From Jamaica to Margate - The Libertines return.

L-R: Pete Doherty, Carl Barât, John Hassall, Gary Powell. Image: Ed Cooke.

The Libertines, fronted by Carl Barât and Pete Doherty with John Hassall on bass and Gary Powell on drums, were in the vanguard of the early 2000s indie rock revival before splitting in 2004. Back together since 2014, they are set to release their fourth studio album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, following a sell-out UK tour and will headline Brighton’s On the Beach festival this summer.

The album was recorded in the studio at the band’s Albion Rooms guesthouse in Margate, which Doherty calls HQ – “Finally some bricks and mortar for the Arcadian dream. It’s a nice little set-up. We’ve got the little venue downstairs where we have the open mics and the comedy night.” The producer was Dimitri Tikovoï, whom Barât had known on and off for years. “I worked with Dimitri on the band Black Honey, on a few of their singles from their second album. He’s a bit of a mysterious figure. But he works really hard. And what’s interesting – because he can be quite avant-garde – he writes uber-commercial pop. That’s what we wanted, someone with that breadth.”

Tikovoï endeared himself to Doherty by being good with his dogs. “He’d go off on his long melancholy walks with the dogs down the seafront when I was cream-crackered, and that’s when I thought, hello, there’s something more.” But he still had some reservations about Tikovoï’s ideas. The album’s closing track, “Songs They Never Play on the Radio”, was one that Doherty had been pushing for ages, and he wasn’t happy when a change of rhythm was suggested. “It ended up getting turned completely upside down, and I was mortally wounded. In the end, it was for the best, it's turned into a better song actually, but I wouldn't have imagined it that morning when I first played my idea of it, and he was like, ‘Try it like this’.”

“We had to de-reggae it. In Jamaica, we got a little bit absorbed! Many a moment, we thought we’d recorded an epic masterpiece, we were absolutely wasted. The next day we played it back and it sounded like someone had pressed record in a pub.”

— Barât

Barât points out that, rather than imposing his vision on the album, Tikovoï saw how to bring out the best of The Libertines’ own sound. “He really listens, he really amplified the strengths. He saw the things that we love and made them stronger and bolder.” Doherty agrees. “In hindsight, listening to the record and seeing what he did with us, I think it was an amazing bit of fortune that we used him. Before meeting him, I was very wary. I had fixed ideas of what was going to happen – I didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen, but I just knew it had to happen to make a great album. Probably left to my own devices it would never have happened. What am I trying to say?” “That you used to be a bit of a suspicious git, and then you found love and opened your heart?” Barât suggests.

Multi-instrumentalist Tikovoï can also be heard performing on some tracks, such as “Merry Old England”. “I think that’s where Dimitri stepped in as our sort of Billy Preston with the piano,” Barât says, referring to the legendary sixties session keyboard player. “There was a Doors kind of element I’ve always been trying to force into a song, where the guitar and keyboard line go disappearing up and spiralling into one another.” Doherty recalls working on the song on the tour bus one night. “We wanted to write the biggest chorus possible, so we thought what song is one of the biggest singalongs in modern pop history?” Googling the most viewed songs by British artists, they came across Simply Red’s “Stars”. “I was mortified, I hated it, but listening to it at 5am on the tour bus, we thought, ‘Yeah there’s something to be had from there,’ so we mined it. John is very good at these things, he worked out the chords, and we took it from there really.”

“Merry Old England” deals with the experience of immigrants hoping to make a home in England and the reality of what awaits them, Doherty explains, while “Be Young” takes on another topical concern, urging listeners to “Be young … fall in love” even as they face the possibility of the environment’s “total and utter annihilation”. “This is the dichotomy, isn’t it, of being human in this in this world, and trying to create joy and magic,” says Doherty, “when you look at the cold hard facts of the missiles and the misery, and you still want to go out and have a good old knees-up.” Musically, it bears traces of its composition in Jamaica, where Doherty and Barât first started work on the album. “The whole song was in reggae when we wrote it,” Barât remembers. “We had to de-reggae it. In Jamaica, we got a little bit absorbed! Many a moment, we thought we’d recorded an epic masterpiece, we were absolutely wasted. The next day we played it back and it sounded like someone had pressed record in a pub.” Doherty says that they didn’t even listen to many of the demos at the time. “We just did them, thought they were great, and then two months later we’re sat back in Margate, and we play them to Dimitri … That’s when work really started, I think.”

Once initial recording was completed, they diverged in their approach to the next steps. Barât was reluctant to stop recording and after the rest of the band had packed up, he returned to do “a bunch of overdubs that the boys didn't know about”, whereas Doherty was happy to leave well alone. “Me, I send them out like messages in bottles, chuck them in the canal and hope for the best.” He believes that the music will speak for itself regardless of any enhancements made during mixing, describing the bridge on “Mustang” as “so gorgeous, so beautiful that I just trust that and know that whatever tinkering anyone does with it, the beauty will shine out.”

The Libertines will be back on the road in the UK this autumn. Touring is a calmer business these days, and the band reflect on how they’ve changed over the past 25 years. “Everything in the early days seemed of such enormous importance to me. I think we took everything very, very seriously,” Barât recalls, while Doherty wishes he’d been slightly more reticent back then. “I’ve seen clips of myself in an interview, and I’m just fucking spieling, opening my heart and talking. If I could do it all again – which obviously you can’t and I wouldn’t really want to – then I’d just keep shtum, I think.” In retrospect, it feels like they were a ticking timebomb, says Barât. Having done their time busking and playing to empty pubs, when success came it was hard to comprehend. “It was such a wondrous thing, and it was everything we ever wanted. We even thought if we didn’t get there in time on the day we got signed up, they were going to change their mind. We fucking sprinted, we got off at the wrong train station, we sprinted to the office. Maybe a bit less urgency and a bit more thought … but then we wouldn’t have had the records we had, we’d be a different band. So it’s hard to say.” And with that, they launch into a rendition of “Non, je ne regrette rien”.

All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade is out 5th April.

Author: Rachel Goodyear