The New Cue #361 February 26: The Libertines
"People crossing the channel are raring to go. They’ll fix your pipes, sell you drugs, they’re up for anything. These are hardworking people."
Good morning,
How are you? All fine and dandy we hope.
In today’s New Cue, we have a chinwag with The Libertines’ Peter (Pete) Doherty and Carl Barât. Highlights includes the story of the band’s new album All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade, their new (ish) Margate HQ, as well as their stormier past, the state of their beloved Albion post-Brexit, Fawlty Towers, secret tunnels, Chief Wiggum and more. Mondays are always free editions, but if you’d also like to sign up to receive Friday’s bumper issue filled with new music recommendations for a mere £5 a month, please just click that ‘Subscribe Now’ button down there.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… The Libertines
Beyond making brilliant records, the really great bands create their own little world for you to discover and lose yourself in. Their songs become trapdoors inviting you into a whole new outlook on life, pieced together from literature, film, music, clothes and more. Like The Smiths before them, The Libertines understood that better than most. When they crashed into the post-Strokes landscape, their scrappy, punk-scuffed tunes existed in a mythical Albion of their own creation. A romantic mishmash of Tony Hancock and Thomas De Quincy, Morrissey and Sid James, it was vision of Blighty that owed as much to Chas & Dave as it did The Clash.
Sadly, as anyone who passed an eye over a tabloid newspaper in the early 2000s will recall, Pete Doherty’s drug problems (and more) scuppered the band before they really had a change to leave a body of work that made good on the early brilliance captured in songs like What A Waster, Up The Bracket or Don’t Look Back Into The Sun.
Thankfully, after reforming in 2014, the band are releasing their fourth album, All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade next month. Now clean and living in France with his wife and young daughter, Doherty can still conjure some of the mercurial magic of old (closing track Songs They Never Play On The Radio is a tune he’s been tinkering with for years, now finally fully realised as a beautiful Beatles-esque ballad), but it’s from a more sturdy-sounding musical base, while his and Carl Barât’s world feels more rooted in contemporary Britain. Barât’s Mustang is a colourful litany of characters who populate his new home of Margate on the Kent coast and Merry Old England sees them looking at the UK from the perspective of modern-day immigrants. Few would have betted on it, but 2024 finds The Libertines in fine fettle…
Chris spoke to Pete and Carl last week from The Albion Rooms, the hotel-cum-recording studio they set up in Margate a few years ago. Here’s a picture of them talking to him on Zoom…
Hello Pete, how are you doing? How was your journey?
Pete Doherty: It was long, to be honest. Eight hours sat in car with a massive dog and a load nappies. I’m not complaining though. I soldier on. [Carl walks in]
And you, Carl?
Carl Barât: Mustn’t grumble. It’s nice to actually sit and talk to people and have the record done. I like this space we’ve got. It’s good.
How has it changed the band having an HQ in Margate? You live here, Carl, so you don’t have to drive for eight hours to get to work, at least.
Carl: No, I have to walk for eight minutes though. Even that’s a slog these days.
How did it all come together as a hotel and studio?
Carl: Very slowly, we’re still getting there.
Pete: There’s rumours that there’s a tunnel here going to the sea.
Carl: Really?
Pete: Yeah, an old smugglers’ tunnel.
Carl: The idea started with getting a record advance. Everyone normally just shoves it in their back pocket and buggers off and individually fritters it away then gets chased for the tax on it. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we buy our own bricks and mortar and have our own HQ? Something that unites us all in our far-flung corners of Europe.’ A home.
Pete: I think it’s really important to us all, this place. I got mad goose bumps when I came down just now. There was a bloke down at the bar nursing half a Guinness, looking absolutely miserable listening to a really beautiful live version of [Stooges track] No Fun. I just thought, ‘Oh mate, this is heaven’.
Carl: He’s an old roadie. He’s one of our locals. He sits in the bar. He can tell a story.
Pete: I went, ‘Oh, evening, mate.’ And he went, [stares blankly]. I love that. The last time I saw him he didn’t even give me a look and the next time it’ll be a ‘Hello’. And then in a couple of years, I’ll be getting the stories out of him. I’ll feel I’ve earned it.
He’ll be like the Major in Fawlty Towers.
Carl: The Major was a war hero. You know that story in David Niven’s book about how in the blitz they kept the show going at [West End nightspot] Café de Paris and the bomb tears through the window and blows up this guy. Anyway, the first guy on the scene was the Major from Fawlty Towers.
Pete: Really?
Carl: Yeah. So was Godfrey in Dad’s Army, he was a war hero as well. Did you see Pike died a couple of days ago?
Pete: Yeah, I saw that. He’s the last one.
If you’re running a hotel, who’s Basil and who’s Sybil?
Pete: You can be Sybil.
Carl: Basil and Manuel, maybe.
Pete: It feels quite underground here a lot of the time. You feel like you can just concentrate and get on with things. Saying that, we do have a hardcore following who see it as a place of pilgrimage. It doesn’t feel like it’s in a voyeuristic way. People come with something to do. Someone will come and they’ll read a poem at the open mic night or they’ll try and get their band some discount time in the studio, if it can be arranged.
It’s better to be doing that than be checking your Tripadvisor reviews.
Carl: Tripadvisor is hardly [novelist and playwright] J. B. Priestley is it? I mean, in terms of the critique. You’re looking at the opinions of people who don’t even fucking…
Pete: Didn’t you have a job once doing travel reviews?
Carl: Oh yeah.
Pete: You just used to cut and paste stuff and change the name of the place.
Carl: I did, yeah.
Pete: J. B. Priestley, my eye!
Carl: Even J. B. Priestley started somewhere.
Do you think having this place has given you some stability as a band?
Carl: I think it’s steadied the ship a little bit. Just having an anchor. We still are ourselves, like a bunch of balloons banging against each other in the wind. We still are that, but we’re anchored now, rather than just… I don’t know.
How has that impacted this record?
Pete: I think it’s pretty central to the whole record. The album’s called All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade [the street The Albion Rooms is on]. The front cover of the album is The Albion Rooms, many of the characters, at least half of them in the songs are, if not Margatians, then neo-Margatians.
Carl: Neo-Margatonians. They’re transferable. I mean, Margate’s got a beautiful sort of crucible element to it, but in terms of where it’s situated on the coast, from Caesar onwards and before then, it’s been like the vanguard of England. The frontline.
Pete: The cannon fodder.
Carl: It’s imbued with history right into the foundations that Pete was just talking about, running under the studio, these interesting catacombs. But I think on top of that, it’s just got people upon people upon people, different classes and different generations. It’s a bit like London in that it’s got the old part of the town that was built that became decayed, then a new part of the town was built then another part went up.
Pete: The cycle continues and then it goes. We are the last of the Elizabethans.
An idea of Englishness has informed so much of what you do, this mythical idea of ‘Albion’. But on this album, it’s more rooted in the current day. You take a song like Merry Old England on the new record. Ten, fifteen years ago you’d think a Libertines’ song called Merry Old England would be…
Pete: Medieval psychedelia.
Sort of. But set in this world that you’ve created rather than a song about what’s going on currently with immigration post-Brexit.
Pete: It interests us both for various reasons and we’ve come at it from various angles but it’s just an endlessly fascinating topic and then being in Margate these last four or five years it’s unavoidable. You enter into friendships and your lives cross paths with people who are risking life and limb to come here like that to try and make a life for themselves. What was the old Kent Airport is now basically a holding compound for illegal immigrants. My old dog walker, I can’t get a hold of him these days because he’s got a job. They gave them a fucking high-vis jacket and a taser and told him: “Look after this lot.” He deals with dangerous dogs, he’s not providing care or sanitation but they give him a wage and put him there basically just to stop people from getting over the fence.
These people are trained doctors, they speak four or five languages, they’re talented sailors - they got a dingy across the fucking Channel, do you know what I mean? They’re fucking raring to go. They’ll do anything. They’ll fix your pipes, sell you drugs, they’re up for anything. These are hardworking people and just to paint a whole boatload of people with the same brush is really strange.
This must be the first time The Libertines have embarked on a record from a place of stability?
Pete: On [first album] Up The Bracket we were young sailors travelling into the unknown where none of this has been mapped. You’re searching for the new world and you kind of welcome the storms in a way, you see it as a test. But obviously it can affect your path or can smash the ship to bits. But these days, I think we’re trying to be more in tune with the weather. We’ve got GPS tracking so we can avoid storms or really batten down the hatches in times of crisis or maybe do a bit of keelhauling if people don’t behave themselves.
It’s been nearly ten years since your last album, Anthems For Doomed Youth. How do you feel about that record now?
Carl: That was definitely a record made on manoeuvres. We were out in the Far East. In the jungle, writing.
Pete: I loved it, Bangkok’s Half Hour. [Album track] The Belly Of The Beast is one of my favourite songs that I’ve ever been involved in. As a writer or a consumer.
Was it important for you to make that album to have more music out in the world? The Libertines have a legacy, but was there a feeling that you should have made more records?
Pete: I don’t know about feelings, I just know that I must’ve believed in it to have done it. And the songs do stand up. The second record, you see, I wasn’t... I vaguely remember going in and then there was that punch up on the first day. But then after I left the band. I went in and we put down loads of live recordings very quickly, all those songs really quickly and then I just wasn’t there. I was elsewhere.
Carl: Mentally, you weren’t there.
Pete: Whereas, I think, in Thailand, even though there were messy moments, we were all there. It’s difficult to lay into the third record really because there are some gorgeous songs on it. And really, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it? Writing and recording songs.
I did an interview in France the other day and when he was setting up his iPhone to record me, this French journalist, I saw a little list and it was times and dates and names of the people he’d recorded and he’d interviewed Damon Albarn a couple of weeks before. I was like, ‘Let’s have a listen!’ He was like, ‘No, no, it’s against journalistic ethics…’ I went, ‘Come on, let’s have a listen!’ So we had a little listen and there was one question he asked him about how he decides which song he uses for Blur and which song he uses for Gorillaz, which I thought was a good question. The answer’s great. He says he’s got a do-it-yourself chemical litmus test set. He makes a special potion and he dips the song, a USB or an MP3 with it on, into it and if the potion turns a certain colour, he uses it for Blur. Which doesn’t answer your question, but it’s quite a funny anecdote.
I liked it. When you were making records with Babyshambles and, Carl, you were making Dirty Pretty Things records, were you aware that you were missing something that the other person brings? Did you feel each other’s absence in those years?
Pete: Maybe, but that can be a driving influence as well. When I’m writing songs, sometimes I imagine I’m singing them to certain people, like my younger self, what would they think? Carl, if he’s not there and there’s no chance he’s going to hear it, he’ll have to hear it on the radio if possible. So that becomes a driving thing as well, it’s an inspiring thing. What you lose on the contribution, you gain on the energy you get from that.
Carl: In short, yes. But then we have to draw from that strength-wise. For me, I had a feeling with all the injustices of the world that had been committed against me, as I’m sure did Peter in his own way, that energy, that anger, resentment and shame. I think also it became apparent what the other one brought to it. That is useful in that respect as well. We could’ve gone along thinking that it was all us that made it and shared this balance and not actually been able to see the difference.
Pete: It’s an interesting question though. I could’ve have given a really flippant answer.
Carl: I’ll keep my retort to myself.
Pete: Come on, let’s have it.
Carl: No. It’s too close to the knuckle.
Pete: OK. I did make a list of things for you to say, because after this we’re doing a guitar magazine interview and I’m doing a Danish fashion magazine because I know loads about Danish fashion. I’ve made a list of things for you to say in your interview, Carl.
Carl: Right.
Pete: One of them is, “Well, let me ask you this… shut up!” which is a Chief Wiggum quote, who also said, “This press conference is over, Phil!” You got to get those in and you’ve also got to say: “It’s not my first rodeo.”
Carl: OK.
Pete: And I’ll be reading the article, so I will check. [Back to the interview] Let me ask you this… shut up! Does that answer your question?
In a way. Thanks for talking to us. Enjoy your Danish fashion interview.
Pete: My pleasure!
Carl: [As Zoom call ends] I’ve got a question for you... what Danish fashion magazine?
CC