The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Boys in the band thrill Fifers
Reformed group rocks Alhambra
Pete Doherty approached the stage to the theme to Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, muttered something incomprehensible into the microphone and the famous riff to Time for Heroes filled the auditorium.
A mass of bodies inevitably surged forward. Within minutes there were moshpits and crowd-surfers soaring towards the stage.
This is how The Libertines got their gig at Dunfermline’s Alhambra Theatre under way last night.
Thousands attended the show in the historic venue, which marked the launch of the band’s 2017 Tiddely om Pom Pom UK “seaside” tour, which includes only two further Scottish performances, one in Inverness and another in Kilmarnock.
The grand interiors of the auditorium couldn’t have been a more fitting surrounding for the band – who could have packed out the likes of the Caird Hall or Glasgow’s Barrowland.
It was a performance reminiscent of those legendary Libertines gigs of the early noughties which survive today as pixelated YouTube video clips; Carl Barât and Doherty’s attempts at vocals drowned out by bellowing fans and the thrashing of Gary Powell’s drums.
By their third song, The Delaney, the two frontmen had already started sharing a microphone so closely as to be a near-kiss.
More than just a rock band, to their oldest and most loyal fans this four-piece have always maintained a romanticism and mystique.
And if last night’s show proved anything it’s that the band’s star has anything but waned over the years – with a crowd of fresh-faced young fans singing along word for word to songs both old and new.
Nostalgia reigned for large portions of the gig as Libertines classics including Up the Bracket and Boys in the Band were belted out with trademark vigour and that same Clash-like energy which won over a generation of music fans.
Famously documenting the then disintegrating friendships of frontmen Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, as Can’t Stand Me Now reached its chorus the mass of some 2,000-plus fans roared back the words; a racket that threatened to drown them out completely.
“Have we enough to keep it together? Or do we keep on pretending?” – sang Doherty, dressed in a denim waistcoat, but things couldn’t be further from the days of the group’s infamous December 2004 split.
Music fans always extol the atmosphere of an intimate gig. Intimacy is something that comes naturally to The Libertines.
Their show at the Alhambra was noisy, messy, rough-around-edges and 90-odd minutes of swaggering, passionate brilliance.
Itwas noisy and messy