Babyshambles

If there's one song that for me embodies the most reckless, shameless youth, it's "Albion" by the Babyshambles. Clear as gin in teacups, it sweeps you away along with the sweetest dreams and the most heroic nights. It always reminds me that if you live the way you should, you never quite catch the right rope. And also that poetry always lands wherever it wants, usually in the most unexpected spot on Earth, which, if you're lucky, is exactly the windowsill where you smoke away your twenties and watch the moon, and wait…
Comforting nostalgia that's good to return to when times turn bad and cast nothing but shadow; you do as McCartney suggested to Julian Lennon: "Refrain". So a show like this becomes a chance to carve out a space of reckless, illusory freedom.

So I put on my good jacket, pin on it the badge I bought with the orange vinyl of St. Vincent, skinny jeans and brown combat boots; and so I walk into a half-empty Alcatraz at a quarter to eight and make my way almost up to the barrier of the small stage. There can't be more than fifty people when the first of four (yes, four) openers kicks off. Lowinsky churn out their Italian indie-pop amid the racket of their own friends and a few curious onlookers. You can spot Pete Doherty wandering back and forth in a tank top on either side of the heavy black curtain. Next up is a very exuberant urban poet who delivers his personal "Ginsberg howl" amid whistles and olés. He says he loves us; just in case, we love him too.
Les Votives open for the third time, an under-category "X-Factor" phenotype of the Strokes. A cynical, tight, post-adolescent indie-rock, topped off with "we wrote this song in Italian with Francesco Bianconi". And I think, Francesco, how much this newfound carefree streak you've picked up in your fifties is like buying yourself a Porsche, isn't it? Two acoustic tracks close things out, courtesy of an artist "very indie in Great Britain" (sorry, I've forgotten the name) who plays alongside Drew McConnell. He looks like Tommy from "Trainspotting" and seems to have spent his whole life studying Thom Yorke. He sings in a black duster coat, blond curls, and skin so pale that any effort borders on sunburn. Yet he's so convinced that we end up believing it too.

The crowd starts to press in, and Alcatraz is now, to my relief, packed solid; it won't be a sad night for a handful of dreamers. I'd already braced myself to hurl insults at the no-shows, but instead there's a stunning crowd ranging from seventeen to sixty years old. In front of me, a guy in a brown corduroy velvet jacket and a black fedora. Then a gentleman in a straw panama and a formal waistcoat, another with fine curled silver moustaches. A woman looks for a spot up in the balcony, in her beige duster coat and matching Hogan sneakers. A trio of girls, in light-blue and burgundy floral shirts and ankle boots, chat about office meetings. Nearby stands a guy in a shirt commemorating Oasis's 2025 tour. An English woman snaps at him: "don't push me, don't be so rude!". He apologises nervously.

The lights go down, the band comes on, along with Pete Doherty in a grey suit, tank top, and a floppy eight-panel flannel cap. The eyes are still his, those of an innocent troublemaker; the heart is intact, just like that ability of his to be, flaws and all, the most romantic of them all. The opening of "Kilimangiro" sets the tone for a thoroughly entertaining "Delivery". He plays it loose-limbed, fans himself, puffs, bides his time, and between one arpeggio and the next sways gently back and forth. The crowd starts to buzz. I grow suspicious; there's something brewing beneath the surface that I sense but don't quite grasp. Just in case, I take off my jacket (after securing the badge in a pocket) and fold it carefully over my arm so as not to crease it. "Beg, Steal Borrow" catches me inside a dangerous swell. I take a few shoves, try to hold my position and balance, but it's an illusion—by "There She Goes" I'm already at its mercy. On stage, the rhythm of "La Belle et la Bête" syncopates into an incendiary reggae-punk, and I, caught in the wave, find myself in the arms of a guy who's just had a medium lager poured for him, pale, cold, foamy. Half of it ends up on my linen jacket. I look at him, mortified. He, with a gesture buried deep in his muscle memory, pushes me back where I came from, into the thick of the frenzied crowd. The band, amused by the chaos, launches into another couple of songs at a blistering pace. I try to extricate myself from the tangle of limbs. But it happens that those left outside, eager to join in, hurry toward the epicentre of the frenzy, widening its diameter and inevitably shoving me back in. Every attempt of mine to flee only brings me back.

In the frenzy, Pete Doherty himself is fired up too; he kicks off his shoes and dives into the front rows, swimming and singing. From my corner I can just make out his red socks surfacing and sinking again. The black fedora of the guy in the jacket glides like a sail amid the splashes of beer. Full glasses fly, a golden rain falls down on everyone. I grab onto an arm and, using it as leverage, hurl myself out of the fray to take shelter behind someone filming the scene with amusement. "You're a coward," I tell myself. I risk being sucked back in when, right in front of us, the crowd forms an empty circle and waits for the crescendo to explode before boiling over again. On stage, Pete Doherty is a beat shaman, becoming the catalyst for a collective ecstasy, steering the excitement with composed awareness, a Neal Cassady in a trance at the wheel of the bus. Below the stage, the crowd keeps building ever-larger totemic clusters of bodies, crashing together with ever greater intensity. We're all lost, singing and mixing together, with no restraint left, back again in sublet rooms with shared kitchens, at university parties, in wrecked nights spent in foul-smelling living rooms full of rolling papers and shredded tobacco and poems by Boris Vian, in blue-and-brown windowless bathrooms, and in dawns as red as our burning eyes.

We're all clinging to a collective ritual that is liberating catharsis, not foolish nostalgia, but a voracity that never gets its fill. And when, at the close of "Fuck Forever", the microphone is tossed out to be devoured by the kids carried adrift on the crowd, everyone's voice surges into the electric storm like some acid test from the good old days as told by Tom Wolfe. There was room even for Albion, and, as Lucio Dalla said about "Santa Lucia", if I were a jerk I'd tell you I cried when I heard it. End of the show, outside it's pouring down as if God himself sent it; dazed, I reach my car and head home without fully grasping what just happened, but now I know this much too: we're all still alive and we can go anywhere… Satsworth… Senford… Weovil… Woomoyle… NEW-CA-STLE!

(Photo by @niska_tognon for Alcatraz Milano)

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