Enjoyably scruffy chaos from Camden’s one-time likely lads
Oh, what’s become of the likely lads. Twenty years ago, had you looked to the year 2021, it is doubtful that The Libertines would have featured in it. They may have been the kings of a thrilling, rootsy, ultra-cool Camden-centric music scene, 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 – more that the wheels being close to falling off at all times was simply part of their DNA. Longevity wasn’t in the plan; there never was a plan.
Getting back together for shows in 2010, and recording 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 unrecognisable, The Libertines’ spirit is as proudly messy and pub-carpet-hearted as ever.
As Carl Barât and Doherty shambled onstage in these grand surrounds, with the awesome, lit-up ruin of Rochester Castle facing them, and lurched into the opener, What a Waster, they remained a charmingly unslick proposition. Not just their spotlit lead duo – now, admittedly, more “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 the band.
Every solo sounded as though it had just been shakily learned, then 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.
Where The Libertines excelled, however, was in creating an air of rowdy togetherness. The setting may have loomed unignorably large, but whenever they brought out the big guns, such as 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 had been written about them.
“This is all right, isn’t it?” nodded Doherty to the crowd early on. “A bit of live music’s all right, down at the old castle by the river.”
Better than all right. What became of the likely lads? Surprisingly, they’re doing brilliantly. Who saw that coming back then?