We all want this album to be the best that it can be...
Discovers how Pete Doherty and Carl Barât from The Libertines got together again to make their first album in almost a decade
AN album release from The Libertines is a rare event.
They have brought out just three of them in 22 years, but their fourth, All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade, will be out shortly and bandmates Pete Doherty and Carl Barât say the new music is worth waiting for.
It is the band’s first LP in nine years and the guys gathered together from their homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to work on the tracks.
It also saw Pete Doherty and Carl Barât going to Jamaica and the album’s title is a nod to their hotel’s street address and their enduring love of Erich Maria Remarque’s landmark anti-war novel All Quiet On The Western Front.
Carl and Pete tell us more...
Did going to Jamaica add to your creativity when it came to new album All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade?
Pete: I feel we’re both pretty creative anyway. We could just sit around and be creative all day, every day, really quickly, making soundscapes, you know, even comedy scripts.
Still, when it comes to actually writing and crafting songs that are going to creep into people’s ears, brains, hearts, and souls, and get right down to the toenails, then yeah, we did have to focus on that.
It’s this endless quest to see if we could write the perfect pop song. We’ve never been stationary.
Carl: We needed to go and be together again without any distractions.
Pete: We went to the Fountain of Youth.
Carl: (Laughs) We did. It didn’t work, did it? I came back looking older!
Was there pressure from the label to get this album out on time?
Pete: There was no pressure from the label, but there was a little bit of pressure from ourselves.
Carl: I think we all want this album to be the best it can be. I want it to be great.
And you’ll do everything you can to give it the birth into this world it deserves.
How proud are you of new album?
It’s this endless quest to see if we could write the perfect pop song
Pete Doherty
Carl: I think I was too insecure to be proud of the first record Up The Bracket in 2002 – but I feel prouder of this record than I have done with anything we’ve done yet. Pete: First of all, I think these new songs have got a hell of a lot of competition.
They’ve got to stand shoulderto-shoulder with [Libertines tracks] Death On The Stairs and Time For Heroes and all these songs, even though they are decades old, they still give the old frissons. We wrote them all in a studio, recorded them live and then went away for months.
Now we’ve come back playing them, and the fact that they are each standing their ground and we’re able to do them justice would suggest that, yeah, I am really proud of it.
I think this is the first time we actually sat and listened to the recording together in a car.
We did it the other day, and I was thinking how long it would take for one of us to go ‘Oh, I didn’t like that bit. I don’t like this bit’, but it didn’t happen, which is unusual.
How would you sum up the album?
Carl: I think we were writing for the album long before we were officially writing for the album.
As we gravitated together more in our day-to-day lives, the album became a possibility and a reality.
At that point everything we were writing started to be geared subconsciously towards the record. We went to Jamaica and did a bit of writing, and we got some beauties out there.
I mean, if you were to tot up the value for writing for those particular lines in the songs, you might have struggled to get them through management, but as it happened, it was necessary, spiritually, for us to go out there.
Pete: It’s very important. The new album wouldn’t have happened if we’d done anything less. I think these songs are better than anything anyone else is writing at the moment. The Mars To Liverpool song by Liam [Gallagher] & John Squire sounds all right.
Carl: You can’t say it’s better than what anyone is writing unless you know what everyone’s writing.
Pete: So, I’m not allowed to say what I believe? It’s what I believe.
Carl: I love that you believe that, but that becomes a headline really quickly, and then it just becomes very crass, and people get p **** ed off.
Pete: (Laughs) There could be an argument in the papers where they’d say ‘Pete’s got a big head; he thinks the songs are the best in the world. And Carl pleads modesty or something. The jury’s out!’”
Carl: You can say that if you like.
■ New Libertines album All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade is out on April 5.
Their tour starts September 23. Visit thelibertines.com for details