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The Gentrification of Albion

Why the dream of the Libertines is going to die in Hyde Park.

Photo by nenuache

Last week, The Libertines took to the internet to announce the when and whereabouts of a forthcoming gig. A map of Hyde Park. A hand with five fingers. A picture of Julius Caesar – namesake for the month of July. It was in the spirit of the old days, except instead of a hastily drafted post on thelibertines.org instructing the hundred or so people online at the time to head to some scummy corner of Bethnal Green, it was directing 452,000 Facebook fans to where they could purchase tickets for £55 a pop.

Annoncering

It's been 12 years since The Libertines first dreamt of sailing the good ship Albion to their fabled haven of Arcadia – a land where whiskey and cigarettes grow on trees and everyone doffs their trilbies to Hancock and Coleridge in equal dandyish abandon – a lot has changed. The grot'n'roll movement they spearheaded is now derided by everyone, including its key players. The online music community they made out of HTML and sticky-tape has been replicated and writ large by multinationals. Scenes birthed from local crowds or likeminded souls are now foisted on to the internet to be judged by baying Soundcloud commenters.

With a second reunion firmly in place and new material feted to be on the horizon, the means of announcement was a small reminder of a somewhat obvious fact that The Libertines can not exist today in the same giddy, romantic bubble that they did back in 2002.

It leaves the band sandwiched between nostalgia and reality, deified by one of the most loyal and ravenous fanbases this century for all the wide-eyed ideals they stood for, yet trying to operate again in a time when those ideals are impossible to enact. Perhaps the reason that no other band has come along with the same impact as The Libertines – bringing their fans into the fold and blurring the lines of social convention – is because those lines have all but disappeared.

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Much is made of the bands that embraced the early Myspace “revolution” – Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen et al, but The Libertines were one of the first and certainly the most successful band to embrace the fledgling social powers of the internet long before then. They came along at a time when communicating in a very direct and very personal way with your fans online was both new and possible.

Annoncering

I spoke to regular .org-er Richard Day, a self-confessed “super fan” who trailed the band throughout his teens and has probably got enough Doherty anecdotes to keep him in tabloid kiss and tell expose money for the next decade or so. “Pete has been charging people £10 a pop to come to his tenement flat in Whitechapel and watch him play songs since 2003,” protests Day, against charges that his heroes have fallen from grace. “You could say those gigs were purely about the money. And probably purely money that was used to buy himself and his friends crack and smack. But nothing was tarnished”.

He recounted a time when Pete and Carl announced a last minute gig at their flat on Teesdale Street in Bethnal Green on the site: “They announced the gig the day before on thelibertines.org forum. Hardly anyone believed it was real. When we got there there were two other people waiting around the corner unsure what was going on, the same as us, but it was definitely Pete and Carl's flat because they had graffitied something Libertinesy on the door. A head stuck out of one of the windows upstairs. It was Pete. He asked if we had a cup of sugar, joking. Then said there was a gig happening in an hour or so and disappeared back inside. There must have been about 50 of us in all allowed into their flat. We stood wherever we could fit, on their beds, on furniture.”

That gig was on March 21, 2003 – six months after the release of Up The Bracket, at a point when the band were established NME cover stars and fast-evolving indie icons. A similar event today would be hastily reported on by every music news website and Twitter account within minutes. It couldn’t happen. The closest that anyone in recent times has got to anything similar was perhaps south Londoners Palma Violets with their creative den-cum-makeshift-venue 180, which they stopped hosting gigs in as soon as they gained even a smidgen of press because it became too dangerous to maintain.

Annoncering

It’s not just the relationship between band and fan that’s changed since then. The Libertines themselves are almost unrecognisable. Wayward characters and bad drugs were, of course, present throughout The Libertines’ early life, but did anyone think that the Albion would steer quite so far off course as it has in the years since? When the olde worlde analogies, Bilo and Biggles nicknames and all the idiosyncratic paraphernalia that came with it first arrived, it was stemmed in a Dickensian back alley tradition that was far from law-abiding, but still retained a element of fantastical youthful innocence. An innocence that has, over time, become little more than sugar-coating for the bitter pill of addiction and underachievement. As one article put it, Doherty has made the quick transition "from Artful Dodger to Fagin”.

Even on a creative level, the Arcadian dream seems to have dissipated into a bizarre hotch potch of ill-advised forays and depressing anecdotes. Pete’s cringing turn in film debut Confessions of a Child of the Century; Carl’s red leather-clad opera debut opposite "Tainted Love" star Marc Almond; Carl auditioning for a band via email applications; Pete nearly cancelling a tour the day before it started because “being in a band is all about pulling birds and he’s got a girlfriend now”; the time Pete turned up to a party with a top hat full of kittens; the time Pete told a journalist he’d woken up in the middle of a Parisian street covered in honey and peas; the time Pete locked a Noisey writer in his weird shop. Aside from early work with Babyshambles and Dirty Pretty Things – both of which came relatively soon after The Libs’ split – the choices the pair have made since almost seemed like ideas designed purely to test people’s loyalty.

Annoncering

A Libertines reunion with all these problems already occurred back in 2010, but that felt like a righteous, delayed send off for a band that crumbled before they could finish their original one. A second reunion, however, poses far more problems for a band not of this time.

Through two superlative albums and umpteen demos, more personality than any band since and perhaps a little bit of right place/ right time, The Libertines built up the kind of fervent goodwill that’s basically inextinguishable. For a large group of 20-somethings in 2014, this July’s reunion will mean more than any other band’s possibly could. But can The Libertines can continue to sail their ship past the sea of wistful thinking into fresh waters? That seems like another one of Pete's pipe dreams.

Follow Lisa on Twitter: @LisaAnneWright

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