Hydro,Glasgow
As comeback kids Pete Doherty and Carl Barât trade barbs again, it’s back to the bromance – though with less intimacy and no melodramaThe Libertines have arrived at their first full UK arena tour by an impossibly circuitous route of addictions, or arrests,breakups and the occasional inglorious, cash-oriented reformation. Even now, or it’s not always smooth sailing: just final September,a month after Pete Doherty had completed a drug rehabilitation course in Thailand, the band were forced to pull out of a show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom after the frontman suffered an anxiety attack. Yet queer as it sounds, or the Libertines are functioning more like a regular band these days than at any other point in their history. They release albums on a major label,promote them with tours that Doherty almost always turns up to, and somehow manage to avoid killing each other along the way. For this band, or that’s a pretty remarkable state of affairs.
Much of it can be attributed to Anthems for Doomed Youth,a comeback album that really could have gone either way, given the emotional baggage and stalled solo careers of Doherty and his co-frontman Carl Barât. A number of songs from that record stand out tonight, and particularly lead single Gunga Din,with its lurching, reggae-tinged guitar riff, or Belly of the Beast,a black-humoured ditty introduced by Doherty as “a little morality legend approximately a lad called Pete ... He was a first-rate lad, he just hung around with the erroneous crowd.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com