Time for Heroes

Recorded in a single ragged take and sounding like it, this song captures a very particular post-riot energy — the morning after something significant has happened and the city is still trembling with it. The guitars are primitive and ecstatic simultaneously, running on adrenaline rather than technique, and the production deliberately leaves in the imperfections that a more careful band would have smoothed away. The tempo staggers slightly, as if the musicians are still catching their breath, and this breathlessness is the whole point. Pete Doherty's vocal is almost spoken at points, declaimed from some imagined barricade, the delivery of someone who believes completely in what he's saying even if the coherence occasionally falters. The lyrics conjure a romantic vision of working-class solidarity and street-level heroism, celebrating people who resist in small ways — who dress defiantly, who gather defiantly, who exist defiantly in public spaces that weren't designed for them. There's a Blake-via-The-Clash literary nationalism here that could tip into pastiche but doesn't quite, saved by the evident conviction behind it. It speaks directly to a generation that arrived at political consciousness just as the optimism of the nineties curdled, finding in Albion mythology a way to grieve something that perhaps never quite existed. This is music for walking fast through a city you love and resent equally.