The New Libertines

STOP PRESS: TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE HERE FOR THE NEW LIBERTINES AT STOKE NEWINGTON LITERARY FESTIVAL (last year we were the first event to sell out so book early!). Our event page with details of performers is here, and a Facebook page here

We’re afraid this isn’t the site for The Libertines 2011/12 tour, though we love Pete and Carl (best go to their website for that info, though we’d love you to hang around here).

(Anna McCrory at Chipping Norton Literary Festival Fringe)

The New Libertines is our touring troupe of troubadour tearaways, and we’ll be raising our underskirts at a venue near you any time now.

The New Libertine movement, if it can be labelled a movement, stands for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human.

“We need writing that serves up the whole of life, in the smallest microcosms maybe, single truths told in single voices, but told in the full – the ugly and the beautiful; the hopeful and the despairing; the angry and the aspiring; that wrings art, words, life itself until they offer up every last secret, every hidden pain, every unexpected and delightful pleasure; that gives life in the full. Free from judgement. Free from taboo. Free from pretence.” (Dan Holloway, The New Libertines)

The New Libertines show presents a rapid fire smorgasbord of literary fabulousness in all its forms. We will be performing around the country in 2011 and 2012.

Our shows

2011

4 April 2011, Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford, 6pm FREE (Not the Oxford Literary Festival)

4 June 2011, Stoke Newington Literary Festival, 4-6pm at Baby Bathhouse, entry £4 (SOLD OUT – THANK YOU!!!)

13 June 2011, Albion Beatnik Bookstore, Oxford, 6pm as part of Oxfinge, entry FREE

15 September, The Literature Lounge at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe

17 September, Pow-Wow Literary Festival

2012

23 January, Afflecks, Manchester

21 April Chipping Norton Literary Festival

3 June Stoke Newington Literary Festival

Woodstock Poetry Festival, November 9

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THE NEW LIBERTINES

“Forget the ennui of the 9-5.
Stories of bingo, of sex, knife crime, coagulated time.
Performed with passion, physicality and style.

Let your bones submerge in this bath of finely spiced voices” (Daily Information, Oxford, on Oxfringe Read Full Review)

“a compelling kind of New Libertine vibe, and offer something different – perhaps more thoughtful – from some of Oxford’s more established open mikes. Well worth checking out.” (Daily Information on This Is Oxford Read Full Review)

“a brilliant night” (For Books’ Sake)

“While ‘The New Libertines’ sounds like a Granta style tag for a new movement, there was too much variety on show for the acts to be pigeonholed – it does appear to be a guarantee of a good night out though” (Workshy Fop)

“the most oh-wow-this-is-tops event of 2012″ (Fat Roland of Flashtag Manchester)

“quite fabulous” (Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine)

The New Libertines Roll of Honour

(MC Dan Holloway)

Danni Antagonist

Paul Askew

Lucy Ayrton

Elizabeth Baines

Sarah-Clare Conlon

Raven Dane

Hannah Elwick

Stuart Estell