The Libertines, SSE Hydro, Glasgow, review: Lose some potency in unfamiliar setting

Like a doomed soap opera couple, the nation loves to watch them bicker. The Libertines’ creative tent pegs Pete Doherty and Carl Barât are back together, reunited on record and once again touring, a decade on from the corrosive split that ended them. For several thousand singing, pint-chucking fans in this vast arena, it appears to be a comeback worth waiting for – a return to a wayward youth that doesn’t feel all that long ago, but which it’s apparently taken Doherty this long to grow out of.

Yet for anyone who saw The Libertines the first time around – a simultaneously thrilling, ramshackle and unpleasantly off-the-rails experience – this performance might have seemed altogether alien. Not from the heart of the heated moshpit during signature tracks like “Can’t Stand Me Now” and “Time for Heroes”, but around the fringes of the hall and up in the tiered seats, where the sheer scale of the show was apparent.

It looks like an arena show and sounds like an arena show. The band’s large, die-cut logo hangs above their heads, alongside large mirrors which give the set the air of an Eighties disco and the ubiquitous video screen to give everyone in the house a sense of intimacy. With it, we can more easily see how fresh Doherty looks now; black suit, white shirt, bowler hat, droogish hair a little too long for its brim at the back. Barât, by comparison, wears a leather jacket and a black cowboy hat, a combination of which Neil Young might be proud.

Behind them, shirtless drummer Gary Powell can be seen sweating ferociously, his deep, thudding beats key to the band’s sound filling the space. Only bassist John Hassall wears the red, Zulu-style military coat that became a signature of the band’s early look; he and the two anachronistic cigarette girls skipping on with usher’s trays to offer the band unspecified refreshments at intervals. “I asked for ginger,” beams Doherty to one of them, his Scottish accent and knowledge of local slang for Irn-Bru are both impressive.

Yet this wasn’t an intimate show. A short walk off to the east lies King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut and the long since closed Barfly, both venues where this band enjoyed sweat-box shows and could spontaneously invite the audience to join them onstage. The Libertines weren’t built for arenas, it seems, where the overlong tuning breaks and laid-back meanderings of “What Katie Did”, for example, sound exposed.

It’s the new songs from last year’s comeback album Anthems for Doomed Youth that best rise to the occasion, in many ways, especially the title track with its mournful what-could-have-been air to that plaintive “life could be so handsome” chorus, and “You’re My Waterloo” initiated by Barât on piano accompanying Doherty singing while framed in a spotlight. Then, when it came the time for the encore, “Up the Bracket”, “What a Waster” and “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” were a decisive reminder of this band’s full potency, which didn’t always quite find itself exercised in this unfamiliar setting.