Attention, aspiring Bay-area music writers: Your local tabloid may soon have an opening

Okay, I know I promised no more Libertines posts for a while. But this is too good to pass up, and anyway, it’s not really about them.

Looking forward to their Toronto date next week, I thought it’d be fun to look up a couple of reviews from their other North American dates. And so I happened upon this write-up from San Francisco. It begins promisingly enough, with an assessment that “Britain's rock scene is stronger than it's been in years; and at the very front of the country's high-profile pack are The Libertines.” But then things go badly off the rails.

See, I don’t claim to be an expert reviewer; since it’s not really my main gig, I always feel like I’m one slip-up away from being found out. But I’d like to think that, at the very least, I wouldn’t go to one of these shows and praise Pete Doherty for having “finally gotten his act together, enough, at least, to lead his band through a hard-charging set of cuts…” Nor would I write about him “opening the band’s set with The Delaney,” or about how he and Carl Barat “spared the crowd the usual between-song ramblings, opting to let the music speak for them.”

Why not? Because if nothing else, I pride myself on knowing who’s on the bloody stage. And unless our intrepid reviewer was hanging around a London crackhouse, I can safely assure him that Pete Doherty – not currently a member of the band he was reviewing – was nowhere in site.

On the bright side, at least he enjoyed the show. Too bad he had no idea who he was seeing.