How I Made The Libertines’ Hedonistic New Video And Artwork, By Longterm Collaborator Roger Sargent

Over the years, Roger Sargent has documented more on The Libertines than any other person. From early gig photography to shooting the picture that adorned their self-titled second album, to making celebrated reunion documentary There Are No Innocent Bystanders to compiling the video footage that introduced their recent shows, Sargent has been there almost every step of the way. Now, Sargent is the aesthetic brain behind the video for comeback track ‘Gunga Din’ and the artwork for forthcoming LP ‘Anthems For Doomed Youth’. Here, he talks through the making of both.

“[‘Anthems For Doomed Youth’] is a way more optimistic record than the first album, that’s for sure. It’s pretty gritty and nasty in places, but it’s definitely a way more optimistic record. I did everything to create the finished artwork myself. It wasn’t something I had any intention of doing, to be honest, but we got back and they said: ‘We need an album cover in five days.’ I thought: ‘Fuck, ok’. Like everything Libertines related, we got the album cover done by the skin of our teeth.

The schedule was pretty tight, and people enjoyed themselves quite a lot in Thailand, so the photo shoot for the NME cover [for the June 20 issue] happened on literally the last day that everybody was there. I’d been trying to shoot an album cover the whole time I was in Thailand, and we’d literally just finished that NME session. They’d all just taken their tops off and jumped in the sea. I said to them: ‘Can we just do one more little session on the bridge? If you’re silhouetted it will look a bit like the first record.’ I wanted to nod to that a little bit, without being completely nostalgic. There is a bit of nostalgia there, as well.

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I added some texture and slightly changed the colours. There’s a danger when you do four people silhouetted against a beautiful sunset that it can look like The Eagles, which is definitely not what this band is. They’ve done all the inner artwork themselves, which is a hell of a task. They’ve done artwork for every single song.”

[The video for ‘Gunga Din’ is shot in] Pattaya, which is one of the world’s sex capitals, but it’s actually not as scary or as threatening as you’d think. I wanted to do something for the video that was going to be fun for them, and that would have a little bit of a narrative that works with the song. The schizophrenic nature of wanting to be good but ending up being bad, and the constant cycle of going out and getting fucked and then regretting it, and then going out and getting fucked again, is what both the song and the video are about. The director of photography said it was the most insane video production he’d ever done, which is pretty much par for the course for the Libertines.”

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