The Libertines' Pete Doherty writes rambling review of his own gigs: 'I felt as though I was ballsing it up bad'

The singer made NME promise to print his account of their Glasgow shows

Pete Doherty (L) with Carl Barat (R) at The Libertines' reunion gig in Hyde Park (Getty Images)

Pete Doherty has penned a review of his own Libertines reunion gigs and it’s as bizarre, rambling and ‘written at 6am’ as you might expect.

Scroll to read the review in full

The singer wrote his hand-typed account in the bath of Blythswood Hotel in Glasgow and passed it on to NME with one simple ask in return: “Promise you’ll print this!”

Print it they did, and now everyone knows how worried Doherty was about “ballsing it all up again”.

The 35-year-old musician was asked to leave the group in 2004 because of his well-publicised drug addictions.

But now, the “Boys in the Band” are back together and full of “unity and celebratory energy”, even if Doherty does need to “make a point of swotting up on the old ‘I Get Along’ solo”.

Two nights at Glasgow’s Barrowlands served as warm-up shows for The Libertines’ “humdinger of a homecoming” Hyde Park gig earlier this month.

Here’s what the co-frontman thought of those gigs:

“Two nights at the Barrowlands and the Libertines revival is upon us…Hyde Park being the humdinger of a homecoming and me with me feet still in water. Bejaysus my ears are still ringing and its 6 in the morning. Random disconnected sentences rattle out of this tidy Tippa 7 shreibmachine. I use the German title for her because she is covered in umlauts. Look: Ö ä Ü…to say nothing of the ß.

“The little bell that signals the end of a line is now redundant with this bleedin’ weird resonant chime that fills my head. Yes, it was f**king loud last night and that’s no lie. What else…well, two specific moments help me to make sense of it all. The opening song was Vertigo. And I couldn’t really get into it. My hand was shaking so violently. Awful. I felt as though I was ballsing it up bad, and that the lads were angry. “Pete’s ballsing it all up again” etc.

“Turns out that they thought we played a blinder and me in particular. No accounting for taste. The previous night – the first of the two Barrowlands ‘warm up’ shows, I reckon was the tighter, the mightier, the most successful.

“Gary thought the opposite…in reality the crowd was so impassioned and partial and pagan in aspect that all quibblings about things as petty as whether or not one played a stinker in a paranoiac, palpitating personal hell become pointless. Saying that I must make a point of swotting up on the old I GET ALONG solo.

“The other moment forever now frozen in time, like a newborn wooly mammoth wide-eyed and very much dead in an arctic ice block, is more uplifting. Don’t look back into the sun was joyous and sheeeet if even the dead frozen mammoth wouldn’t have his cockles warmed a tad by the unity and celebratory energy that the old barrowlands sprung dancefloor bounced with…Christ my ears are f**ked.

“Hilld and sheeps and butterflies, naked boubous running happily in rays of sunshine, oups m dreaming…see you later”