It is not easy to kickstart a fresh musical career after you've been in a painfully fashionable – and intermittently brilliant – band. It is even harder when this is your second bash at starting out again. And harder still when a couple of months ago you trousered enough money to keep you in leather jackets for a lifetime by briefly reforming that original band for a pair of festival cameos. Yet last night erstwhile Libertine and ex-Dirty Pretty Thing Carl Barât did enough to suggest that, if he digs his heels in, his personal rock drama might have a memorable third act yet.
Barât's recent eponymous album saw him moving away from full-on garage-band mode with influences that range from Brecht to Brel. Onstage he offered something of a buy-one-Barât-get-the-old-one-free deal as he shuttled between the fresh and the familiar. At first things looked a little wobbly as he worked through newer tracks such as the self-abasing "Je Regrette, Je Regrette" without a guitar for comfort, but the recent Jam-meets-Morrissey-behind-Thin-Lizzy’s-bikesheds single "Run with the Boys" hit the right note and when he slammed into The Libertines' screamalong "Man Who Would be King" proceedings ignited.
This, of course, is Barât's conundrum. Every time he did an old song, such as the catchily ramshackle "Up the Bracket", one could feel the gig soar. Yet the new material, reflecting the singer's ups and downs, is extremely engaging. "The Fall", with its Genet-like sea-shanty sensibility could be the finest song Scott Walker never wrote, while "So Long, My Lover" had a glorious music-hall sweep, aided by soul-tinged backing vocals and a string section squeezing onto the stage. One of the new album’s strongest tracks, the atmospheric “Carve My Name” took woozy, gin-soaked Romanticism to dizzy heights with the line: "I've carved my name on the livers of my lovers."
The new, more complex material finds Barât moving away from his past stylistically, but there was no getting away from the fact that a lot of the audience last night was there to here the old riffs. One could almost sense the surge to the bar of young men in Fred Perry shirts whenever Barât picked up his acoustic guitar and introduced a newer number. And when they weren't heading to the bar they were perpetually peeping into the wings to see if Pete Doherty was waiting to come on. It was not to be, though a large optimistic contingent stayed behind even when the gig ended in the hope of some Doherty fairydust.
As lone frontman – his band is solid but anonymous – Barât is not the force he was alongside Doherty, where they had an undeniable homoerotic appeal. He currently aspires to Jim Morrison’s snake-hipped lovegod status, but when he stripped to his vest and tight black jeans the effect was more mime artiste's leotard than Lizard King incarnate. But at least Barât is not overshadowed. This is his chance to shine and foreground his European poetic roots, so often hidden by Doherty's abiding obsession with Albion, and he largely grabbed it. On the thrashed-out punk rock of "Bang Bang You're Dead" which closed the show proper, however, he was more Lurker than Lorca.
This was a gig that gradually broke away from the past but never ignored it. It was touching rather than cynical that Barât acknowledged his history but maybe he should have resisted finishing his encore with The Libertines' "Don't Look Back into the Sun". Barât should be looking forward, not back at anything at all.
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