My Top 1000 Songs #376: Up The Bracket

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

I didn't bother checking out the Libertines when they first came to short-lived prominence in the early '00s. The UK music mags I read like Mojo and Uncut seemed to talk more about the band's infighting and drug problems than their music, and they kind of got lumped into that whole Interpol-Strokes-Franz Ferdinand "return of guitars to rock & roll" hype machine.

But an online friend sent me a band mix a few years later, and I was immediately smitten. The band owed a lot more to the Clash and early Jam than to the more innocuous alt.rock of the day, and felt like one of the more authentically energizing mainstream-friendly rock bands I'd heard in some time. "Up The Bracket," the title track from their outstanding 2002 debut LP (produced by the Clash's Mick Jones), perfectly meshed punk energy with a sense of Britpop melody. And bonus points for featuring a few b-sides ("The Delaney" and "Skag & Bone Man") which were at least as good, scrappy and frenetic and thoroughly off the rails.

Live, 2015 reunion gig:

Even better live (date unknown?):