(no subject)
Stella on the dpt forum translated these two interviews from Germany. What a star!
German Visions magazine (issue 186, September 08) (scans here)
Dirty Pretty Things
Lurking Libertine
“Our fans are all freethinkers. Lazy and drunken maybe but all of them are thinkers”
Here’s a band that is willing to keep dreaming of self-fulfilment à la pirate - including hedonism, hatred and the occasional ballad. But who will follow them?
“Sorry, I’ve got a cold” says Carl Barât and spits into the waste bin. “Caught a cold, caught a cold”, he mumbles and shuffles to his trolley, that is filled to the brim with packets of handkerchiefs. As if hankies were suddenly searched for duty free items. As is known the polite patient is still one of the creative halves of the blessed Libertines, the band with the long shadow that caused chaos in the hearts of their fans. And indeed it is difficult to say “Dirty Pretty Things” where you almost wanted to say “Libertines”, especially since the band’s names are very close in their meaning. Barât himself still looks so good and fresh, that you would happily share a prison cell with him for a few weeks. [Err …]. But there’s a strange atmosphere surrounding the man with the cold, a mix of class room and waiting room, in which Carl and his American guitarist Anthony Rossomando seem to sit for quite a while now.
‘Romance On Short Notice’, their second album, is out in England for a few months. A disappointing number 35 in the charts was as far as it got. “But we got more positive than negative critics”, say Carl defiantly and noticed that “most of all the mass publications like the album”. If Barât’s body language had an accent it probably would be just as incomprehensibly as the mumbling that is his form of articulation. He is virtually sitting on his nape in the armchair [I translated it literally but have problems imagining the scene], his whole attitude seems like an attempt to establish a role play where Anthony is the nice cousin and he himself the mischief-maker. The one who starts an argument and later forgets what all this is about. Rossomando is all the more talkative. “To be in this band is like a carte blanche to prolongate your own youth”, he says. “To be creative is like playing.” Anthony thinks that if he weren’t in a rock band he would probably invest his ambition in model aircraft. Hearing this Carl is suddenly wide awake. And the following little dialogue illustrates quite nicely the dynamics within the band …
Carl Barât: “Hey; I like modelmaking a lot too. When I was a little boy I built a Ju-52.”
Anthony Rossomando: “I even had the plane of the Red Baron.”
Barât: “Did you build it yourself?”
Rossomando: “No, it was prefabricated …”
Barât: “But that’s completely pointless.”
Rossomando: “I wanted to build it myself, with my neighbor, but he had diabetes and no toes anymore, so we just sat in garden chairs and shot at cans.”
Barat: “Really? Cool!”
Rossomando: “Classical American amusement. We should do this one day.”
Barât: “Well, I own an air gun …”
Rossomando: “Oh, which one?”
Barât: “No idea. But recently I shot a friend into the knee. So it works.”
Rossomando: “Wicked. Was he annoyed?”
Barât: “Indeed! I wanted to show him that it doesn’t hurt. But it did apparently. Hahah! Like being 12 again.”
My friend, the mad gunman. The random brashness isn’t staged. Barât still leaves the impression that he handles his life only with a lot of luck, something that is due to him as incarnation of individual freedom in the rock circus. At the same time ‘Romance On Short Notice’ shows again that the man with hundreds of hankies is actually keen on structure. The twelve songs of the album are straight-line cases with a traditional contingent of ballads and partly rather self-referential texts. ‘Tired of England’ for example “deals with people who are moaning about their life in England. They can’t cope with their life and blame the country they live in.” So people who are bored are at fault themselves can always found a band. Carl hasn’t noticed yet that especially English rock music has got a good international reputation but he thinks this is “good news”. Anthony doesn’t miss the opportunity to underline the merits of German rock music and raves about Can and Alec Empire, while Carl adds “Jennifer Rostock”. He is a guy that you have to like even when he is naughty.
So the angriest song of the album is ‘Hippy’s Son’. Anthony stays diplomatic: “We like the original hippy idea but it’s almost 40 years old by now and got ruined, like any other scene, by hipster-students. The original idea has been as contra-cultural as punk. And for me punk means DIY, local promoters, five dollars entry and Fugazi songs. No sound but an aesthetic. An attitude to life.” Carl says that he still loves 60s bands like Jefferson Airplane but disowns the children of the revolution. “I have been to Christiania in Copenhagen once and it reminded me a lot of those communes that I found god-awful. In England the whole hippy culture turned into this commune stuff during the eighties. Those places are drowning in arrogance.” Barât adopts another voice: “’Well, I guess I’m just too autonomic for you. I probably scare you Boeotians, eh? The skull along with the batiks is probably a bit too hefty for you …’ That’s something that annoys me extremely, that intellectual stagnation. There’s always that whole string of lazy arses that cling to a movement.”
Rossomando adds the US version of the bogeyman. “Back at uni there was a guy who always said he’s about to go on tour, until I asked him how his band is called. It turned out that he just followed Grateful Dead to sell weed at their gigs. And to top it all … with his mother’s Jeep. Damn middle class kids! They think they are hippies just because they discovered marihuana and Grateful Dead. A nightmare!” Barât lectures: “Self-aggrandising killed the hippies - and fashion killed punk.” But who knows … maybe someday soon something’s chasing after Dirty Pretty Things. After all the most difficult time for a rock star is the morning after the revolution.
and Musikexpress (scans here)
Carl Barât is snuffy. The guitarist and singer of Dirty Pretty Things is ill - and not annoyed because it isn’t his recent album we are talking about but once again Pete Doherty.
Pete Doherty, of course. Barât is now 30 years old and has probably been interviewed hundreds of times. But during all those conversations he had to answer “once, at the most twice” no questions concerning his old mate. Didn’t have to explain how things were back then with the Libertines, how they have beaten up each other, how Pete burgled his flat to finance the next shot. And whether him and Pete, according to the British press, are really working on a musical.
“No, that is the “usual tabloid bollocks”, says Barât. Apart from that he is bearing the topic Doherty surprisingly stoical. Anthony Rossomando, the guitarist who joins us for the interview, is rather amused as well.
Who is going to die earlier: Carl Barât or Pete Doherty?
Rossomando: I place 5 Euro that Carl will live longer.
How frustrating are all those questions regarding Doherty?
Barât: Not too frustrating. Only when you harp on about the topic for too long it’s getting boring. But I can understand why those questions get asked. And fortunately I’ve got quite a good self-perception and can deal with it.
But isn’t it unfair that Doherty gets all the attention?
Barât: I don’t want to get the sort of attention he is getting. You have to be very careful what kind of publicity you want to get. I find it quite pleasant that people on the street don’t recognise me and that people who talk about me are talking most of all about the music.
But apparently it seems to be more important to have a famous model as girlfriend than to write good songs?
Barât: Well, I know how the media are working. You have to accept it. And I have decided not to become part of this machinery. Being a celebrity has got no appeal to me.
Is the English tabloid press some sort of purgatory that every halfway successful band has to go through?
Rossomando: You can’t avoid it. It’s the nature of the beast. But you can decide how much you want to get involved.
Is it possible to use the beast or is it inevitable that you get swallowed?
Barât: Surely you can beat it, but you have to manage to jump off in time. In England things can develop very quickly. After releasing only one single the Libertines were on the cover of the NME. At the beginning you need the beast to get famous. But then you have to jump off.
But don’t you need the beast to sell records?
Rossomando: You don’t sell any records with that sort of publicity anyway. Pete is the most notorious musician in Great Britain along with Amy Winehouse. But you don’t see it in album sales. While Coldplay don’t appear at all in the yellow press and sell a vast number of CDs.
Barât: Pete sells maybe just about 100000 records. Amy Winehouse sells 3 million records with the same strategy.
Rossomando: But Amy Winehouse is just extremely talented.
The following laughter is just a little bit sneering, but very liberating. And most of all it shifts that elephant out of the room. Now there’s space to talk about Romance At Short Notice. This album maybe isn’t a classic in the making but it means a development from the two year old debut Waterloo To Anywhere”. In some songs there is still a bit of the Sturm and Drang [no idea how to translate this] of the Libertines but other songs are little dramas, artfully arranged Britpop valuables. Trumpets, powerful melodies and string arrangements. It’s possible to hear the Beatles and of course the Kinks. And it left traces in the music that Barât, Rossomando, drummer Gary Powell and bassist Didz Hammond grew up when Cool Britannia was about to aim for world domination [except that Anthony was probably rather unfazed by Cool Britannia when he grew up]. You could say that Dirty Pretty Things have found their own voice. In any case the NME sees it this way and this isn’t completely unimportant in England.
England is unmistakeably the most important reference point of the album. It’s the England of the proud working class that gets humiliated today by welfare. It’s the England shaken by globalization, about which it says in the programmatic last song Blood On My Shoes: “The rich get richer but still they cry.” Dirty Pretty Things articulate a longing for an England that isn’t gone but has never really existed. They are defending this England in their first single ‘Tired Of England’ against, according to Barât, “the usual moaners”. Is it possibly the ‘New England’ that Billy Bragg more than two decades ago didn’t even dare dreaming of?
Barât: I surely didn’t think of Billy Bragg when I wrote ‘Tired of England’. But I can see similarities. In any case an interesting comparison. Funnily we’ve still got all those problems that Bragg talked about in his song - even more of them.
Rossomando: But Bragg is looking for a new girl.
But still it was a political song. Are Dirty Pretty Things a political band?
Rossomando: There are references to politics. But we are not waving a flag, we are not propagating socialism. We are dreamers, romantics. But still we know what’s going on in England.
Barât: And if necessary we would mount the barricades and fight. For the right cause.
What could that be?
Barât: For freedom. Against facism. Or against a pointless war.
Isn’t Great Britain involved in a pointless war right now?
Barât: The war in Iraq is stupid. But there are good reasons to go to Afghanistan. But anyway, blame the Americans. We are just rookies anyway regarding wars, we don’t know how to do it. But generally: I use my voice for things that are important to me. Some political topics but there’s much more that is important to me.
Can political pop music achieve anything?
Barât: We are living in a highly political world, in which everything you say can be interpreted politically. Each decision to buy anything in the supermarket is political. But that doesn’t mean that you have to write a song about the tax reform. But, okay, here’s the answer to your question: Yes, we are a political band. But that is not our only aim.
German Visions magazine (issue 186, September 08) (scans here)
Dirty Pretty Things
Lurking Libertine
“Our fans are all freethinkers. Lazy and drunken maybe but all of them are thinkers”
Here’s a band that is willing to keep dreaming of self-fulfilment à la pirate - including hedonism, hatred and the occasional ballad. But who will follow them?
“Sorry, I’ve got a cold” says Carl Barât and spits into the waste bin. “Caught a cold, caught a cold”, he mumbles and shuffles to his trolley, that is filled to the brim with packets of handkerchiefs. As if hankies were suddenly searched for duty free items. As is known the polite patient is still one of the creative halves of the blessed Libertines, the band with the long shadow that caused chaos in the hearts of their fans. And indeed it is difficult to say “Dirty Pretty Things” where you almost wanted to say “Libertines”, especially since the band’s names are very close in their meaning. Barât himself still looks so good and fresh, that you would happily share a prison cell with him for a few weeks. [Err …]. But there’s a strange atmosphere surrounding the man with the cold, a mix of class room and waiting room, in which Carl and his American guitarist Anthony Rossomando seem to sit for quite a while now.
‘Romance On Short Notice’, their second album, is out in England for a few months. A disappointing number 35 in the charts was as far as it got. “But we got more positive than negative critics”, say Carl defiantly and noticed that “most of all the mass publications like the album”. If Barât’s body language had an accent it probably would be just as incomprehensibly as the mumbling that is his form of articulation. He is virtually sitting on his nape in the armchair [I translated it literally but have problems imagining the scene], his whole attitude seems like an attempt to establish a role play where Anthony is the nice cousin and he himself the mischief-maker. The one who starts an argument and later forgets what all this is about. Rossomando is all the more talkative. “To be in this band is like a carte blanche to prolongate your own youth”, he says. “To be creative is like playing.” Anthony thinks that if he weren’t in a rock band he would probably invest his ambition in model aircraft. Hearing this Carl is suddenly wide awake. And the following little dialogue illustrates quite nicely the dynamics within the band …
Carl Barât: “Hey; I like modelmaking a lot too. When I was a little boy I built a Ju-52.”
Anthony Rossomando: “I even had the plane of the Red Baron.”
Barât: “Did you build it yourself?”
Rossomando: “No, it was prefabricated …”
Barât: “But that’s completely pointless.”
Rossomando: “I wanted to build it myself, with my neighbor, but he had diabetes and no toes anymore, so we just sat in garden chairs and shot at cans.”
Barat: “Really? Cool!”
Rossomando: “Classical American amusement. We should do this one day.”
Barât: “Well, I own an air gun …”
Rossomando: “Oh, which one?”
Barât: “No idea. But recently I shot a friend into the knee. So it works.”
Rossomando: “Wicked. Was he annoyed?”
Barât: “Indeed! I wanted to show him that it doesn’t hurt. But it did apparently. Hahah! Like being 12 again.”
My friend, the mad gunman. The random brashness isn’t staged. Barât still leaves the impression that he handles his life only with a lot of luck, something that is due to him as incarnation of individual freedom in the rock circus. At the same time ‘Romance On Short Notice’ shows again that the man with hundreds of hankies is actually keen on structure. The twelve songs of the album are straight-line cases with a traditional contingent of ballads and partly rather self-referential texts. ‘Tired of England’ for example “deals with people who are moaning about their life in England. They can’t cope with their life and blame the country they live in.” So people who are bored are at fault themselves can always found a band. Carl hasn’t noticed yet that especially English rock music has got a good international reputation but he thinks this is “good news”. Anthony doesn’t miss the opportunity to underline the merits of German rock music and raves about Can and Alec Empire, while Carl adds “Jennifer Rostock”. He is a guy that you have to like even when he is naughty.
So the angriest song of the album is ‘Hippy’s Son’. Anthony stays diplomatic: “We like the original hippy idea but it’s almost 40 years old by now and got ruined, like any other scene, by hipster-students. The original idea has been as contra-cultural as punk. And for me punk means DIY, local promoters, five dollars entry and Fugazi songs. No sound but an aesthetic. An attitude to life.” Carl says that he still loves 60s bands like Jefferson Airplane but disowns the children of the revolution. “I have been to Christiania in Copenhagen once and it reminded me a lot of those communes that I found god-awful. In England the whole hippy culture turned into this commune stuff during the eighties. Those places are drowning in arrogance.” Barât adopts another voice: “’Well, I guess I’m just too autonomic for you. I probably scare you Boeotians, eh? The skull along with the batiks is probably a bit too hefty for you …’ That’s something that annoys me extremely, that intellectual stagnation. There’s always that whole string of lazy arses that cling to a movement.”
Rossomando adds the US version of the bogeyman. “Back at uni there was a guy who always said he’s about to go on tour, until I asked him how his band is called. It turned out that he just followed Grateful Dead to sell weed at their gigs. And to top it all … with his mother’s Jeep. Damn middle class kids! They think they are hippies just because they discovered marihuana and Grateful Dead. A nightmare!” Barât lectures: “Self-aggrandising killed the hippies - and fashion killed punk.” But who knows … maybe someday soon something’s chasing after Dirty Pretty Things. After all the most difficult time for a rock star is the morning after the revolution.
and Musikexpress (scans here)
Carl Barât is snuffy. The guitarist and singer of Dirty Pretty Things is ill - and not annoyed because it isn’t his recent album we are talking about but once again Pete Doherty.
Pete Doherty, of course. Barât is now 30 years old and has probably been interviewed hundreds of times. But during all those conversations he had to answer “once, at the most twice” no questions concerning his old mate. Didn’t have to explain how things were back then with the Libertines, how they have beaten up each other, how Pete burgled his flat to finance the next shot. And whether him and Pete, according to the British press, are really working on a musical.
“No, that is the “usual tabloid bollocks”, says Barât. Apart from that he is bearing the topic Doherty surprisingly stoical. Anthony Rossomando, the guitarist who joins us for the interview, is rather amused as well.
Who is going to die earlier: Carl Barât or Pete Doherty?
Rossomando: I place 5 Euro that Carl will live longer.
How frustrating are all those questions regarding Doherty?
Barât: Not too frustrating. Only when you harp on about the topic for too long it’s getting boring. But I can understand why those questions get asked. And fortunately I’ve got quite a good self-perception and can deal with it.
But isn’t it unfair that Doherty gets all the attention?
Barât: I don’t want to get the sort of attention he is getting. You have to be very careful what kind of publicity you want to get. I find it quite pleasant that people on the street don’t recognise me and that people who talk about me are talking most of all about the music.
But apparently it seems to be more important to have a famous model as girlfriend than to write good songs?
Barât: Well, I know how the media are working. You have to accept it. And I have decided not to become part of this machinery. Being a celebrity has got no appeal to me.
Is the English tabloid press some sort of purgatory that every halfway successful band has to go through?
Rossomando: You can’t avoid it. It’s the nature of the beast. But you can decide how much you want to get involved.
Is it possible to use the beast or is it inevitable that you get swallowed?
Barât: Surely you can beat it, but you have to manage to jump off in time. In England things can develop very quickly. After releasing only one single the Libertines were on the cover of the NME. At the beginning you need the beast to get famous. But then you have to jump off.
But don’t you need the beast to sell records?
Rossomando: You don’t sell any records with that sort of publicity anyway. Pete is the most notorious musician in Great Britain along with Amy Winehouse. But you don’t see it in album sales. While Coldplay don’t appear at all in the yellow press and sell a vast number of CDs.
Barât: Pete sells maybe just about 100000 records. Amy Winehouse sells 3 million records with the same strategy.
Rossomando: But Amy Winehouse is just extremely talented.
The following laughter is just a little bit sneering, but very liberating. And most of all it shifts that elephant out of the room. Now there’s space to talk about Romance At Short Notice. This album maybe isn’t a classic in the making but it means a development from the two year old debut Waterloo To Anywhere”. In some songs there is still a bit of the Sturm and Drang [no idea how to translate this] of the Libertines but other songs are little dramas, artfully arranged Britpop valuables. Trumpets, powerful melodies and string arrangements. It’s possible to hear the Beatles and of course the Kinks. And it left traces in the music that Barât, Rossomando, drummer Gary Powell and bassist Didz Hammond grew up when Cool Britannia was about to aim for world domination [except that Anthony was probably rather unfazed by Cool Britannia when he grew up]. You could say that Dirty Pretty Things have found their own voice. In any case the NME sees it this way and this isn’t completely unimportant in England.
England is unmistakeably the most important reference point of the album. It’s the England of the proud working class that gets humiliated today by welfare. It’s the England shaken by globalization, about which it says in the programmatic last song Blood On My Shoes: “The rich get richer but still they cry.” Dirty Pretty Things articulate a longing for an England that isn’t gone but has never really existed. They are defending this England in their first single ‘Tired Of England’ against, according to Barât, “the usual moaners”. Is it possibly the ‘New England’ that Billy Bragg more than two decades ago didn’t even dare dreaming of?
Barât: I surely didn’t think of Billy Bragg when I wrote ‘Tired of England’. But I can see similarities. In any case an interesting comparison. Funnily we’ve still got all those problems that Bragg talked about in his song - even more of them.
Rossomando: But Bragg is looking for a new girl.
But still it was a political song. Are Dirty Pretty Things a political band?
Rossomando: There are references to politics. But we are not waving a flag, we are not propagating socialism. We are dreamers, romantics. But still we know what’s going on in England.
Barât: And if necessary we would mount the barricades and fight. For the right cause.
What could that be?
Barât: For freedom. Against facism. Or against a pointless war.
Isn’t Great Britain involved in a pointless war right now?
Barât: The war in Iraq is stupid. But there are good reasons to go to Afghanistan. But anyway, blame the Americans. We are just rookies anyway regarding wars, we don’t know how to do it. But generally: I use my voice for things that are important to me. Some political topics but there’s much more that is important to me.
Can political pop music achieve anything?
Barât: We are living in a highly political world, in which everything you say can be interpreted politically. Each decision to buy anything in the supermarket is political. But that doesn’t mean that you have to write a song about the tax reform. But, okay, here’s the answer to your question: Yes, we are a political band. But that is not our only aim.