Gin in teacups

The Libertines

I suspect that few readers of The Dabbler will have paid much attention to the recent reunion (including a BBC-televised performance at the Reading Festival) of the band The Libertines. Yet for  countless indie girls and slightly-less-skinny-than-they-used-to-be NME-readers in their late 20s, this was a seriously Big Deal. This is one of those bands that tempts impressionable types into disturbing fanaticism.

The story of The Libertines is a tiresome ‘bromantic’ saga featuring two dysfunctional narcissists. The love-hate chemistry between the band’s dual frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barat is of the intense, bordering on homoerotic sort that lends itself to one of the more baffling (to men) genres of female erotica – ‘slash fiction’ (read the Wiki page and boggle, you’ll never be able to watch Star Trek in the same way again). Since the Libertines split up in 2004 Doherty’s troubles with drugs and Kate Moss and prison have made him second only to Amy Winehouse in the tabloid pop anti-hero stakes. In fact, the Doherty/Barat soap opera, which included Doherty’s imprisonment for breaking into Barat’s home, has generated far more journalistic verbiage than the band’s modest musical output (one and a half really rather excellent albums, half an album of lazy/heroin-addled rubbish, a couple of decent EPs) and is as good an illustration as any of that spiritual malaise afflicting English creative types these days.

Nonetheless, Dabblers prepared to overlook the tedious dramas of these self-obsessed wallies will find something unusual and interesting in the music of The Libertines, because their shtick is based on a peculiar strand of English fantasy revolving around folk memories of a lost ‘Albion’. ‘Queen Boadicia’ and ‘the arcadian dream’ pop up in their songs, as a mythical alternative reality to grim stuff about needles and deaths on staircases.

Doherty in particular has a lovely turn of phrase. His song Albion summarises this odd little retroprogressive subgenre of English pop:

Gin in teacups/And leaves on the lawn/Violence in bus stops…and the pale thin girl behind the checkout…Yellowing classics and cannons at dawn/Coffee wallahs and pith helmets/And an English song…

Thus Doherty, we must conclude, also suffers that same troubling feeling that the British soul was at its zenith when everyone had clipped accents and thin-moustached officers in tropical outposts sweated gin-and-tonic and quoted Latin proverb et cetera, and everything that’s happened since has been unmistakeably symptomatic of our purposeless spiritual decline.  He is, nonetheless, like me, a patriot. Surely neither the current nor previous Poet Laureate managed to come up with a patriotic line as memorable as this:

There’s few more distressing sights than that/Of an Englishman in a baseball cap/We’ll die in the class we were born/That’s a class of our own, my love.

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5 thoughts on “Gin in teacups

  1. Gaw
    September 7, 2010 at 11:24

    I’m not sure Mr B is going to like that disparaging reference to baseball caps.

  2. russellworks@gmail.com'
    ian russell
    September 7, 2010 at 11:26

    ”There’s few more distressing sights than that/Of an Englishman in a baseball cap.”

    I suppose one would have to be a mirror – ah, sorry, looking glass – in the Doherty bathroom…

  3. Brit
    September 7, 2010 at 11:30

    Heh, before Mr B appears to defend the honour of the States, I interpreted that as anti-chav rather than anti-Yank…

  4. russellworks@gmail.com'
    ian russell
    September 7, 2010 at 11:49

    I wouldn’t worry – every Englishman and his wife happily bought their blue jeans and sneakers. We’ll not me personally but I’m sure I’m in the minority…

  5. Worm
    September 7, 2010 at 20:37

    with you on the libertines rather excellent expounding of albion – carry on films, diana dors, tweed, crap cars, soho, gin and all that jazz. Can’t stand me now is a great song

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