Post by mj on Jul 4, 2014 12:03:18 GMT -5
Why I'll Always Hear Their Music
with love and without underwear from NYC
Ahead of their July 5 date in London’s Hyde Park, the Libertines are looking good and sounding better than ever, and all this new buzz on their reunion is taking me back to the first time I heard them. As it turned out it ended up a pretty memorable night. The year was 2004, The Libertines was playing on a first generation iPod and I was having a threesome. And not a teenagey one with the giggling and the awkward but a very adult one where everyone tried their best and both clothes and people ended up in a big pile and I was so high I accidentally wore the other girl's skirt home with no underwear. Anyway the Libertines were, appropriately enough, the soundtrack to all that. I got my own copy of that record the very next day and like so many other listeners, I've followed the band and its boys and their bands ever since. Better ears than mine have written on why technically the Libertines's music is fantastic; for me, the two albums the band released captured a very specific point in my early 20s when I was trying to figure things out, a raw and vulnerable and raucous and driven mix of what-the-fuck, and feeling all this voiced spot on in their music was really perfect. They were in the struggle too.
Now it's 3am and memory lane isn't letting me go, so I've spent hours online: youtube, watching audience posted clips from Glastonbury on June 28; NME, reading the latest hypes on the reunion; netflix, re-watching There Are No Innocent Bystanders for probably the fourth time; back to youtube, watching all of the Reading 2010 set; wikipedia, going over old interview references. Somehow, in the grand tradition of wandering around on the internet, hopping from weird stepping stone to even weirder stepping stone, I wind up on an abandoned Libertines message board from 2003. An anonymous poster, identified and quoted in later articles as Peter Doherty, is talking about a night with Carl Barat:
"1997 I remember sitting on top of a tower block in bow and carl had that look in his eye he seized me screaming we should throw ourselves off together I had to knock him out and drag him down,
`there`s nothing in this world for us` he`D say, `let`s shoot each other`.
`lets shoot this shit up at the same time an drown in all eternity
no carl, it`ll be grand, lets keep going
i love you I love you so much
lets keep going
`yeah lets keep going forever peter, til the very end`
yeah til the end"
Undeniably the relationship between the band's founders Peter and Carl is a deep and magical thing, colored with romanticism and dashed with their individual brilliances. It seems to be impossible to find an interview with either one of them where the other isn't discussed. They way they speak about each other is so gentle, so full of love, that it's difficult to reconcile it with the wildness, the recklessness and the destruction they went through together, inflated as it all was by the media. If I had to call them together anything, it'd be a meeting of souls, like particles that circled each other billions of years ago and circle one another still. Together they have a real gravity, a pull. People pick up on this and they want in. Interviewers, reviewers, friends, fans, me writing this shit at 4am. The internet is littered with speculation on the exact nature of their relationship; erotic fan fictions and photo montages devoted to their togetherness abound. Personally I give precisely zero fucks about this, because songs like that got written and played. I forget who said it but, "The artist's feeling is his law." Together these two people shared a powerful feeling, and that feeling built a dream.
England has a storied tradition of gorgeous oft-wasted musicians in tight trousers writing and playing the ever living fuck out of rock music, arguably the best rock music. Personally I don't want our rock musicians to be be pillars of sobriety, happiness or mental stability. What good music ever came out of that? Please understand I'm not wishing ill on anyone here or saying that wasted, sad and emotional is the only way to be an artist. What I am saying is that in my experience, the artist's struggle to be true to oneself and to create something original isn't pretty, it can be terrifying actually, and the ups and downs for a creative soul abound. Tumble and scrap and sacrifice and struggle you will certainly will, but your art will pull you up again. The Libertines threw open their arms and let us in to this. Beauty can be fucking dirty, and unkind, and precious, and fierce, and rare - and we should celebrate that, we should always hear that. We should turn it the fuck up.
Thank you for you, Libertines, and all the love
xo,m
with love and without underwear from NYC
Ahead of their July 5 date in London’s Hyde Park, the Libertines are looking good and sounding better than ever, and all this new buzz on their reunion is taking me back to the first time I heard them. As it turned out it ended up a pretty memorable night. The year was 2004, The Libertines was playing on a first generation iPod and I was having a threesome. And not a teenagey one with the giggling and the awkward but a very adult one where everyone tried their best and both clothes and people ended up in a big pile and I was so high I accidentally wore the other girl's skirt home with no underwear. Anyway the Libertines were, appropriately enough, the soundtrack to all that. I got my own copy of that record the very next day and like so many other listeners, I've followed the band and its boys and their bands ever since. Better ears than mine have written on why technically the Libertines's music is fantastic; for me, the two albums the band released captured a very specific point in my early 20s when I was trying to figure things out, a raw and vulnerable and raucous and driven mix of what-the-fuck, and feeling all this voiced spot on in their music was really perfect. They were in the struggle too.
Now it's 3am and memory lane isn't letting me go, so I've spent hours online: youtube, watching audience posted clips from Glastonbury on June 28; NME, reading the latest hypes on the reunion; netflix, re-watching There Are No Innocent Bystanders for probably the fourth time; back to youtube, watching all of the Reading 2010 set; wikipedia, going over old interview references. Somehow, in the grand tradition of wandering around on the internet, hopping from weird stepping stone to even weirder stepping stone, I wind up on an abandoned Libertines message board from 2003. An anonymous poster, identified and quoted in later articles as Peter Doherty, is talking about a night with Carl Barat:
"1997 I remember sitting on top of a tower block in bow and carl had that look in his eye he seized me screaming we should throw ourselves off together I had to knock him out and drag him down,
`there`s nothing in this world for us` he`D say, `let`s shoot each other`.
`lets shoot this shit up at the same time an drown in all eternity
no carl, it`ll be grand, lets keep going
i love you I love you so much
lets keep going
`yeah lets keep going forever peter, til the very end`
yeah til the end"
Undeniably the relationship between the band's founders Peter and Carl is a deep and magical thing, colored with romanticism and dashed with their individual brilliances. It seems to be impossible to find an interview with either one of them where the other isn't discussed. They way they speak about each other is so gentle, so full of love, that it's difficult to reconcile it with the wildness, the recklessness and the destruction they went through together, inflated as it all was by the media. If I had to call them together anything, it'd be a meeting of souls, like particles that circled each other billions of years ago and circle one another still. Together they have a real gravity, a pull. People pick up on this and they want in. Interviewers, reviewers, friends, fans, me writing this shit at 4am. The internet is littered with speculation on the exact nature of their relationship; erotic fan fictions and photo montages devoted to their togetherness abound. Personally I give precisely zero fucks about this, because songs like that got written and played. I forget who said it but, "The artist's feeling is his law." Together these two people shared a powerful feeling, and that feeling built a dream.
England has a storied tradition of gorgeous oft-wasted musicians in tight trousers writing and playing the ever living fuck out of rock music, arguably the best rock music. Personally I don't want our rock musicians to be be pillars of sobriety, happiness or mental stability. What good music ever came out of that? Please understand I'm not wishing ill on anyone here or saying that wasted, sad and emotional is the only way to be an artist. What I am saying is that in my experience, the artist's struggle to be true to oneself and to create something original isn't pretty, it can be terrifying actually, and the ups and downs for a creative soul abound. Tumble and scrap and sacrifice and struggle you will certainly will, but your art will pull you up again. The Libertines threw open their arms and let us in to this. Beauty can be fucking dirty, and unkind, and precious, and fierce, and rare - and we should celebrate that, we should always hear that. We should turn it the fuck up.
Thank you for you, Libertines, and all the love
xo,m