I hadn’t heard much of their music, although I knew the name. That’s one of the problems with being an expat in Asia – you become completely disconnected from the music scene of the West, particularly anything that could possibly be construed as “indie”.
A slideshow to illustrate my realisation of precisely why professional music photographers do not use their iPhones for gig photography. Photoset here.
I had to sell my Fender acoustic and my Ibanez hollowbody electric guitars when I left England behind. My Peavey telecaster clone went to a friend. That was five months ago.
In many ways, that was the moment in which the enormous size of my situation really hit me. No guitars. I had never been without a guitar – my Dad’s was always around when I was a child, and I acquired the first guitar of my own when I was still at high school.
In other ways, I suppose the uncertainty of life here in Thailand had stopped me buying a guitar so far. The feeling that at any point, it could all go wrong, and that I would have to return, a failure, to England.
Today, after buying the pictured Takamine Dragon, I guess I finally feel at home.
It’s not cool right now to be technically extraordinary. The Libertines couldn’t play guitar to save their lives. The attitude that you can pick up an instrument that’s out of tune and thrash away at it, singing to your heart’s content, is massively inspiring. We’re fed up with supershiny pop records, and the monster stadium-rock bands. When I produced some of the Libertines’ records, Carl Barat would come up with the simplest riffs and he’d not be able to play them properly, and it was brilliant. He didn’t think in terms of complex scales and notes, just something to sing along to.
Bernard Butler – my favourite guitarist, on the guitar – my favourite instrument, namechecking The Libertines – my favourite band. A good read.
A belated review of one of the most-looked-forward-to albums of the year (at least for me, and most of the tabloid press…) – “Down In Albion” hit the P2P networks a few weeks before release, which may or may not have influenced the distinct lack of media hype on its actual release. Anyway, here’s my take.
Firstly, this needs a few listens. I was a huge Libertines fan, and standing slack-jawed amongst thousands, covered in beer at the first of their three-night residency at Brixton Academy back in March 2004 remains one of the most intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. I loved Up the Bracket, and even managed to enjoy the eponymous follow-up, The Libertines – probably best described as the sound of a band falling apart.
My only criticism was that the albums were hardly as polished as the Bernard Butler produced singles (What a Waster, Don’t Look Back Into The Sun), and actually just sounded as if everyone (the band, producer Mick Jones, mixers, engineers, tea lady…) had ingested all of the fast drugs in London, turned everything up to 10 that could conceivably be turned up to 10 (and even a few things that couldn’t), and played the album live, never stopping to record a second take.
In retrospect, this is possibly exactly what they did. But it’s a raw, intense sound with more layers than are immediately discernable, and grows on you like something nasty at the back of the fridge.
Down In Albion is much the same, and whilst I was a little underwhelmed after the first few listens, I soon became first whelmed, then encouraged, and finally convinced that this is in fact a fine album indeed. Not that Pete Doherty has made it easy for himself – there are some bad, ocassionally even cringe-inducing moments ahead, but they’re sufficiently few and far-between for this to be, overall, a fine debut…
Met two fellas over gin and mixers
They talked for a while and soon got the picture
One was a souped up Soho mincer,
And the other was a pikey with a knowledge of scripture…
Things get off to a jaunty enough start with La Belle Et La Béte, formerly known to we consumers of fine bootlegs as Conversation Diva. The familiarly slurred vocals, the crisp guitars, the upbeat drums… And then Kate Moss starts singing. About a minute and a half in. Isn’t it embarassing when the singer brings his girlfriend to the band rehearsal? She’s a fine looking woman, but she can’t sing to save her life. What were you thinking, Pete? Are you on crack? Eh? Oh.
Oh, you’re so clever
You’re so clever but not very nice
Recent single Fuck Forever is up next, anthemic panacea to anything uplifting or vaguely optimistic. Great.
Oh poor me, my liberty…
Then straight into A’rebours, which for the trainspotters is an amalgamation of the old bootleg tracks Curtain Call and If You Fall, and is one of the best tracks on the album – obviously the beauty of combining these distinctly separate demos isn’t really going to impress the average listener, who will have heard neither (and wouldn’t want to), but seeing and hearing where this song came from makes it all the more spectacular that it’s come out as well as it has…
Does anybody want tea?
Did anybody thank you, ah fuck me…
I think Morrissey is probably the only other person in the world who could sing about tea and still rock. The 32nd Of December sounds like a future single, albeit one in need of heavy editing for radio play…
Oh, The Sun, They make you out to be a tearaway…
Pipe Down, instant punk anthem, Sticks and Stones, a surprisingly good-if-reggae-tinted reworking of an old Libertines demo, and then the biggest WTF moment of the album so far.
Killamangiro was the ‘Shambles’ first top ten single, and a mighty fine song it was. So quite why it’s been re-recorded for the album I have no idea.
The highlight of the single for me was the poignant “And on the off-chance that you’re listening to the radio, I thought you might like to know you broke my heart” – a plaintive message to one Carl Barat, one-time co-Libertine and eventually the man who broke up the most promising band of the past decade.
On the album version he sings “On the off-chance that you’re listening, I thought you might like to know, la la la la”. Pronouncing the words, Peter, is not optional. Not on the final take. What did the other takes sound like?
Eight Dead Boys has some of the best guitar work on the album, and In Love With A Feeling is the only song I’ve ever heard that dares to reference the popular biscuits Hob Nobs. Not only that, but it’s a decent song too.
Then the one everyone’s been talking about, Pentonville. Rapped, ragga-stylee by Pete’s former cellmate in the eponymous London jail. Okay, it sounds about as out-of-place as a funny joke in a politician’s speech, but it’s not actually that bad. Oh all right, it is.
What Katy Did Next is decent – a simple, catchy love song, but loses several hundred points for ripping the first verse straight out of The Stone Roses album track Good Times, one of the best tracks on Second Coming…
Gin in teacups, and leaves on the lawn
Violence in dole queues and the pale thin girl behind the checkout…
Current single, Albion, is quite simply the best song I’ve heard in years. In a fair and just world, it would be Christmas Number One. In this slightly less fair and just world, that honour will presumably go to the winner of X-Factor. Or Westlife. Sigh.
I heard it said
You had come back from the dead
Playing so fine
Even if you don’t show up on time
Back From The Dead is a reworking of the B-side from Pete & Wolfman’s For Lovers, the best pop single of last year. Good, but not great.
And if I confide in you today, I know you don’t believe a single word I say
I found solace in the flood, and everybody knew that I would
Cause I’m alright, and there’s a slight crack in my chimney…
Loyalty Song is surely another potential single, boasting not just a singalongatastic melody but also the best usage of a glockenspiel in a contemporary song since Radiohead’s Karma Police.
Up The Morning starts slowly, then flowers into the purest uplifting imperfect beauty, and then all too soon we’re at the fourteenth and final track – winding down slowly with Merry Go Round.
Said what I like most about you Pete, is your girlfriend and your shoes
And it’s nearly half past five
Can we swap again?
Half past five, can we swap again?
And the last cymbal fades, and we strain to hear the mutterings in the background, it’s all over.
Not to everyone’s tastes. You won’t like it at all at first – I didn’t. But if it grows on you at all, it’ll grow a lot. Recommended.
Half Man Half Biscuit. Where to start? Formed in the early 1980s in Birkenhead, HMHB are perhaps the best band you’ve never heard of. Nigel Blackwell’s sublime lyrics mix social commentary with sardonic surrealism, and a healthy portion of god-awful puns.
I just got hold of Achtung Bono – their recent tenth studio album. Whilst track one, “Restless Legs” is perhaps oddly underwhelming, it’s followed by “CORGI Registered Friends”, an acerbic attack on vacuous middle class bores. The opening trilogy is completed with the actually quite touching “For What Is Chatteris…”, essentially a love song about the pointlessness of the quaint country village once your love has left it behind, in which Blackwell introduces the irrisistable phrase “drive-by shouting”.
Shit arm, bad tattoo” is a thinly-veiled attack on The Libertines, the title and refrain refer to the cover of their eponymous second album.
Witness:
When she wakes up in the morning, she writes down all her dreams. Reads like the Book of Relevations, or The Beano or The Unabridged Ulysses… –The Libertines, “What a Waster”
versus
If you’re going to quote from the Book of Revelation, don’t keep calling it the Book of Revelations. There’s no “s”, it’s the Book of Revelation. As revealed to St. John the Divine. –HMHB, “Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo”
“Surging Out Of Convalescence” is another rant about the things in life with which we’re all familiar, but only Blackwell has the nerve to actually mention: “Is your child hyperactive, or is he perhaps a twat?” rails against the trend of applying labels rather than correction to wayward youth, whilst “I wrote to the Horse and Hounds, to gloat over what I’d done. I’d stored their magazine, in a data retrieval system” highlights the stupidity of the copyright blurb in the first pages of every bloody magazine you buy, of which nobody is ever going to take the slightest bit of notice.
“Upon Westminster Bridge” begins with a bass guitar picking out the melody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and just when you think it’s going to turn into another of their “list songs” (ITMA, Referee’s Alphabet, Breaking News), Nigel comes out with “If Jesus came to Earth today, they’d crucify him straight away, upon a cross of MDF, and they’d use ‘no need for nails’”. Then a time signature change and we’re finished off rather nicely with a somewhat unorthodox version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:
Spoiling good Friday, my true love sent to me:
12 drummers singing
11 chairmen dancing
10 mascots whinging
9 stewards flapping
8 christening invites
7 cows a-barking
6 vicars strumming
Nick fucking Knowles
4 boring words
Carphone Warehouse and Matalan
And a pulled-up at Bangor-On-Dee
“Joy Division Oven Gloves”, quite aside from being the best song title I’ve seen in several years, not only manages to be both the catchiest and most surreal song on the album, but also makes some kind of point about the incessant commercialisation and capitalist culture marauding its way into the last holy ground – music itself. It then segues into traditional song to end with “My Grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf, so I sold it and opened up a stall… selling Joy Division Oven Gloves”.
“Mate of the Bloke” I already knew from a performance on Andy Kershaw’s show a few years back, and is a rousing endorsement of the side-benefits of being a “mate of the bloke who sets up the PA”, whilst “Asparagus Next Left” warns of the unseen gruesome dangers lurking behind the roadside signs imploring drivers to stop for assorted fruit and vegetable produce: “‘Ooh, ooh, rhubarb – let’s go!’ She’s still not been accounted for…”
“Depressed Beyond Tablets”, quite aside from garnering praise simply for lifting the title from Chris Morris‘ gloriously biting Brass Eye series of yesteryear, not only perhaps deservingly chastises the recent music scene’s love of songs of depression and angst (Emo, argh), but manages to sum itself up wonderfully for the sake of this paragraph with the one-upmanship of “Belle Epoque sang ‘Black Is Black’? Yeah, well I sing ‘Black is Black is Black is Blacker’”.
“Bogus Official (public information tune)” is exactly what is says on the tracklist, and swiftly brings us to “Letters Sent”, which although on ocassion is lyrically perhaps a little impenetrable, still contains the joyously downbeat “Leisure centre cashpoint. Always out of order. And there’s too much chlorine in the pool”.
“Twydale’s Lament” is probably the most musically complex piece, managing to effortlessly flirt between a range of time signature and keys, wonderfully conveying the rage of the opening line “Indicate then, you stupid bastard – how was I supposed to know that you intended to go left, I’m not a mind reader… You should be cast away into the fiery pit – and in the fiery pit there are eternal sleeping policemen. ” The mid-section riffs along to Nigel’s spoken monologue about taking elastic bands discarded by his postman and taking them to the pub in order to flick cigarettes out of his mouth. Then we mellow out for the closing refrain of “Gouranga gouranga. Yes, I’ll be happy – when you’ve been arrested for defacing the bridge”. If you’ve ever driven under a certain motorway bridge in the north-west, you can’t help but punch the air in elated agreement with this particular line.
Finally and all too soon, we close with “We Built This Village On A Trad. Arr. Tune”, not only a terrific riposte to Starship’s worst song ever, but a jolly upbeat finale containg gems such as “It fills me with joy to see moshers out jogging”, and “graduated to solids disturbingly early”, themselves shoved unceremoniously aside by the awe-inspiring “It’s a cricketing farce with a thickening plot- Act 1, Scene 1: Brenda Blethyn gets shot”.
Twelve tracks. Forty minutes. Anyone who didn’t grow up in the UK in the 80s or 90s won’t understand most of the references, and it won’t make any impression whatsoever on the charts – but it’s my record of the year so far.
