Clockenflap: The Libertines are reunited and ready to rock Hong Kong
More than a decade after breaking up amid a haze of drugs and recrimination, The Libertines are back with Pete Doherty and heading for Clockenflap
To the uninitiated, The Libertines are a tabloid cartoon of punching pals who couldn’t handle the excesses of rock’n’roll fame.
But behind the headlines that have swirled around one of the biggest coup bookings at this year’s Clockenflap festival is a band that have battled demons, drugs and violence to become one of the most vital and visceral acts in the world.
Having reunited earlier this year after more than a decade of one-off gigs and rumours of a reformation, Pete Doherty, Carl Barat, Gary Powell and John Hassell will arrive in Hong Kong for their performance at West Kowloon on November 28 as a tightly knit unit once again.
READ MORE: The life and near deaths of Pete Doherty, frontman of Clockenflap headliners The Libertines
They may not be as close as they were during their heyday in the early Noughties, when they rewrote the rulebook for garage rock in two albums that alloyed furious open-heart paeans of love, life and friendship to spiky indie-punk. But they are certainly closer than during their wilderness years when lifelong friends Doherty and Barat seemed to spend most of their time sniping at each other or, in Pete’s case, burgling his friend’s home.
“We’ve probably spoken to each other more this morning than we did for months at a time when we were living together back in the [old] days,” Doherty told Spin magazine earlier this year, referring to one of rock’s most acrimonious splits. “It wasn’t even a question of body language back then either. You just snarl and you noticed right away.”
For fans, the break up of the band in 2004 was heartbreaking. The Libertines had forged a new consensus in rock, one that had given independent music back to the fans. In a riot of so-called guerilla gigs at friends’ flats, in the band’s romantic vision of an English music that encompassed the values of Albion (the oldest known name of the island of Great Britain) and in their grotty street-urchin appearance, they rescued indie from a slow death brought on by the gaudy success of Britpop in the late 1990s.
