Carl Barat and Pete Doherty, together again. Yawn. Photograph: Jean/EMPICS
Am I the only person who was deeply unmoved by the reunion of Pete Doherty and Carl Barat last night? The response from the crowd at the Hackney Empire when Barat took the stage seems to suggest so. When Barat, whose creative and personal relationship with Doherty disintegrated due in large part to the latter's predilection for Class A drugs, joined his fellow one-time Libertine, a kind of hysteria broke out. Likewise, the press coverage this morning was just short of rapturous. The sentiment on repeat was, "This is what we've all been waiting for." Well, not me.
Because amid all this hyperbole, there is something very simple that is continually and blindly ignored en masse: the Libertines were never very good.
At their best, the band produced perfectly fine pop singles like Can't Stand Me Now, a wild, call-and-response track that made the best of Barat and Doherty's strained and intense friendship. But, for the most part, the average Libertine lyric was indulgently self-referential and the music, in contrast, was far from grandiose. They made decent enough indie pop, but failed to push the boundaries beyond the dully derivative - their sound lying listlessly somewhere between the Kinks and the Jam.
Admittedly, there was something about their guerrilla approach to music that seemed to give the British music scene a bit of a kick up the arse, the fuss that surrounded them almost certainly reflecting the fact that they removed the traditional boundaries between fans and bands with their spontaneous gigs and online fan base.
But having gone their separate ways in 2003, and with their solo work producing only meagre results, the legend of the Libertines has continued to grow. Fans clung to hopes of an eventual reconciliation. But last night's performance by the two former Libertines' frontmen hardly vindicates those desires.
While a poor quality video posted on YouTube is hardly a reliable source when it comes to capturing the atmosphere of the night, all I observed from those clips was just how little chemistry and cohesion there seems to have been between Doherty and Barat. The result was pretty shambolic. Not romantically so, not in a bohemian kind of way - there were no tortured geniuses here. Just a mediocre performance and some average tunes.
