Three years after they cracked up and fell apart, the Libertines' greatest hits arrives as confirmation that the group's tempestuous career wasn't simply a two-year collective British hallucination. It really did happen-- the desperation, ambition, hysteria, celebrity, notoriety, tears, reconciliation, love, and squalor, but I'm not sure how much of that you can hear on this 13-track souvenir.
It's become a critical commonplace to insist, in a Brian Eno kind of way, that pop is less about simply making music than about creating a world, and the Libertines are a test-case in just how far you can push this. The Libertines were conceived from the start as a well-read critical wet-dream of the perfect post-Strokes British pop group. If the Manic Street Preachers found a ready-made reading list and manifesto in Greil Marcus's punk fantasia Lipstick Traces, the Libertines claimed a similar touchstone in Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine. Bracewell's history craftily charted the wistfully utopian impulse in English art from the Brontes to the Smiths, via Oscar Wilde, Powell & Pressburger, Mark E. Smith, and Kate Bush. And self-proclaimed inheritors Pete Doherty and Carl Barât delighted quote-hungry hacks with their talk of "sailing the good ship Albion to Arcadia."
The group's Bernard Butler-produced, Jam-indebted debut single "What a Waster" went a little way to walking the walk-- it's a tumbling, shambolic tale of visionary rent boys and crackwhores, whose diaries read like "the Beano or the unabridged Ulysses," and which most came to life when Barât spat the lines "what a divvy, what a fucking div" with gusto and relish. Placed midway through this compilation's untimely running order, it still sounds like the greatest thing they ever recorded.
Listening to the rest of Time for Heroes, even to indie disco standards like "Don't Look Back Into The Sun" and "Can't Stand Me Now", it feels like the band succeeded in spite of the half-assed meagerness of their music. They opted for Mick Jones to helm their subsequent records, vainly hoping that some of the Clash's panache might rub off, but Jones' slack production only hindered the group. His scuffling skiffle sound-- tinny and tame-- gazes up at the Only Ones' heroin-fueled star but is happier lying in the gutter. And for hotshot pop poet laureates, they scarcely scraped together another couplet worth quoting. "There are few more distressing sights than that/ Of an Englishman in a baseball cap" they sing on "Time For Heroes"-- which may have inspired a generation of indie kids to don their dad's old trilbies, but ain't exactly Coleridge.
No, the Libertines' strength lay less in music than in their sense of the possibilities for self-mythology. Particularly in the gossipy village of the UK, pop has been been knitted ever tighter into a modern entertainment-media complex, and the Libertines worked this like grandmasters. The daily sordid soap opera of the group-- as broadcast and narrowcast, downloaded and dreamed up through newspapers and message boards-- is much more compelling than any of the music they made. Eventually, in songs like "What Became of the Likely Lads?", it devolved into their only subject. Doherty and Kate Moss became the couple for a moment when indie and pop, glamor and squalor, NME and Heat magazines finally merged in the echo chamber of modern celebrity.
Indeed, it could be that the greatest pieces of art associated with the band are actually Roger Sargent's photographs, as featured on the sleeves both of this collection and of the self-titled second album. These richly suggestive stills staged the band as heirs to the rock tradition of Brian Jones, Sid Vicious, Richey Manic...figures who in some ways owned their respective bands through odd charisma and enigmatic intensity. Except while their predecessors were iconic adjuncts or supplements to the music, with the Libertines that's practically all there was, and the records feel like an incidental part of their pop world.
It seems odd to deny how potent and powerfully compelling the spectacle of the Libertines has proved. But without a single or song strong enough to carry them beyond their pop moment, you wonder whether their presence will inevitably dwindle beneath the homage of their fans and pale imitators. As Barât and Doherty must surely know, there is no future in England's dreaming.
