What a Waster

The song enters on guitars that sound like they were recorded in someone's kitchen in 1971 and then kicked down a flight of stairs — ramshackle, warm, slightly out of tune in a way that feels entirely deliberate and entirely right. Pete Doherty and Carl Barât trade vocals with the ease of two people who've been finishing each other's sentences for years, their voices complementing through contrast: one rougher, one more melodic, both effortlessly charismatic. There's a Britpop lineage here but filtered through pub-rock and something genuinely Dickensian — this is London as a city of romantic wreckage, populated by wasters and dreamers who can't quite tell themselves apart. The drums are straightforward and unhurried, the bass locked in without drawing attention to itself, everything in service of the song's central transaction: charm and self-destruction presented as inseparable qualities, practically as virtues. Lyrically it's a portrait and a confession simultaneously — the narrator knows exactly what he is and finds that knowledge amusing rather than troubling. This is the sound of early 2000s British guitar music before it calcified into formula, when The Libertines were still genuinely unpredictable. You'd put this on pregaming with friends who quote books they've half-read and have complicated feelings about London.