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Johnny Borrell has launched a scathing attack on The Libertines, with the former Razorlight frontman slamming them as a “self-referential tabloid pantomime”.
Borrell who recently released The Atlantic Culture, was at one point a member of The Libertines in their early days - with the track 'The Boy Looked At Johnny' famously referencing him.
He claims that during his time with The Libertines he remembers, “listening to demos of 'Music When The Lights Go Out' from, like, 1999 – and honestly, they were better than what ended up on the album."
In the interview with Noisey, Borrell claimed, “that second album [2004's self-titled LP], their label were just desperate to capitalise on the initial success, and get anything at all out of them. So, they hashed together a lot of the songs that didn’t make the first record, and dredged up some even older stuff.”
He added : “They were totally unbeatable in those early shows – or, especially the first twenty minutes of those early shows, before the coke wore off. The Libertines were a massive coke band, and very, very actively encouraged in that by their A&R. Now, one usually thinks of coke bands as totally overblown pomp, right? So, a band like The Libertines, back in the day, would have been a speed band... The history of recent British music could have been very different if Pete and Carl had gotten into amphetamines instead of gak."
Borrell also claimed that The Libertines were “Almost a piece of performance art – Marina Abramovic meets Phil and Grant Mitchell off Eastenders. I guess that progression is important when talking about the descent into landfill indie."
He also said in the interview that Razorlight’s eponymous second album, "definitely opened the way for a flood of mediocrity in UK music".
