The last decade should have belonged to Patrick Wolf and British Sea Power - and in a way it did - Part 1.
By Graham Chalmers
It is an era which seems to grow increasingly complex with every passing year and yet, looking back to the start of the Noughties, the overwhelming desire in musical culture was for simplicity. If, by the end of the decade a whole host of bands and solo acts were once again concerned with complexity, it's not to belittle their significance to say this unexpected mix of artiness and pop often struggled, and still does, to connect with the broader public. It says more for the times that such acts exist and have an audience at all.
The following article seeks to explain how the music changed and why and what it meant and means, how the manly growls of 2000 turned into the falsettos of 2009, the garage room guitars into perky synths. It will also show how much-hailed 'man of the decade' Jack White's direct legacy turned out to be a dead end, while his indirect one helped open up a new box of tricks, ushering in the most exciting era for musical creativity since post-punk and the early 1980s.
In doing so, it salutes in passing the under-sung heroes of the age, the musical forces that really mattered - Devendra Banhart and James Murphy, Guillemots, and Field Music, British Sea Power, and The Beta Band, Goldfrapp, and Patrick Wolf. We are living in a new golden age and, among those responsible, it's Patrick Wolf who shines brightest from the shadows, his butterfly talents flitting across a dizzying range of musical forms and meanings, the only new genius of the Noughties. But out story starts in 2000 with two trends moving in opposite directions - the real world and rock music.
"Technology and bureaucracy makes us all the same while at the same time it fragments and separates us"
It is an era which seems to grow increasingly complex with every passing year and yet, looking back to the start of the Noughties, the overwhelming desire in musical culture was for simplicity. If, by the end of the decade a whole host of bands and solo acts were once again concerned with complexity, it's not to belittle their significance to say this unexpected mix of artiness and pop often struggled, and still does, to connect with the broader public. It says more for the times that such acts exist and have an audience at all.
The following article seeks to explain how the music changed and why and what it meant and means, how the manly growls of 2000 turned into the falsettos of 2009, the garage room guitars into perky synths. It will also show how much-hailed 'man of the decade' Jack White's direct legacy turned out to be a dead end, while his indirect one helped open up a new box of tricks, ushering in the most exciting era for musical creativity since post-punk and the early 1980s.
In doing so, it salutes in passing the under-sung heroes of the age, the musical forces that really mattered - Devendra Banhart and James Murphy, Guillemots, and Field Music, British Sea Power, and The Beta Band, Goldfrapp, and Patrick Wolf. We are living in a new golden age and, among those responsible, it's Patrick Wolf who shines brightest from the shadows, his butterfly talents flitting across a dizzying range of musical forms and meanings, the only new genius of the Noughties. But out story starts in 2000 with two trends moving in opposite directions - the real world and rock music.
"Technology and bureaucracy makes us all the same while at the same time it fragments and separates us"
- Henri Lefebvre, Critique of
Everyday Life Volume 3 (1981)
It wasn't the first time in music history someone had looked backwards to move forwards. They huffed and they puffed but the storm of energy blowing across the Atlantic from unfashionable parts of the USA such as Texas in the final years of the 1990s barely dented the musical landscape - outside of the few people lucky enough to catch their live shows in the UK at the time.
At The Drive-In, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Queens of The Stone Age all had a vision of how to revive rock music after Grunge collapsed under its own weight and Britpop run out of fizz; one based on big guitar riffs, a massive shot of energy and the absence of fear of not appearing 'cool' or 'modern'. They loved rock and punk, not that common at the time.
It wasn't the first time in music history someone had looked backwards to move forwards. They huffed and they puffed but the storm of energy blowing across the Atlantic from unfashionable parts of the USA such as Texas in the final years of the 1990s barely dented the musical landscape - outside of the few people lucky enough to catch their live shows in the UK at the time.
At The Drive-In, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Queens of The Stone Age all had a vision of how to revive rock music after Grunge collapsed under its own weight and Britpop run out of fizz; one based on big guitar riffs, a massive shot of energy and the absence of fear of not appearing 'cool' or 'modern'. They loved rock and punk, not that common at the time.
Even more unusual was their
embracing of some of the less fashionable elements of the 1970s, a decade
then regarded by most critics as synonymous with then despised phenomena as
prog rock, stadium bands and limp singer- songwriters, (almost as unloved
then as the money-obsessed 1980s with its New Romantics and synth-saturated
pop).
Sporting afros and a variety of weird hairdos, At The Drive In et al set out on a path of their own beyond existing trends, as if attempting to hack their way through the jungle of genres and subgenres multiplying, dividing and subdividing with lightning speed in music culture. Their directness and energy and lack of concern for what critics thought 'cool' cried out for attention as globalisation and the growth of the internet started to bring everyone and everything together while simultaneously splitting the whole into a million pieces.
But no matter how hard they tried, how thrilling their live performances, no breakthrough resulted in the charts, the future was not to be unified on their terms. Ultimately, they were just too a bit too intense, their role destined to be one of scene-setters and trail-blazers, not stars.
Instead something related but lighter was to provide a new dawn as the 21st century began, something which sprang partly from the same roots. The two acts in question, The White Stripes and The Strokes, took the same starting points, punk and rock, but had no desire to be modern; indeed, their most radical aspect was their conservatism. What the White Stripes and The Strokes did was to make the old new and the unfashionable fashionable.
For White Stripes front man Jack White and The Strokes' Julian Casablancas, the future lay in the past, in more primitive times, in simple tunes and small studios, in 'analogue' or, at least, an analogue sound. Which is not to say they were unoriginal; "originality" being a question in itself, as nebulous a concept as "post modern" in art and culture. But don't take the word of Modern Music Review, take the inappropriate word of an old rock star.
"When you hear The Beatles you finally see what's possible. They took all these bits and pieces - Motown, country, Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins - and became the full puzzle" - Gene Simmons of painted rockers Kiss told Mojo magazine in its November 2009 issue, unintentionally defining The Beatles as the first "post modern" rock band.
To measure how unlikely the approach taken by mssrs White and Casablancas seemed in 2000, it's necessary only to remember the poo-pooing which greeted Primal Scream's attempts to be the new Rolling Stones or Faces on their follow-up to Screamadelica, 1993's Don't Give Up, Give Out or, closer in time, the new Iggy Pop and the Stooges on tracks like Medication on 1997's Vanishing Point. (Bobby Gillespie and co were always ahead of the game when it came to choosing musical influences, perhaps the band's only real talent).
For a band with commercial ambitions at the dawn of the new century, going back to the garage in search of rock's lo-fi roots wasn't the most obvious career move. Only a fool or a mystic was calling out for the following as fireworks graced the sky for the arrival of the numeral 20 at the start of the calendar:
Scruffy jeans, baseball shoes, tousled long hair and the DIY sounds of New York's 1970 punk clubs, CBGBs and Max's Kansas City. (The Strokes). Tight red and white slacks and matching T-shirts, Led Zeppelin, old blues acts and folk music. (The White Stripes)
The shock of the old. Listening now to The Strokes' eponymous debut album from 2001 is to hear a band who can scarcely be bothered to hit their guitar strings any louder than is strictly necessary. So stripped back are The White Stripes with Meg White's minimalist drumming, there isn't even a bass guitar (though they occasionally sneak in a similar-sounding effect with the help of Jack's Digitech pedals).
It had been a long time since any big-selling bands rock bands had put the drum beat and the rhythmic feel ahead of the lead guitar in importance. The key to the success of both bands, the reason why their fate wasn't to languish in the margins alongside At The Drive-In, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and Queens of The Stone Age, also belonged to the annals of pop history: Tunes. Personality. Looks.
The emphasis was less on noise and more on charm, though there was some of that. The bright, life-affirming sharpness and wit of The White Stripes. The slightly grubby; just fell out of bed louche-ness of The Strokes
No matter how loud the White Stripes' version of the blues sounded or scuzzy The Strokes' pop-punk, neither band let more than a second or two pass without a catchy hookline. While very different vocalists in style, both White and Casablancas appeared to give a damn. They both oozed emotion and romance, the former with his showman's extravaganza, a little grandiose and wild, the latter lazy and pinched, a little world-weary before his time.
It was all so self-confident and unthreatening and, crucially, both bands understood the power of the image. The Strokes were pictured together walking gang-like with a lazy swagger; boys on the make, a laidback version of the poster for the movie Reservoir Dogs or the young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets. The White Stripes pretended they were brother and sister, Jack and Meg White, exchanging affectionate, conspiratorial glances on stage. Behaving more like lovers on the run than siblings, the duo could he been Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot Le Fou (1965) or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde (1967) or, bringing it more up to date, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994).
In the context of the times, hearing The White Stripes and The Strokes first small UK hits in 2001, Hotel Yorba (number 26) and Hard To Explain (number 16) respectively, didn't feel old-fashioned, it felt like a breath of fresh air. At least it wasn't negative - it stood in opposition to the fatalism of mainstream indie-rock of the time, of Coldplay and Snow Patrol whose melodic reconfigurations of the unspecified angst of 1990s post-rock bands such as Mogwai was in the process of capturing the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Light up, light up, as if you have a choice" (from Run by Snow Patrol, 2003) caught the spirit of the age and its feeling of hope swamped in helplessness - in that sense it was more truly modern music whether critics liked it or not. But it wasn't exciting and it was no way forward. Instead, for at least 12 months at the start of the decade, it was agreed by one and all that the White Stripes and The Strokes, those most traditional of bands, were the future of rock n roll.
October, 2009, Later with Jools Holland, BBC TV Who's that? What's that? An icy slab of synth? A spangly flourish of electronic keyboards? The music still sounds doom-laden, even though the band ditched their doom-laden dress-sense sometime around their second album in an effort, presumably, to look more like "normal" guys. But where are the guitars? They've disappeared or been relegated to second place to the Casios and the Rolands and the Korgs. Here on BBC's Later, playing Papillion, the debut single from their new album, they've just become the latest in a long line of 'indie' and 'alternative' outfits, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Julian Casablancas, to join the electro revolution. Yes - The Editors have gone 80s!
As the White Stripes and The Strokes became headline news not just in the music press but national newspapers, it was easy to fall in love with their energy and style. If you checked their lyrics, which were combatative rather than moving, playful rather than clever, one thing became clear - the conservatism of their influences was matched by the conservatism of their content.
Sporting afros and a variety of weird hairdos, At The Drive In et al set out on a path of their own beyond existing trends, as if attempting to hack their way through the jungle of genres and subgenres multiplying, dividing and subdividing with lightning speed in music culture. Their directness and energy and lack of concern for what critics thought 'cool' cried out for attention as globalisation and the growth of the internet started to bring everyone and everything together while simultaneously splitting the whole into a million pieces.
But no matter how hard they tried, how thrilling their live performances, no breakthrough resulted in the charts, the future was not to be unified on their terms. Ultimately, they were just too a bit too intense, their role destined to be one of scene-setters and trail-blazers, not stars.
Instead something related but lighter was to provide a new dawn as the 21st century began, something which sprang partly from the same roots. The two acts in question, The White Stripes and The Strokes, took the same starting points, punk and rock, but had no desire to be modern; indeed, their most radical aspect was their conservatism. What the White Stripes and The Strokes did was to make the old new and the unfashionable fashionable.
For White Stripes front man Jack White and The Strokes' Julian Casablancas, the future lay in the past, in more primitive times, in simple tunes and small studios, in 'analogue' or, at least, an analogue sound. Which is not to say they were unoriginal; "originality" being a question in itself, as nebulous a concept as "post modern" in art and culture. But don't take the word of Modern Music Review, take the inappropriate word of an old rock star.
"When you hear The Beatles you finally see what's possible. They took all these bits and pieces - Motown, country, Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins - and became the full puzzle" - Gene Simmons of painted rockers Kiss told Mojo magazine in its November 2009 issue, unintentionally defining The Beatles as the first "post modern" rock band.
To measure how unlikely the approach taken by mssrs White and Casablancas seemed in 2000, it's necessary only to remember the poo-pooing which greeted Primal Scream's attempts to be the new Rolling Stones or Faces on their follow-up to Screamadelica, 1993's Don't Give Up, Give Out or, closer in time, the new Iggy Pop and the Stooges on tracks like Medication on 1997's Vanishing Point. (Bobby Gillespie and co were always ahead of the game when it came to choosing musical influences, perhaps the band's only real talent).
For a band with commercial ambitions at the dawn of the new century, going back to the garage in search of rock's lo-fi roots wasn't the most obvious career move. Only a fool or a mystic was calling out for the following as fireworks graced the sky for the arrival of the numeral 20 at the start of the calendar:
Scruffy jeans, baseball shoes, tousled long hair and the DIY sounds of New York's 1970 punk clubs, CBGBs and Max's Kansas City. (The Strokes). Tight red and white slacks and matching T-shirts, Led Zeppelin, old blues acts and folk music. (The White Stripes)
The shock of the old. Listening now to The Strokes' eponymous debut album from 2001 is to hear a band who can scarcely be bothered to hit their guitar strings any louder than is strictly necessary. So stripped back are The White Stripes with Meg White's minimalist drumming, there isn't even a bass guitar (though they occasionally sneak in a similar-sounding effect with the help of Jack's Digitech pedals).
It had been a long time since any big-selling bands rock bands had put the drum beat and the rhythmic feel ahead of the lead guitar in importance. The key to the success of both bands, the reason why their fate wasn't to languish in the margins alongside At The Drive-In, And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and Queens of The Stone Age, also belonged to the annals of pop history: Tunes. Personality. Looks.
The emphasis was less on noise and more on charm, though there was some of that. The bright, life-affirming sharpness and wit of The White Stripes. The slightly grubby; just fell out of bed louche-ness of The Strokes
No matter how loud the White Stripes' version of the blues sounded or scuzzy The Strokes' pop-punk, neither band let more than a second or two pass without a catchy hookline. While very different vocalists in style, both White and Casablancas appeared to give a damn. They both oozed emotion and romance, the former with his showman's extravaganza, a little grandiose and wild, the latter lazy and pinched, a little world-weary before his time.
It was all so self-confident and unthreatening and, crucially, both bands understood the power of the image. The Strokes were pictured together walking gang-like with a lazy swagger; boys on the make, a laidback version of the poster for the movie Reservoir Dogs or the young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets. The White Stripes pretended they were brother and sister, Jack and Meg White, exchanging affectionate, conspiratorial glances on stage. Behaving more like lovers on the run than siblings, the duo could he been Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot Le Fou (1965) or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde (1967) or, bringing it more up to date, Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994).
In the context of the times, hearing The White Stripes and The Strokes first small UK hits in 2001, Hotel Yorba (number 26) and Hard To Explain (number 16) respectively, didn't feel old-fashioned, it felt like a breath of fresh air. At least it wasn't negative - it stood in opposition to the fatalism of mainstream indie-rock of the time, of Coldplay and Snow Patrol whose melodic reconfigurations of the unspecified angst of 1990s post-rock bands such as Mogwai was in the process of capturing the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Light up, light up, as if you have a choice" (from Run by Snow Patrol, 2003) caught the spirit of the age and its feeling of hope swamped in helplessness - in that sense it was more truly modern music whether critics liked it or not. But it wasn't exciting and it was no way forward. Instead, for at least 12 months at the start of the decade, it was agreed by one and all that the White Stripes and The Strokes, those most traditional of bands, were the future of rock n roll.
October, 2009, Later with Jools Holland, BBC TV Who's that? What's that? An icy slab of synth? A spangly flourish of electronic keyboards? The music still sounds doom-laden, even though the band ditched their doom-laden dress-sense sometime around their second album in an effort, presumably, to look more like "normal" guys. But where are the guitars? They've disappeared or been relegated to second place to the Casios and the Rolands and the Korgs. Here on BBC's Later, playing Papillion, the debut single from their new album, they've just become the latest in a long line of 'indie' and 'alternative' outfits, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Julian Casablancas, to join the electro revolution. Yes - The Editors have gone 80s!
As the White Stripes and The Strokes became headline news not just in the music press but national newspapers, it was easy to fall in love with their energy and style. If you checked their lyrics, which were combatative rather than moving, playful rather than clever, one thing became clear - the conservatism of their influences was matched by the conservatism of their content.
"I want to steal your
innocence. To me, my life, it don't make sense... .I just want to misbehave.
I just want to be your slave." - from Barely Legal, The Strokes (2001)
"Fell in love with a girl... but sometimes these feelings can be so misleading. She turns and says "are you alright?" I said "I must be cause my heart's still beating." She says "come and kiss me by the riverside, Bobby says it's fine, he don't consider it cheating." - from Fell In Love With A Girl, The White Stripes (2001)
Like a million, less cool pop bands before them, both bands traded mainly in the world of boy meets girl. If for The Strokes it was a case of making sure they were more victor than victim in any battle of the sexes (a foretaste of the sexism of The Kings of Leon) for the nicer White Stripes it was usually the other way round.
Apart from a brief reference to the government in The End Has No End on from The Strokes' second album Room on Fire (2003), whose back sleeve shows the four of them standing in front of "Ground Zero" where the Twin Towers once stood, neither bands' songs showed any signs of having a sense of the bigger picture - or that there was a bigger picture out there. For both groups, words were a personal matter.
It made sense in a way. In the post-Cold War era of globalisation and the spread of the internet with its proliferation of networking sites, the world had come rushing in. As the barriers to communication dissolved in the face of technological revolution, soothsayer Marshall McLuhan once-trendy definition of the "global village" supplanted by a globe of villages, it suddenly became cheap and easy to have your interests, your talent broadcast to a wider public.
In the new age of the internet, it was true - your life really was as important as anyone else's.
In an environment predicted by Felt and Momus maverick Nick Currie thus "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people," (a bon mot of 1991) singing about the ins and outs of your love life made as much sense as anything else. Lacking idealism or ambition, this approach also had one additional thing on its side - honesty. The Strokes' dog eat dog approach to the war of the sexes may not have been particularly admirable, but in a world of complexity and compromise, a little cynicism came across as common sense. In the case of The White Stripes, the more positive of the two bands, it was a bit different, it seemed possible there might be more at work behind the flash and the crash.
"When ideas become too complicated. . .when it's hard to break the rules of excess, new rules need to be established. Even if the goal of achieving beauty from simplicity is less exciting, it may force the mind to acknowledge the simple components that make the complicated beautiful" - from the sleeve notes of De Stijl album, The White Stripes' second album 2000.
De Stijl, may have been recorded on an eight-track in Jack White's living room with cover versions of ancient songs by bluesmen of old, Son House and Blind Willie McTell, but the sleeve was dressed in modern All those sharp red, white and black lines straight from the Dutch art movement of the same name, highly stylised photographs of Jack and Meg interposed with designs, sculptures and sketches. It wasn't much remarked upon at the time, just as the picture of MGMT merrily burning dollars on the inner sleeve of 2008's Oracular Spectacular would late be similarly ignored, but the sleeve suggested a man, and a girl, with more on their minds than Top Ten hits - there was a hint of a mission.
Before the fame to come and friendships of the future with film stars, fashion models and rock legends, the pursuit of the personal appeared to amount to a heroic gesture for The White Stripes. While other bands reacted to the troubles of the age with a mixture of angst and irony though, significantly, rarely anger, White didn't seem ready to wallow in the cultural malaise affecting the western world after the end of the Cold War without some sort of fight. In the sleeve notes to the Elephant album in 2003, still The White Stripes' biggest seller to date, he took the time to address fans with a mix of religious fervour and obtuse philosophising, mourning "the sweetheart's loss in a disgusting world of opportunistic, lottery ticket holders, caring about nothing that is long term."
If White's devotion to the roots of rock represented a type of search for purity, the decision to record the Elephant album in Liam Watson's tiny London studios Toerag in 2002 was tantamount to an act of spiritual cleansing.
By returning to a world of simplicity and playful naiviety, White appeared to believe he could resurrect the idea of innocence as a transformative force in the world.
A transformation did take place in the fashion-conscious UK music scene as a result of his efforts. Before you could say 1970s Fender Twin Reverb amplifier or "New York city cops ain't too smart", a whole slew of guitar bands with the 'back to basics' ethic emerged. Of these, The Libertines weren't alone in missing White Stripes' idealism in favour of that garage band coolness.
At least they managed to add a London twist of their own to the mixture; a Clash-like 'last gang in town' mentality combining their own dandy-esque taste for aristocratic dilettantism with the imagined poetry of the gutter. The inner sleeve of their debut album in 2002, Up The Bracket, showed a photograph of the band in the studio pouring over a piece of paper with producer Mick Jones. The words "planning the blag summer 2002" are scrawled in handwriting
across it like a memento of an ambitious bank robbery. The Libertines boasted toe-tapping tunes and real character and, in the shape of Carl Barat and Pete Doherty, a genuinely intriguing partnership; the indie equivalent of Lennon and McCartney, the wounded visionary and a more grounded straight man. No, these were not stupid boys. Choosing to work under the stewardship of an expert in these matters, Jones was formerly of The Clash, there was no practical reason why their debut album of 2002,Up The Bracket, should sound ramshackle. But that was the deliberate charm of it. The constant feeling in songs such as Horror Show or Time For Heroes that the wheel was about to fall off the wagon was always balanced by strong melodies and intelligent lyrical turns, betraying The Libertines' twin front men's less than poverty-stricken upbringing.
The real problem with the 'garage rock revolution' hailed at time by the NME was its lack of mainstream success. Who was going to push open the door unlocked by The Strokes and the White Stripes? Not the Yeah Yeah Yeahs whose highly-regarded five-track EP on Witchita Recordings featuring Our Time may have made no 1 in the UK indie chart (and number 56 in Sweden) but failed to trouble the regular top 40. As for the sharp-suited The Hives, even their instant popular classic Hate To Say I Told You Say, originally released on small Swedish label Burning Heart in 2000 to nil reaction here, still only reached number 23 on its re-release two years later on ex-Creation boss Alan McGhee's Poptones label.
"Fell in love with a girl... but sometimes these feelings can be so misleading. She turns and says "are you alright?" I said "I must be cause my heart's still beating." She says "come and kiss me by the riverside, Bobby says it's fine, he don't consider it cheating." - from Fell In Love With A Girl, The White Stripes (2001)
Like a million, less cool pop bands before them, both bands traded mainly in the world of boy meets girl. If for The Strokes it was a case of making sure they were more victor than victim in any battle of the sexes (a foretaste of the sexism of The Kings of Leon) for the nicer White Stripes it was usually the other way round.
Apart from a brief reference to the government in The End Has No End on from The Strokes' second album Room on Fire (2003), whose back sleeve shows the four of them standing in front of "Ground Zero" where the Twin Towers once stood, neither bands' songs showed any signs of having a sense of the bigger picture - or that there was a bigger picture out there. For both groups, words were a personal matter.
It made sense in a way. In the post-Cold War era of globalisation and the spread of the internet with its proliferation of networking sites, the world had come rushing in. As the barriers to communication dissolved in the face of technological revolution, soothsayer Marshall McLuhan once-trendy definition of the "global village" supplanted by a globe of villages, it suddenly became cheap and easy to have your interests, your talent broadcast to a wider public.
In the new age of the internet, it was true - your life really was as important as anyone else's.
In an environment predicted by Felt and Momus maverick Nick Currie thus "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people," (a bon mot of 1991) singing about the ins and outs of your love life made as much sense as anything else. Lacking idealism or ambition, this approach also had one additional thing on its side - honesty. The Strokes' dog eat dog approach to the war of the sexes may not have been particularly admirable, but in a world of complexity and compromise, a little cynicism came across as common sense. In the case of The White Stripes, the more positive of the two bands, it was a bit different, it seemed possible there might be more at work behind the flash and the crash.
"When ideas become too complicated. . .when it's hard to break the rules of excess, new rules need to be established. Even if the goal of achieving beauty from simplicity is less exciting, it may force the mind to acknowledge the simple components that make the complicated beautiful" - from the sleeve notes of De Stijl album, The White Stripes' second album 2000.
De Stijl, may have been recorded on an eight-track in Jack White's living room with cover versions of ancient songs by bluesmen of old, Son House and Blind Willie McTell, but the sleeve was dressed in modern All those sharp red, white and black lines straight from the Dutch art movement of the same name, highly stylised photographs of Jack and Meg interposed with designs, sculptures and sketches. It wasn't much remarked upon at the time, just as the picture of MGMT merrily burning dollars on the inner sleeve of 2008's Oracular Spectacular would late be similarly ignored, but the sleeve suggested a man, and a girl, with more on their minds than Top Ten hits - there was a hint of a mission.
Before the fame to come and friendships of the future with film stars, fashion models and rock legends, the pursuit of the personal appeared to amount to a heroic gesture for The White Stripes. While other bands reacted to the troubles of the age with a mixture of angst and irony though, significantly, rarely anger, White didn't seem ready to wallow in the cultural malaise affecting the western world after the end of the Cold War without some sort of fight. In the sleeve notes to the Elephant album in 2003, still The White Stripes' biggest seller to date, he took the time to address fans with a mix of religious fervour and obtuse philosophising, mourning "the sweetheart's loss in a disgusting world of opportunistic, lottery ticket holders, caring about nothing that is long term."
If White's devotion to the roots of rock represented a type of search for purity, the decision to record the Elephant album in Liam Watson's tiny London studios Toerag in 2002 was tantamount to an act of spiritual cleansing.
By returning to a world of simplicity and playful naiviety, White appeared to believe he could resurrect the idea of innocence as a transformative force in the world.
A transformation did take place in the fashion-conscious UK music scene as a result of his efforts. Before you could say 1970s Fender Twin Reverb amplifier or "New York city cops ain't too smart", a whole slew of guitar bands with the 'back to basics' ethic emerged. Of these, The Libertines weren't alone in missing White Stripes' idealism in favour of that garage band coolness.
At least they managed to add a London twist of their own to the mixture; a Clash-like 'last gang in town' mentality combining their own dandy-esque taste for aristocratic dilettantism with the imagined poetry of the gutter. The inner sleeve of their debut album in 2002, Up The Bracket, showed a photograph of the band in the studio pouring over a piece of paper with producer Mick Jones. The words "planning the blag summer 2002" are scrawled in handwriting
across it like a memento of an ambitious bank robbery. The Libertines boasted toe-tapping tunes and real character and, in the shape of Carl Barat and Pete Doherty, a genuinely intriguing partnership; the indie equivalent of Lennon and McCartney, the wounded visionary and a more grounded straight man. No, these were not stupid boys. Choosing to work under the stewardship of an expert in these matters, Jones was formerly of The Clash, there was no practical reason why their debut album of 2002,Up The Bracket, should sound ramshackle. But that was the deliberate charm of it. The constant feeling in songs such as Horror Show or Time For Heroes that the wheel was about to fall off the wagon was always balanced by strong melodies and intelligent lyrical turns, betraying The Libertines' twin front men's less than poverty-stricken upbringing.
The real problem with the 'garage rock revolution' hailed at time by the NME was its lack of mainstream success. Who was going to push open the door unlocked by The Strokes and the White Stripes? Not the Yeah Yeah Yeahs whose highly-regarded five-track EP on Witchita Recordings featuring Our Time may have made no 1 in the UK indie chart (and number 56 in Sweden) but failed to trouble the regular top 40. As for the sharp-suited The Hives, even their instant popular classic Hate To Say I Told You Say, originally released on small Swedish label Burning Heart in 2000 to nil reaction here, still only reached number 23 on its re-release two years later on ex-Creation boss Alan McGhee's Poptones label.
The Libertines limped to number
37 in June 2002 with debut single What A Waster, Up The Bracket made 29 the
same year while Time for Heroes was adjudged a bit of a breakthrough by
reaching number 20 in 2003. Despite being hailed as the next big thing
by all and sundry, the Kings of Leons' early UK singles, Molly's Chambers
and Wasted Time could only make 23 and 51 respectively in August and October
of 2003. Razorlight's Rock n Roll Lies stalled at 56 in the same year,
followed swiftly by Rip It Up which did at least reach number 20.
Ironically, the biggest hit of the era was a bit of a novelty record -
United States of Whatever by Liam Lynch which hit in 2002. Even The Strokes'
struggled to capitalise on all the attention, each succeeding album
following Is This It, their 2001 debut, going on to sell less. Only The
White Stripes whose Seven Nation Army broke the top ten in 2003 became
genuine competitors in both the world of art and commerce.
Most of these and some of the other bands of the same ilk highlighted in Rough Trade Shops' influential Rock and Roll 1 competition in 2002, The Von Bondies, The Kills, The Dirtbombs et al, were genuinely great live - and if you caught Razorlight in the days when lead singer Johnny Borrell's hair was blonde not brown, you'll know they, too, were once something to get excited about. This was proper, straight to the point, lo-fi rock 'n' roll, packed with energy. The problem was energy was all most of these bands had. Good songs were few and far between. You could leap around to at a club or a gig but what could you do with it when you got home?
"The predominance of abstraction in art goes together with the unlimited power of money." - Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 1981
Rather than being dullards compared to the bright sparks of The Libertines', maybe the likes of Razorlight were more perceptive than we, or they themselves, realised. Without meaning to, perhaps they saw right through the scruffy, romantic mystique of their rivals and spotted there was nothing behind the pose and the riffs. Jack White may have fallen in love with the rarified obscurities of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Music, compiled in the 1950s but reissued in 1997, the same year he formed the White Stripes, he may also have noted that Beck was also a big fan, but he failed to draw the same lessons from it. Both were recyclers of history, part of a phenomenon described by Brian Eno in Mojo magazine in March 2009 as compilers of "cultural blocks". It didn't look original, the revered former member of Roxy Music and populariser of ambient music continued, but in recombining the blocks we think we recognise, you hear them differently, ending up with something "still completely original"
While multi-talented, idiosyncratic Beck was taking all those old, pure sounds in the 1990s and making them impure with a bewildering varied pot-pourri of every modern sound going, including several strains of dance and hip hop, the young Jack White simply plugged in his guitar and played the blues.
His real antecedent in the art of rehabilitating the past wasn't Beck, it wasn't a musician as such but another traditionalist in modern clothing, film-maker, Quentin Tarantino. It was his breakthrough movies of the early to mid-1990s with their streetwise mix of crime and romance which laid the groundwork for the popular revival of hitherto 'uncool' music in the following decade; the soundtracks of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction selling in unusually large numbers to a generation too young to remember much before U2 or Duran Duran never mind the 70s, 60s or 50s, even.
What he did years before another Mr White came to prominence, was unexpected but simple - take 'obscure' surf punk, primitive garage and trash rock, country and rock n roll ballads by the likes of Link Wray, Chuck Berry, Ricky Nelson, and place them in modern surroundings. Unloved since their time in the sun 30 years or more earlier, heard in dynamic, new contexts they came to life in a way their makers could never have intended.
The rawness of these records from a more innocent age acted not only as a contrast to the cynical nature of Tarantino's pulp stories where only the sharpest survive, injecting warmth into scenes which otherwise might have appeared merely hard-faced, but also got to the heart of what the likes of Reservoir Dogs were really about. This a dog eat dog world, Tarantino is saying, and life is just as basic and simple as these songs. The attitude belonged to original rock n roll but it was to lead by sheer accident to a completely different end as musical culture changed and evolved in the decade to come.
Graham Chalmers
Most of these and some of the other bands of the same ilk highlighted in Rough Trade Shops' influential Rock and Roll 1 competition in 2002, The Von Bondies, The Kills, The Dirtbombs et al, were genuinely great live - and if you caught Razorlight in the days when lead singer Johnny Borrell's hair was blonde not brown, you'll know they, too, were once something to get excited about. This was proper, straight to the point, lo-fi rock 'n' roll, packed with energy. The problem was energy was all most of these bands had. Good songs were few and far between. You could leap around to at a club or a gig but what could you do with it when you got home?
"The predominance of abstraction in art goes together with the unlimited power of money." - Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 1981
Rather than being dullards compared to the bright sparks of The Libertines', maybe the likes of Razorlight were more perceptive than we, or they themselves, realised. Without meaning to, perhaps they saw right through the scruffy, romantic mystique of their rivals and spotted there was nothing behind the pose and the riffs. Jack White may have fallen in love with the rarified obscurities of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Music, compiled in the 1950s but reissued in 1997, the same year he formed the White Stripes, he may also have noted that Beck was also a big fan, but he failed to draw the same lessons from it. Both were recyclers of history, part of a phenomenon described by Brian Eno in Mojo magazine in March 2009 as compilers of "cultural blocks". It didn't look original, the revered former member of Roxy Music and populariser of ambient music continued, but in recombining the blocks we think we recognise, you hear them differently, ending up with something "still completely original"
While multi-talented, idiosyncratic Beck was taking all those old, pure sounds in the 1990s and making them impure with a bewildering varied pot-pourri of every modern sound going, including several strains of dance and hip hop, the young Jack White simply plugged in his guitar and played the blues.
His real antecedent in the art of rehabilitating the past wasn't Beck, it wasn't a musician as such but another traditionalist in modern clothing, film-maker, Quentin Tarantino. It was his breakthrough movies of the early to mid-1990s with their streetwise mix of crime and romance which laid the groundwork for the popular revival of hitherto 'uncool' music in the following decade; the soundtracks of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction selling in unusually large numbers to a generation too young to remember much before U2 or Duran Duran never mind the 70s, 60s or 50s, even.
What he did years before another Mr White came to prominence, was unexpected but simple - take 'obscure' surf punk, primitive garage and trash rock, country and rock n roll ballads by the likes of Link Wray, Chuck Berry, Ricky Nelson, and place them in modern surroundings. Unloved since their time in the sun 30 years or more earlier, heard in dynamic, new contexts they came to life in a way their makers could never have intended.
The rawness of these records from a more innocent age acted not only as a contrast to the cynical nature of Tarantino's pulp stories where only the sharpest survive, injecting warmth into scenes which otherwise might have appeared merely hard-faced, but also got to the heart of what the likes of Reservoir Dogs were really about. This a dog eat dog world, Tarantino is saying, and life is just as basic and simple as these songs. The attitude belonged to original rock n roll but it was to lead by sheer accident to a completely different end as musical culture changed and evolved in the decade to come.
Graham Chalmers
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