Culture Music Live music

The Libertines at the Forum

The Libertines at the Forum | Live review

28^th February 2022

Ronan Fawsitt

28 February 2022

The Libertines, fronted by Carl Barât and Pete Doherty, deliver a crowd-pleasing set of their greatest hits at Kentish Town’s Forum. Following a last-minute cancellation in Bristol after an unspecified respiratory illness from notorious frontman Doherty, the veteran indie rockers return to London for their long rescheduled Giddy Up a Ding Dong tour – and boy, is it worth the wait.

They open their penultimate gig, following impressive sets from Vona Vella and Dead Freights, with What a Waster: a fan favourite, guitar-slashing track off debut album Up the Bracket (a record fast approaching its 20^th anniversary in June, to be celebrated with a performance at Newcastle’s Rock’n’Roll Circus festival). The night is teeming with tracks picked from their early albums, but, with a catalogue as heavily weighted in the formative years of their tenure, who can blame The Libertines for embracing their early work? After all, it was only in 2015 when their third album was unveiled to the world.

Doherty and Carl Barât, two 00s Brit-rock titans, are as electric as they were in their heyday, bouncing off each other effortlessly as they deliver track after track of classic Libertines tunes. For their hit song What Katie Did (a romantic anthem that may or may not be about Doherty’s ex-partner Kate Moss), Barat plants a rose in the mouth of his creative partner, before throwing petals of his own into the crowd. With a stage presence as bold as The Libertines’, it’s hard not to fantasise about what might have been if the band hadn’t had to deal with the fallout of their own personal differences all those years ago.

Later offerings like the piano-driven You’re My Waterloo – a stirring and melancholic track that attempts to slow down the tempo in the hall – and the pulsating rhythms of Gunga Din off their 2015 album Anthems for Doomed Youth prove to be hits for the die-hard devotees in the crowd. Meanwhile, earlier tracks such as Can’t Stand Me Now (a highlight that sets the tone for the evening with fans joining in the anthemic choral cry of Doherty’s vocals) deliver what the audience expects from this iconic group. The show comes to a close with an encore that includes Time for Heroes and their greatest hit, Don’t Look Back into the Sun, the latter a true standout that even the least initiated of attendees (of whom there were noticeably few for such a packed-out evening) can sing along with. A true-to-form outing from the Brit-rock heroes that can only signal that the best is yet to come for the The Libertines.