At 46-years old Peter Doherty was able to fulfil his lifelong ambition of appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The Libertines frontman made his festival bow on Tuesday night, the first of two nights at Edinburgh’s La Belle Angele as part of the Big Nights at the Fringe Festival programme and was playing his second night on Wednesday.

Chaotic is a word that has been used to describe Doherty at various points during his career, and for reasons that are just as varied. The Libertines were chaotic. Babyshambles were chaotic. And there’s something quite chaotic about the situation as he strides on stage, apparently as the techs are setting the stage up for his performance, and begins playing his first song.

There is a closeness in La Belle Angele that immediately sparks that excitement of those long gone days of Doherty playing to a handful of people in a flat somewhere in Camden.

He weaves his own solo work amongst The Libertines tracks at breakneck speed. Each song demonstrating that while they may be two very different propositions - a Doherty song can be spotted at 100 paces. Felt Better Alive from this years album of the same name doesn’t feel a beat out of place alongside What a Waster and the euphoric Time for Heroes.

Peter Doherty on stage at La Belle Angele | NW

placeholder image — Peter Doherty on stage at La Belle Angele | NW

Can’t Stand Me Now is interupted briefly with a version of Run Run Run from 2024’s All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade. The songs were released 20 years apart, but the gap between them doesn’t feel like a moment.

There is also a brief interlude so Doherty, backed by support act Junior Brother, can read some poetry - ticking off another longheld ambition. It is moments like this that make this show special.

There is something remarkable about seeing Doherty aged 46, still with that cherubic face and full of the bohemian spirit that made him a magnet for people like myself. And the closer feels like it gives an answer as to what makes it so.

He ends with Don’t Look Back into the Sun, interwoven with Oasis’ Live Forever - apt given the Manchester band’s recent Murrayfield residence. But it also feels personally appropriate. Oasis were the band for the generation before mine. The Libertines felt like our generation’s band - all indie sleaze, military jackets, the love songs for your best mate. The lot of it.

Doherty feels, purposely, like a man out of time. He embodies a mythological England that is forever in a sort of perfect stasis filled with episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, aboard the good ship Albion heading towards that idealised, but not sanitised, version of a nation.