VINYL
Tickets £3
Doors open 12pm, session starts at 12.30pm
This show is for a seated audience
The bar will be open throughout

If you want a neat summary of what The Libertines were about and the essence of their appeal, it can be found in two short videos. The first, filmed by an MTV camera crew, is of an 18-year-old Pete Doherty waiting in line outside HMV’s flagship Oxford Street branch in 1997, on the day that Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now is released.

“Can you sum up Oasis for me in one sentence?” asks the presenter. Doherty replies, “I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel Gallagher’s a poet and Liam’s a town crier, and that, to me, seems like the perfect combination.” The delighted presenter then asks his interviewee to sum up Oasis in one word. That word? “Trousers.”

The second video, shot six years later, consists of shaky camcorder footage filmed inside the flat that Doherty and his then flatmate and songwriting partner Carl Barât lived in at the time. Through the grainy murk we can make out The Libertines performing live in their living room to what looks like a small crowd of at least 20 people.

We then hear a raised voice, and the camera swings round to focus on the face of a furious middle-aged woman, exclaiming “I’m one of your neighbours, and I’m sick of your bloody noise, just like all the other neighbours round here,” to chuckles from the assembled audience. Later, it emerges the police have been called. We glimpse two officers at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and without missing a beat, the soon-to-be-forcibly-silenced band launch in to a scrappy cover of ‘The Guns of Brixton’.

The Libertines were a classic case of ‘right band, right place, right time.’ Formed during the same year that saw Doherty trying to educate MTV’s viewers about Italy’s foremost novelist and cultural critic, London students Doherty (English literature) and Barât (drama) bonded over their shared interest in songwriting, before spending the next several years gigging around London in any venue that would have them. And when they couldn’t find a place to play, they’d simply make improvised venues of their own – their flat, other people’s flats, squats, empty warehouses – via a series of guerrilla gigs.

The band might not have been reinventing the wheel musically – Doherty and Barât’s approach to songwriting slotted neatly into a long lineage of characterful, melodic, rousing and sometimes rowdy British acts from The Kinks, through Magazine, XTC, The Clash, The Jam and The Smiths, shot through with a dash of The Velvet Underground’s abrasive aggression and some knockabout whimsy worthy of Chas ‘n’ Dave – but they were certainly pioneering in their use of the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter internet.

Via chaotic message boards, rickety websites and this hot new thing called MySpace they would publicise their upcoming gigs while giving barely hours of notice. The immediacy of this semi-underground, grassroots-driven approach to growing an audience carried distinct echoes of the late 80s/early 90s rave scene.

It wasn’t until the dramatic arrival on Britain’s shores of US garage rock revivalists and fantastic haircut havers The Strokes, and the 2001 release of said band’s debut album Is This It, that the whip-smart Ray-Davies-by-way-of-Morrissey lyricism and rambunctious, quasi-punk instrumentation of Doherty and Barât’s material began to attract serious attention.

Upon recruiting drummer Gary Powell and bassist John Hassall, and eventually signing to Rough Trade, the band set about recording the set of songs that would become Up the Bracket under the supervision – albeit of a distinctly, hands-off kind – of former Clash vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones.

The end result makes for a bracing listen. Barât and Doherty’s lyrics are steeped in romantic imagery and themes, regaling the listener with tales of petty crime, sleazy London night life and assorted sordid affairs – all barked out in varying flavours of an insouciant, slurred drawl against a backdrop of barely contained chaos.

Up the Bracket is an album laden with pop hooks, pretty vocal harmonies and memorable turns of phrase, but delivered in an almost wilfully ramshackle way. The guitars are played adeptly, but sound ragged and unkempt. The band are undeniably tight – The Libertines were a gig-hardened bunch by the time of the album’s recording – while somehow sounding as if they’re constantly on the verge of falling apart completely, with only Powell’s unflappable drumming managing to hold everything together.

At the time of its release in 2002, Up the Bracket was gleefully out of step with what was going on in the wider sphere of British ‘alternative’ rock – that being any colour you liked, so long as it was beige, courtesy of Coldplay, Travis, Stereophonics and sundry others, while Radiohead floated off somewhere overhead, amid clouds of avant-garde jazz and abstract electronics. If you were in your teens and in the market for a properly good time in the company of the most worldly and charming cool older brothers you could wish for, Up the Bracket was there and waiting.

The mid 90s had shown that being an experimentally-inclined and/or confrontational band needn’t pose any obstacles to chart placings and financial success. The early 2000s showed that there were limits to how far record companies were prepared to bankroll artistic indulgences, and that if ‘weird’ guitar music had declined in popularity, then all that marketing and promotional support would only flow to those bands prepared to put the hours in, sell those CDs and behave.

But no matter. You could always start a band, create your own mythology centred on hazy notions of a utopian Albion where all thoughts, deeds and compulsions are not just tolerated but encouraged, and hold court before spellbound NME journalists delighted at being in the presence of musicians capable of genuine wit, warmth and headline quote after headline quote.

The supermodels, rehab, burglary, prison stints, inter-band acrimony, spiralling addiction and (much later) reconciliation would all come later. For now, at least, we had the Boys in the Band. And that’s all that mattered. The session will be curated by Roman Atkin.

The album playback will be followed by a Q&A session.

After a short break, we’ll follow the album with our usual ‘Dead Wax’ session. Bring along a vinyl disc of your choice and hear a track from it played through the Arts Centre PA. This can be anything you like, for any reason – the more ‘out there’ the better.

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