Has any band ever been a bigger gift to music journalists than The Libertines? Here they are, four f*cked and erudite urchins from somewhere dodgy in London. And two singer/songwriters with a brilliant concept of how a rock'n'roll band should behave to draw attention to themselves.
Their plan is simple: talk explicitly about sex and drugs; get pissed and fight each other frequently; lie, incessantly, for the benefit of good quotes; concoct an eccentric manifesto (Chas'n'Dave are great!) and some vague ideas about 'Albion'; and, crucially, look a bit like The Strokes.
Well, how can they fail? The Libertines throw light on a rather unseemly fact about music journalism that, frequently, we'd rather not acknowledge. Namely, rock'n'roll attitude is tremendously easy and satisfying to write about. Describing rock'n'roll music - what it actually 'sounds' like - is a much tougher job. How we pray for boys like this, whose every quote is a headline. And how we pray, even harder, that their music is at least OK, so that we don't have to feel so bad about being so excited.
Bad news time. 'Up The Bracket' is, largely, a load of old cobblers. It brings back discomforting memories of that dim time between shoegazing and Britpop, when we were briefly diverted by bands like S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men: quasi-mod-ish, quasi-punkish, NME-literate manipulators with nary a decent tune between them. For a start, it seems deliberately incompetent. Mick Jones is named as producer, though from the recorded evidence one suspects his main duty was to tell the boys about mad times in The Clash. The Strokes and The Jam are liberally copied, a problem given those two bands depend on disciplined playing and The Libertines, not to put too fine a point on it, are a shambles.
Which is probably the idea. 'Up The Bracket' whiffs of the Bohemian art stunt, the sort of record that would defeat the band's deviant purposes were it actually any good. The whole package is so deliberately cack-handed and tossed-off, in fact, that it seems designed not to distract from the quality of their interviews. That's The Libertines: they're only in it for the quotes, and if anyone else likes the record, it's a bonus.
