought I was bumming Mick. Ha ha."
In the morning, I called Alan in his hotel room. We went to the coffee
shop.
"They just seem to be a bunch of tight friends having a laugh."
"It's beginning, Sonny. Its just beginning ... why do you think I've got
two security guards on Carl and Pete at five hundred quid a day?"
"To make sure that nobody has a pop at them while they are out with the
fans."
"No. Too, stop them beating each other up".
In the hotel lobby, the band was gathering and the atmosphere was tense.
Everyone spoke in whispers. Carl pulled Alan aside.
"Pete took a cab back to London last night. I'm not even sure if he's in
the hotel room. It's starting again..."
Then Pete came into the empty lobby, smiled, and said in a soft-spoken voice
"Hello Alan..."
As we walked to the car with Pete, I turned around and asked him:
"Black cab, money to burn, Pete, how much did the cab ride cost?"
He just smiled as he stepped into the tour bus. As I got into Alan's car,
he told me that he did not take a taxi cab back, but instead, he probably got
one of the fans from last night to drive him to London and back to Birmingham.
He smiled and laughed. It's just beginning. !"
As I stood in the lobby of the Britannia of Manchester, I was in awe of the
English tack and quote Lenny Bruce: "It looks like a queer went crazy in here with a staple gun." Over-the-top Englishness, perfect for the Libertines.
The Manchester show was pure celebration. With Red Stripe in hand I get
trampled by the first rush of teenage girls, running past me with weirdly
ecstatic faces, until the front of the stage was four feet deep with them.
Teenage girls always know what is cool in rock'n'roll.
The Libertines have no authority. No precedents live. Their only authority is the never-never land of chemical rebellion and like fatal nerve agents who seemingly awake every morning to the sound of explosions, and they feel a need to document with their songs. The new song, "I Can't Stand You"; portrays the tension between Carl and Pete, perfectly: androids, unrepentant and 21st-century revisiting 1977. But tonight, this is not a slow decline into latex cabaret: more than three very loud chord but a homicidal artistic attack, and a stand-off is taking place within the Libertines compound Pete runs out onto the stage and screams out during "The Saga" - "It's not a problem, I don't have a problem". They taunt the audience with "What a Waster", a deep and concrete grey guitar noise chemistry. The tension of the show and the security being three feet thick, I wander out into Manchester, to the shouts of "Look look, not even the roadies could get in...". I end up in a stranger's flat, at three in the morning, listening to Badly Drawn Boy's soft psyche-pop. At four in the morning I wander into the empty hotel listening to a stolen copy of Love's "Forever Changes"..
I spot a kid in a "Free Pete Doherty" T-shirt. I recognised him trying to get into the show tonight; skin translucent - a beautiful ghost of a kid dressed in Adidas gear.
Weren't you at the Libertines show?
"I am in the city with the Libertines ... We are going to go to the Albion.
Arcadia is a halfway point between the earth and heaven and hell. We are
going to Arcadia."
We stare at each other for awhile. His chemically scarred face waiting
for me.
"Tell me what you know about the Libertines"
"The power of Pete Doherty will not be manifest until all human populations
are judged after death. This is not meaningful yet, however all who have
been born will die for that purpose, either in the Libertines or not."
He hands me a five pound note. "Please get this signed by them. Tell them
to take me with them".
The next day in the lobby of the hotel, the band's entourage are talking in
whispers. Gary comes down, hung-over and happy:
"That was the best show - the best show ever - the last two times in
Manchester - they threw beer cans at me - the first one got me on the one
side of my head and then another came sailing through - and got me on the other side
until I looked like a devil with two horns."
Alan collected me quickly and we checked out. As we walked to the car, I
asked Alan:
"Why the rush?"
"Pete destroyed the hotel room and put his foot through the door and threw a
television out of the window...on his second attempt."
"What happened on the first attempt?"
"It bounced back."
"Isn't this all turning into Spinal Tap clichés?"
"No, no, no. With Pete it is beyond cliché. Pete and Carl haven't read any
rock'n'roll biographies. I don't think either of them realise what a cliché
is. But tonight, it is my job to keep Pete out of the pub besides Glasgow
Barrowlands."
"Why?"
"It's an Irish Celtic pub."
"Is he in the tour bus? Not back in London".
"They had to carry him on the tour bus still passed out".
The show in Glasgow was spiritual Libertines power. "I Can't Stand You" is ... loud. The sheer volume is comparable to the avant-garde No York art attack of early Love, while "Death on the Stars" is a disorientating wiry-ruffian of a psychedelic-rage freak out. As "What a Waster" is twisted from an amped up cockney punk into a pilled-up weirdo, the audience takes careful steps backwards. It's an apocalyptic sound clash between The Jam-type mod-rock and the audio-roar of a freakbeat 747 taking off. Amazing stuff. They dance in sick, the sick of England, singing randomised rock'n'roll suicide words about doom, the doomed and the dead. And the audience are ecstatic. Pete and Carl, topless, parade like the Cavarrgio slut boys of Mick'n'Keef. Sweat is condensing on the walls.
At the aftershow, I sat near the back, drunk, dirty and weaving with the
artificial energy of sleep psychosis. A girl was talking nonsense to me
about Courtney Love and the Libertines, imitating Love in a bizarre
Glaswegian manner, trying to unbuckle my belt whilst whispering how much she really would do anything to meet the band. I pointed them out - at the back of
club, signing autographs and chatting to the fans.
"No. But I really want to meet the band."
"Err.. They are at the back of the club there."
A by-passer noted: "Mate, I think she is trying to shag you to meet the
band."
The girl screamed, Courtney-like, and left. At the end of the evening I end up in another taxi. Alan hands Carl £1,500 in notes. He shoves it into his coat. "Did you take your twenty percent, Alan?"
We walked to the hotel room. Pete Doherty seemed to be the evocation of
dimly lit bedsits in Brighton, barely letting light in. I stood in the corner of the restaurant and watched the band, not having met him before, he seemed, strange, impossible to know, instead, I walk over to the bar, to listen to Velvet Underground's first album, as Pete accidentally knocks into me.
"Sorry about that Sonny, instant karma, y'know". He smiled. "So where are you from?"
"A small faded steeltown in the States"
"Cool. Do you want to sit down in the brown booths near the back. What did you think of the show?"
"Brilliant. You are a brilliant rock'n'roll star. Like Morrissey from the Smiths - guys and girls both want to fuck you. It's a lineage."
"That's funny. Really big guys come up to me and tell me that they want to kiss me. We might get the support slots for the Morrissey tour."
"Alan told me that Morrissey is a big fan and has brought several copies of Up the Bracket."
Alan came over and a post-match analysis ensued over the tour before descending into Led Zeppelin Carry-on.
"Alan, what would you do if we destroy the hotel restaurant?"
"Pay for it."
"Alan, can we go to where you grew up in Glasgow?"
"No. It would just depress you, Pete. I took my wife there a few years
ago."
"Tell me how you grew up."
"Are you taking the piss, Pete?"
"Alan I'm mortified that you would think that."
Pete, large eyes rolling, decided that we should all get a taxi back to
London and do a gig in his flat. "We've got all the equipment and the bus.
We should just do it. Or at least go back to London and have some fun." Pete,
like a deranged homing pigeon for London - looked at Alan and myself. Alan was
quiet before going: "Y'know what Pete, I'm the manager, and should say no, but fuck it, it sounds like good fun." Carl came back to the table and Pete and Carl discussed the impromptu gig before the tour manager came over to collect them.
"No, no, we're going back to London and we are going to do a gig in my flat"
"Oh no, you are not."
"I'll arm wrestle you for it."
Pete lost. And the band went back to the tour bus.
In the morning, Alan dropped me off at the train station. I put in Love's "Forever Changes", I watched the endgame titles of the tour's movie end for me as the morning working people, enter in, slowly piling in front of me, until I fade into the crowd, one by one….the sounds of the Glasgow mixed with Forever Changes. "All of God's Children gots to have their freedom..."
At Brixton Academy, I found Alan, swamped with people. He updated me on
the band's Bristol show. "Pete left before on Wednesday for London but came
back for Bristol."
But by the time they came onstage - The Libertines went into the sky and exploded like a vicious star. They hadbecome the last rock'n'roll gang in town. Saturday, Bobby Gillespie turned up and fell in love with the band. Sunday, the band imploded on stage during "I Can't Stand You", Pete, yelling to Carl, 'YOU CAN'T STAND ME NOW', beforebreaking his guitar and pushing over an amplifier. He came back onstage when Carl continued without him. "Sorry I had a strop.."
A week later, whilst attending a Mick Jones, in-studio gig, eleven years, since the Clash superstar last played, Alan McGee pulled me aside to update me on the Libertines news. "Don't tell anyone this, I'm going to have to employ two security guards just so the Libertines don't trash the studio and each other. But it will be worth it. Two weeks and it will be a classic album. There are already three hundred songs ready."
With Carl there - I turned to him -" I think that the Libertines, revitalised Mick Jones to write music again."
"Really, that's the greatest accolade that I've ever received."
"Yeah, the good ship Albion sails on."
Sonny Tremaine
(http://www.poptones.co.uk/Libertinesnews.htm)
Beautiful Losers
Days and Nights with the Libertines - The Best Rock'n'roll Band in the World
The last cinematic redux promise of excitement in garage rock'n'roll by the Hives, Kings of Leon, The Strokes have petered out in chart-rigging, anonymous maverick songwriters and deadly dull careerism. Mercurial rock'n'roll is dead. However, the two bands at the end of the riot of 2001 - have destroyed all, killed ‘em all, fucked them all, deceived all - the White Stripes and the Libertines.
The Libertines, a dirty punk rock boy band of London fuck-ups have survived being championed by NME, rent boy rumours, the deadly Strokes comparisons to playing three sold-out nights at Brixton Academy with their fey boot boys' poetry of terrace shouts literati. In their songs - they imagine an England where everything is strange.
They obsessed over a rock'n'roll ideal of the Albion, a ship, head by lead singers, Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, which will take you to Arcadia, a never-never land where rock "means something". And in doing so, have become pop guerrillas, playing impromptu gigs in flats and on rooftops. All very novel, until Pete Doherty was fired from the group on their European tour. Doherty formed a new band "Babyshambles" and broke into Barat's flat and was promptly arrested.
As his doleful eyes stared out from the prison cell, from the magazines in England at that time, like Robert Mitchum in the San Bernardino courthouse, the Libertines entered into rock'n'roll infamy with Pete in jail, smoking a cigarette, making horror-eyes at the camera, looking cool and self-assured.
A few months after his released, I went down to Alan McGee's Death Disco. The Libertines had released their top thirty hit "Don't Look Back into the Sun", which immortalised Alan's club with the lyric "They play that song at the Death Disco, the one that starts so fast and ends so slow". He told me that he had just signed the Libertines to Creation, his new management company. He looked gleeful. The Libertines were the best band in the world, he said, and my
first job is to put them back together again.
Six months later, I find myself in his car, on a short tour around England with the Libertines.
In Birmingham we checked into the Britannia Hotel. The tour manager drifted
in with several others. He told Alan that the rest of the Libertines were still asleep on the bus that they had picked up Pete in Hackney -- without shirt, shoes and socks, and wearing several jackets. "I don't really think he knows he is on the tour yet". In the tour room, roadies, venue people and promoters sat in silence, eating catered food. I talked to John Hassle, the bassist, about their recent French tour and Serge Gainsborough. Carlos came in, and pulled Alan aside for a word. As we walked back to the hotel for a drink in the pub, I looked behind me, to see Carl whispering to the tour manager. I asked Alan if everything was all right:
"I don't know what will happen, anything could happen - they could break up, they could write their album, they could record their album, they could all die ... But make sure that you never enter the tour bus or dressing room if you are not asked. Don't break that boundary or you will piss the band off. I hope I don't end up on the tour bus, at all, myself. If I do, then things will really kick off".
Alan and I went back to the hotel for a drink and I watched him answer his
telephone, back and forth, watching the old men leaning up against the bar.
Alan was discussing the latest legal warning received by Brixton Academy: if
there were more stage invasions on this tour, all the Libertines gigs would
be pulled. As we left, two guys dressed as Alice in Wonderland were pissing
on the streets of Birmingham.
I took my place behind the sound desk, listening to the new Cherrystones garage-psyche compilation, which opened the show. Alan went to inform the band that they were not to incite a stage invasion. The Libertines had a legal warning from Brixton Academy that all dates would be pulled if a stage invasion were to happen.
As Doherty took the stage, he hypnotised the audience into shouting what he shouted, which tonight, was cracked punk rock psychedelia. The crowd swayed back and forth, before collapsing in a pile-up during the rockabilly nightmare of "Horrorshow". A girl screams "Help me, help me". A security reaches into the melee to pick her up; he loses his grip. She falls down again, with four men on top of her. One fan, face bloody, looks up briefly before being swamped by the crowd. People are being crushed against the steel bars of the sound desk. Security guards pulled bodies over the bars and onto the sofa behind me, piling them up, like happy shoppers in Altamont. As I looked around me during "I Get Along" - the club began to look like Vietnam. The youth of England, pissed, passed out and asphyxiated. The Libertines danced in their sick onstage.
I stumbled into the bathroom for a piss ... The guy next to me, in a torn
Fred Perry shirt, was shouting out "That was the best moment of my life --
you have to LOVE the Libertines, Libertines, Libertines..."
"Do you realise that your nose is broken?"
"Alright, so it is, it makes the gig even more classic."
"Why do you like the Libertines?"
"Because they are the best fookin' band, mate. You want to tell me they're
not."
"No."
He turns back and comes at me.
You think that's funny?
Yeah.
Getting paranoid now?
"Fuck you."
I give him two fingers before getting into the station; Love "Forever Changes" plays over the p.a.
A sparrow flies over head as acid drenched strings distort and vibrate the room. I walked up to the dressing room to meet the band who all fall into whispers when they see me. Pete is talking to Alan; his face is very white, like an African masque of the dead, where white symbolised the doomed generation. We walked out to meet the fans. Hands in the air, non-stop dancing fans, hundreds of them, filling every space. They all wore T-shirts emblazoned with Pete and Carl's faces or slogans for the Arcadia. Flash photographs went off, tear and urgent faces.
Alan: "Pete is a folk hero. I've not seen this level of devotion to the fans since Clash in 1977 or Oasis in 1994".
Back at the hotel, we all got drinks as the band discussed the faces in the
crowd. Before long, Pete, John and Carl, had started an impromptu
sing-along, where requests of covers of the Clash, Donovan, the Pogues and
Love were taken.
Roger Sargent, long-time believer, official photographer and confidante of the band, pulled me aside: "When was the last time you've seen a band play music after a gig?".
Carl and John knew any song you threw at them, like human randomised Ipods.
Pete disappeared upstairs with two of the fans, as people eventually
disappeared, leaving Carl and John, singing Jam and Velvet Underground
songs, discussing the new songs in the set list. Before long - Carl, a
natural mimic, was imitating blues singers and telling stories
"You know that I wear Joe Strummer's jacket on stage" to the sounds of
general disbelief. "Oh yeah, Jeanette Lee, who used to be the PIL bassist
was given
the jacket by Chrissie Hynde - who gave it too me."
Carl went and got the jacket. "I showed Mick Jones the jacket once - at an
after show - I got him in the bathroom. We were in the toilet and I said -
Mick I got Joe's jacket - do you want to see it?"
"Was Mick freaked out?"
"No. He was just going - "Wow" and "That's amazing" - as I pointed out the
holes where Joe used to pin the sheriff's badge. When we left - the
security
guard thought I was bumming Mick. Ha ha."
In the morning, I called Alan in his hotel room. We went to the coffee
shop.
"They just seem to be a bunch of tight friends having a laugh."
"It's beginning, Sonny. Its just beginning ... why do you think I've got
two security guards on Carl and Pete at five hundred quid a day?"
"To make sure that nobody has a pop at them while they are out with the
fans."
"No. Too, stop them beating each other up".
In the hotel lobby, the band was gathering and the atmosphere was tense.
Everyone spoke in whispers. Carl pulled Alan aside.
"Pete took a cab back to London last night. I'm not even sure if he's in
the hotel room. It's starting again..."
Then Pete came into the empty lobby, smiled, and said in a soft-spoken voice
"Hello Alan..."
As we walked to the car with Pete, I turned around and asked him:
"Black cab, money to burn, Pete, how much did the cab ride cost?"
He just smiled as he stepped into the tour bus. As I got into Alan's car,
he told me that he did not take a taxi cab back, but instead, he probably got
one of the fans from last night to drive him to London and back to Birmingham.
He smiled and laughed. It's just beginning. !"
As I stood in the lobby of the Britannia of Manchester, I was in awe of the
English tack and quote Lenny Bruce: "It looks like a queer went crazy in here with a staple gun." Over-the-top Englishness, perfect for the Libertines.
The Manchester show was pure celebration. With Red Stripe in hand I get
trampled by the first rush of teenage girls, running past me with weirdly
ecstatic faces, until the front of the stage was four feet deep with them.
Teenage girls always know what is cool in rock'n'roll.
The Libertines have no authority. No precedents live. Their only authority is the never-never land of chemical rebellion and like fatal nerve agents who seemingly awake every morning to the sound of explosions, and they feel a need to document with their songs. The new song, "I Can't Stand You"; portrays the tension between Carl and Pete, perfectly: androids, unrepentant and 21st-century revisiting 1977. But tonight, this is not a slow decline into latex cabaret: more than three very loud chord but a homicidal artistic attack, and a stand-off is taking place within the Libertines compound Pete runs out onto the stage and screams out during "The Saga" - "It's not a problem, I don't have a problem". They taunt the audience with "What a Waster", a deep and concrete grey guitar noise chemistry. The tension of the show and the security being three feet thick, I wander out into Manchester, to the shouts of "Look look, not even the roadies could get in...". I end up in a stranger's flat, at three in the morning, listening to Badly Drawn Boy's soft psyche-pop. At four in the morning I wander into the empty hotel listening to a stolen copy of Love's "Forever Changes"..
I spot a kid in a "Free Pete Doherty" T-shirt. I recognised him trying to get into the show tonight; skin translucent - a beautiful ghost of a kid dressed in Adidas gear.
Weren't you at the Libertines show?
"I am in the city with the Libertines ... We are going to go to the Albion.
Arcadia is a halfway point between the earth and heaven and hell. We are
going to Arcadia."
We stare at each other for awhile. His chemically scarred face waiting
for me.
"Tell me what you know about the Libertines"
"The power of Pete Doherty will not be manifest until all human populations
are judged after death. This is not meaningful yet, however all who have
been born will die for that purpose, either in the Libertines or not."
He hands me a five pound note. "Please get this signed by them. Tell them
to take me with them".
The next day in the lobby of the hotel, the band's entourage are talking in
whispers. Gary comes down, hung-over and happy:
"That was the best show - the best show ever - the last two times in
Manchester - they threw beer cans at me - the first one got me on the one
side of my head and then another came sailing through - and got me on the other side
until I looked like a devil with two horns."
Alan collected me quickly and we checked out. As we walked to the car, I
asked Alan:
"Why the rush?"
"Pete destroyed the hotel room and put his foot through the door and threw a
television out of the window...on his second attempt."
"What happened on the first attempt?"
"It bounced back."
"Isn't this all turning into Spinal Tap clichés?"
"No, no, no. With Pete it is beyond cliché. Pete and Carl haven't read any
rock'n'roll biographies. I don't think either of them realise what a cliché
is. But tonight, it is my job to keep Pete out of the pub besides Glasgow
Barrowlands."
"Why?"
"It's an Irish Celtic pub."
"Is he in the tour bus? Not back in London".
"They had to carry him on the tour bus still passed out".
The show in Glasgow was spiritual Libertines power. "I Can't Stand You" is ... loud. The sheer volume is comparable to the avant-garde No York art attack of early Love, while "Death on the Stars" is a disorientating wiry-ruffian of a psychedelic-rage freak out. As "What a Waster" is twisted from an amped up cockney punk into a pilled-up weirdo, the audience takes careful steps backwards. It's an apocalyptic sound clash between The Jam-type mod-rock and the audio-roar of a freakbeat 747 taking off. Amazing stuff. They dance in sick, the sick of England, singing randomised rock'n'roll suicide words about doom, the doomed and the dead. And the audience are ecstatic. Pete and Carl, topless, parade like the Cavarrgio slut boys of Mick'n'Keef. Sweat is condensing on the walls.
At the aftershow, I sat near the back, drunk, dirty and weaving with the
artificial energy of sleep psychosis. A girl was talking nonsense to me
about Courtney Love and the Libertines, imitating Love in a bizarre
Glaswegian manner, trying to unbuckle my belt whilst whispering how much she really would do anything to meet the band. I pointed them out - at the back of
club, signing autographs and chatting to the fans.
"No. But I really want to meet the band."
"Err.. They are at the back of the club there."
A by-passer noted: "Mate, I think she is trying to shag you to meet the
band."
The girl screamed, Courtney-like, and left. At the end of the evening I end up in another taxi. Alan hands Carl £1,500 in notes. He shoves it into his coat. "Did you take your twenty percent, Alan?"
We walked to the hotel room. Pete Doherty seemed to be the evocation of
dimly lit bedsits in Brighton, barely letting light in. I stood in the corner of the restaurant and watched the band, not having met him before, he seemed, strange, impossible to know, instead, I walk over to the bar, to listen to Velvet Underground's first album, as Pete accidentally knocks into me.
"Sorry about that Sonny, instant karma, y'know". He smiled. "So where are you from?"
"A small faded steeltown in the States"
"Cool. Do you want to sit down in the brown booths near the back. What did you think of the show?"
"Brilliant. You are a brilliant rock'n'roll star. Like Morrissey from the Smiths - guys and girls both want to fuck you. It's a lineage."
"That's funny. Really big guys come up to me and tell me that they want to kiss me. We might get the support slots for the Morrissey tour."
"Alan told me that Morrissey is a big fan and has brought several copies of Up the Bracket."
Alan came over and a post-match analysis ensued over the tour before descending into Led Zeppelin Carry-on.
"Alan, what would you do if we destroy the hotel restaurant?"
"Pay for it."
"Alan, can we go to where you grew up in Glasgow?"
"No. It would just depress you, Pete. I took my wife there a few years
ago."
"Tell me how you grew up."
"Are you taking the piss, Pete?"
"Alan I'm mortified that you would think that."
Pete, large eyes rolling, decided that we should all get a taxi back to
London and do a gig in his flat. "We've got all the equipment and the bus.
We should just do it. Or at least go back to London and have some fun." Pete,
like a deranged homing pigeon for London - looked at Alan and myself. Alan was
quiet before going: "Y'know what Pete, I'm the manager, and should say no, but fuck it, it sounds like good fun." Carl came back to the table and Pete and Carl discussed the impromptu gig before the tour manager came over to collect them.
"No, no, we're going back to London and we are going to do a gig in my flat"
"Oh no, you are not."
"I'll arm wrestle you for it."
Pete lost. And the band went back to the tour bus.
In the morning, Alan dropped me off at the train station. I put in Love's "Forever Changes", I watched the endgame titles of the tour's movie end for me as the morning working people, enter in, slowly piling in front of me, until I fade into the crowd, one by one….the sounds of the Glasgow mixed with Forever Changes. "All of God's Children gots to have their freedom..."
At Brixton Academy, I found Alan, swamped with people. He updated me on
the band's Bristol show. "Pete left before on Wednesday for London but came
back for Bristol."
But by the time they came onstage - The Libertines went into the sky and exploded like a vicious star. They hadbecome the last rock'n'roll gang in town. Saturday, Bobby Gillespie turned up and fell in love with the band. Sunday, the band imploded on stage during "I Can't Stand You", Pete, yelling to Carl, 'YOU CAN'T STAND ME NOW', beforebreaking his guitar and pushing over an amplifier. He came back onstage when Carl continued without him. "Sorry I had a strop.."
A week later, whilst attending a Mick Jones, in-studio gig, eleven years, since the Clash superstar last played, Alan McGee pulled me aside to update me on the Libertines news. "Don't tell anyone this, I'm going to have to employ two security guards just so the Libertines don't trash the studio and each other. But it will be worth it. Two weeks and it will be a classic album. There are already three hundred songs ready."
With Carl there - I turned to him -" I think that the Libertines, revitalised Mick Jones to write music again."
"Really, that's the greatest accolade that I've ever received."
"Yeah, the good ship Albion sails on."
Sonny Tremaine
(http://www.poptones.co.uk/Libertinesnews.htm)