A disappointing gig
Some bands just don’t know when to give up.
Back in June, I fulfilled a ten-year-long dream by seeing The Strokes play at All Points East Festival in London. My pal Leader flew all the way over from Australia just to go; we’re both huge fans, and the band’s music is part of the reason we started talking again more regularly after we finished university. We spent the night before catching up with some other friends from university, had a few drinks, and got up bright and early to catch a day’s worth of music before we both turned into teenage girls from the sixties at a Beatles concert for a couple of hours when The Strokes finally walked out on stage.
I love The Strokes for more than just their music. Although they didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel with their first album Is This It, it certainly created a bit of a revolution in rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. Without it, without them, we wouldn’t have any Foals, any Kings of Leon, any Arctic Monkeys; indeed, Alex Turner croons ‘I just wanted to be one of The Strokes’ as the first line on the latest Arctic Monkeys album. What the music of the band did — bringing rock and roll back into the charts— was just as important as how the record actually sounded; and actually, the album didn’t sound anywhere near as rock and roll as some of the other music that was coming out around the same time.
The gig took place nearly twenty years after the release of that first album. Julian Casablancas, the frontman, was nearing forty-one when we saw him. At the age of forty, you can’t get up to the same rock and roll antics you did when you were twenty-one — and indeed, the band didn’t try. Rather than coming out to their first gig in the UK for three years and trying to recreate what they did when they were fresh-faced rockstars taking Rolling Stone by storm, they just put on a ruddy good show. They played almost every song off of the first two albums, two off of the third, and nothing from numbers four and five (exactly what everyone wanted to hear); there were no on-stage antics; nobody was pissed, or if they were, they kept it together exceedingly well; and, aside from Casablancas forgetting the lyrics on more than one occasion (for the encore of ‘Is This It’, he left the stage for a verse and a half, letting the crowd fill in the gaps; when he returned, he apologised, saying ‘You guys sing it better than I do anyway’), the band were outstanding. Every song sounded almost album quality. They were obviously well rehearsed. It was an extremely worthy comeback gig, a few sound problems (i.e. it was a bit quiet) notwithstanding.
If it weren’t for The Strokes, The Libertines also wouldn’t exist. Banny Pootschi, the early manager for The Libertines, heard of the success of The Strokes and decided that was the direction the British four-piece needed to go. Before she changed their sound, replaced their drummer, and got the media to focus on the relationship between Carl Barât and Peter Doherty, they were making sentimental acoustic music in a whiskey bar in Islington. And The Libertines subsequently became the British Strokes: in America, the success of The Strokes led to the cropping up of a hundred copycat bands, while The Libertines’ fame in the early 2000s caused the same in the UK. Remember The Feeling? Or The Gossip? Or The Pigeon Detectives? Nah, me neither.
On Tuesday night, I fulfilled an even-longer-held dream of seeing Pete ’n’ Carl live in the flesh, with John and Gary bringing up the rear to boot. The Libertines hold a special place in my heart: many an evening was spent drinking cheap beer down the garage at the end of my mum’s garden, mumbling our way through their back catalogue, thinking we were the coolest cats in town. We weren’t, obviously. Just look at this trilby:
I was pretty excited to see them. After all, their music defined a lot of my teenage years, though even then I was about ten years too late to fall in love with them. So you’ll be as disappointed as I was to hear the concert they played was a fucking shambles. (And not a Babyshambles. Ha, ha.) Actually, you definitely won’t be as disappointed as I was.
For a start, Doherty was completely plastered. He was incomprehensible when he spoke to the audience; the one part I caught was him saying something about it being near the end of the tour, apparently the reason he could barely put two chords together. Then there’s that, too: he could barely play the guitar. For Doherty to be worse at guitar than he was when he was sober is really saying something. And for the most part, it didn’t look like anyone on stage wanted to be there, and they especially didn’t want to be there with each other. At times, minutes were spent in between songs, standing around at the drums, ostensibly figuring out what they were going to play next, but in fact just arguing with one another. The band would start a song, and stop a few chords in, only to repeat the process with another. At one point, Doherty was singing by himself on stage — God knows where Barât had gone — and he and the drummer had a tussle over a jacket he was holding. Doherty didn’t want to let go. A whole verse of singing was lost due to this childish argumentation. It was fucking embarrassing.
And it wasn’t rock and roll, either. I paid fifty euros for that concert — to see a band who meant a hell of a lot to me when I was younger, the music of which still conjures up extremely happy memories with some of my best friends. This was, potentially, the only time I’m going to get to see them; if all goes well, Barât and Doherty will retire into the hotel cum bar cum restaurant cum recording studio they’ve bought in Margate, and that’ll be that. And not too soon, either. Seeing a bunch of pissed up musicians argue with each other on stage and stumble chaotically through a half-arsed setlist might have been acceptable and even exciting in 2003 for a fiver at a bar in Camden. But at one of the biggest venues in Berlin, for an semi-reunion tour (or is it still a tour for their last album, released in 2015?), it’s not cool, it’s not edgy, and it certainly wasn’t impressive.
During their encore — although that it was an encore was news to me; there was none of the showiness one expects from an encore. They just stumbled off, and returned even more fucked up than before — they managed to get a couple of tunes right. ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ sounded semi-decent. Earlier in the show they’d managed to cobble together an acceptable ‘What Became of the Likely Lads’, one of my favourite tracks. So, silver linings. But the rest was simply a mess. The newer songs, even, which one would expect them to have perhaps rehearsed once or twice, sometimes didn’t even come across as fully-fledged songs. I’m not very familiar with the latest album, and that concert certainly didn’t make me want to add it to my Spotify favourites. And the band, apparently, managed to destroy quite a lot of equipment. Roadies were constantly running on and off the stage to replace microphones, pick up stands, sort out cables that risked strangling portions of the audience and/or band. It didn’t make for impressive viewing, although the frantic looks on the faces of the crew at least brought some humour to the evening.
People went to that concert last Tuesday evening to see one of the biggest British rock bands of the last twenty years — maybe longer — play all the old songs they know and love, to reminisce, to remember what it was like when they were released, to be back in their youth again, to have that feeling of excitement they had the first time they heard them. Instead, we were presented with an underwhelming performance, the highlights of which were petty arguments between washed-up rockstars who should have hung up those red military jackets after their 2014 reunion tour. Had I been as drunk as Doherty, I might have enjoyed it; frankly, though, that’s not why I go to concerts. It was certainly an interesting comparison to The Strokes: how two of the most important and influential rock bands of the last two decades handle themselves a little way down the line — a kind of make-or-break moment. In the Libertines’ case, they broke — at least for me.
I went to an indie night in Lido the other week, and the DJ spun a Libertines track that sounded infinitely better than it did on the night when it was being played by the band themselves. Next time I want to remember what it was like to be fifteen again, I’ll head back there instead.
