The Libertines, review: a sweetly seductive display of pub-carpet charisma
Oh, what’s become of the likely lads. Twenty years ago or thereabouts, had you looked to the year 2021, it is doubtful that the Libertines would have featured in it. The kings of a thrilling, rootsy, ultra-cool Camden-centric music scene they may have been, and deservedly so, but there was also something very No Future about them.
It wasn’t even necessarily the drugs that threatened to derail them (and, remember, Pete Doherty at one point had an appetite for both crack and heroin), but that the wheels being perilously close to falling off at all times was simply part of their DNA. Longevity wasn’t in the plan – there never was one anyway.
Getting back together for shows in 2010, and doing a new album in 2015, came with a slight sense that that’s what bands do now. But what still sticks out six years on from getting properly back in business is that, while the Camden from which they came and which they spooned into their songs of love and loss and excess and life may have become increasingly unrecognisable, the Libertines’ spirit remains as proudly messy and pub-carpet-hearted as ever it was.
As Carl Barat and Pete Doherty shambled onstage in these grand surrounds, with the awesome, lit-up ruin of Rochester Castle facing them, and lurched into opener What a Waster, they remained a charmingly unslick proposition. Not just their spotlight duo upfront – now admittedly more endearingly Withnail and I than Mick and Keef, with Doherty basically dressed as a farmer in his flatcap and braces – but the whole scruffy lifeblood of this band.
Every solo sounded like it had just been shakily learned, but played with enormous heart anyway, bum notes be damned. Rather than any sharp, grandstanding endings, every single song lolloped and tumbled over the finishing line with a sense of just about making it to the end with a cheeky glint in its eye. Exactly as it should be.
Songs like the punky Horror Show and the sharp sass of Boys in the Band clattered along urgently, with Barat and Doherty’s vocal interplay as louche and casual as if this were a Sunday-afternoon jam in their old flat. Meanwhile, Gunga Din’s pivot to reggae and the slurred sing-along of The Boy Looked at Johnny joyously trod the line between falling apart and being just rickety enough to be exciting.
Where the Libertines excelled, though, was in creating a sense of rowdy togetherness. The setting may have loomed unignorably large, but whenever they brought out big guns like Up the Bracket and the riotous Can’t Stand Me Now, they were back playing one of their old impromptu gigs in someone’s living room, as the crowd threw their arms around their mates and sang as if the songs were specifically written about them.
Barat and Doherty themselves may have grown older and (somewhat) wiser, but they remain basically the same as they were back in those days as well. Sharing microphones, drinks and cigarettes between songs, their casual, no-bother attitude may have made it seem like they’d just wandered in through an unguarded gate and decided to have a go on-stage, but this lack of airs and graces comes hand in hand with a powerful, cool charisma. Attached to songs as infectious as Don’t Look Back into the Sun, it’s a raggedly glorious secret weapon.
“This is alright, isn’t it?” nodded Doherty to the crowd early on. “A bit of live music’s alright, down at the old castle, by the river.”
Better than alright. What became of the likely lads? Surprisingly, they’re doing brilliantly. Who saw that coming back then?
Touring nationwide until December. Tickets: thelibertines.com
