So I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a Black man. It shouldn’t really matter all that much. But, you know, the type of music I share my thoughts on wouldn’t usually say “Black” to most people. Regardless, it’s the truth. Growing up and watching MTV2 UK in the mid-2000s, you’d wouldn’t see many, if any, Black faces on music videos. Kele Okereke of Bloc Party’s was probably the first one I saw via ‘Helicopter’. It was the only one for a while. But then the video for The Libertines’ ‘Up the Bracket’ showed up one day. It wasn’t the first of the band’s that I’d seen, but it was certainly the first I watched that featured all the members. Gary Powell was the first Black drummer I’d ever encountered. He didn’t look like he was playing the drums with much focus or precision in the video for ‘…Bracket’, and it got me wondering whether he was actually in the band or a stand-in for someone else. That’s quite messed up, I know, shows you how my 9- or 10-year old brain was conditioned. It wasn’t until I saw him again in the video for ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead’ by Dirty Pretty Things that I understood, this was an actual drummer who could actually play.

You can find that funny, you can find that truly insane. I’m somewhere in the middle thinking on it now. More towards ‘insane’, though. Despite the naive prejudice I gathered on the first viewing, it didn’t distract from the fact that the song itself sounded very nice. Doherty sings about meeting two dodgy men on Vallance Road, supposedly an allusion to the infamous Kray twins who used to live there, and telling them to fuck off by sticking two fingers up at them. Not the peace sign. And then the song focuses on two people for the choruses, a boy and a girl, who look like they’d be the perfect pair but are lost in their own little worlds. A slight change in theme, but it works somehow. The video added to the enjoyability. The band walk up an alleyway (Grove Passage in Bethnal Green, London – a mecca for Libertines fans), Pete Doherty and Carl Barât mime the words while doing so, and they all end up back at someone’s flat, performing the song in their iconic red jackets, in a party-like atmosphere while girls dance around them. Very easy watching. If there are two people who know how to mime lyrics and walk towards the camera, it’s Pete Doherty and Carl Barât. If you see videos by either of them, solo or with their other bands, that’s usually what happens.

‘Up the Bracket’ is the title track on the band’s debut album. It opens the second side, if you were to buy the record on vinyl. As much as I like ‘Up the Bracket’ as a whole, it’s the small, little details that make it an engaging listen. There’s the yell by Doherty right at the beginning, one of frustration, recorded during a moment of chaos in the studio. Barât joins in on the lower harmonies on the “See these two cold fingers” lines, those sound cool. He also plays the descending guitar line in the choruses, he for sure plays the lead guitarist role in the song. There’s that moment during the second chorus when a scratchier vocal track comes into frame, revealed to be inserted from another take of the song in the 2022 anniversary edition. The aforementioned yell is also in that same take. I didn’t know that before writing the sentence, but I’m keeping this all in. I think the oddity that puts the cap on everything is the audible ‘fuck off’ that’s said near the end of the guitar solo. That ‘fuck off’ went uncensored for years on TV. When it was about 2012 or something and I saw the video on what had turned into ‘MTV Rocks’, probably the last time I saw the video on the channel, it appeared that someone at the MTV offices had figured out there was a clear curse word in the song and censored it. I was falling out of love with MTV2/Rocks around that time, the music on rotation there just didn’t seem to as interesting as it used to be. Just that small censorship move showed me that things had really changed on that channel. Couldn’t tune into it the same way anymore.