THE DUKE ON
THE RECORDED WORKS OF
BABYSHAMBLES
THE RECORDED WORKS OF
BABYSHAMBLES
What happened on Sunday was that Kilamangiro, the second
Babyshambles single, entered the UK Top Ten. The event marks
something of a watershed in the bizarre, deeply distressing and
agonisingly short history of the best band of the last
motherfucking decade.
The Duke could wax on and wax off about how amazing The Libertines
are from now till sometime next winter, most likely, and probably
wouldn’t even repeat myself, except for maybe a couple gratuitous
“motherfuck”’s. Chances are, though, the band will have imploded
before I get the first damn sentence out my face. The success of
the Babyshambles record, and the recent chaotic UK tour, makes
that all the more likely.
What it all boils down to, is that Peter Doherty was faced with an
ultimatum. Drop the crack, or get the fuck out The Libertines. It
was a tough-love approach, taken by the band, up-to-and-including
best mate and co-frontman Carl Barat, and also manager, Alan
MacGee, the man who discovered Oasis back in the hoary midsts of a
while back.
Doherty took himself off to various rehab centres, from The Priory
to Buddhist monasteries, returning to Britain after having bounded
free from both in pursuit of local dealers. He ended up in court
on a dangerous weapons charge, barely a year after spending time
in prison (after burgling Barat’s flat, grabbing laptops and
vintage guitars). It’s a ghoulishly compelling saga, and for folks
looking on, I imagine it reeks of nothing more than the antics of
another spoilt rock star.
For folks who actually give a rancid shit about the fella, about
the band, about the stunning, sublime music they create, it
amounts to a heartbreaking scenario.
So, shorn of ties with The Libertines, who did what they could and
then carried on fulfilling gig commitments without him, Doherty
took his side-project on the road. The Babyshambles tour this
autumn was characterised by late-arrivals (if, indeed, arrivals
were on the cards at all), last-minute decisions to abandon the
gig and invite everyone back to Doherty’s flat for an acoustic
session, and, of course, an army of Bohemian hipsters and culture
whores smoking crack with Doherty between performances, filling
his already dope-deluded head with ideas of grandiosity.
Pete Doherty is a sight, is what he is. Eyes sunk into his face,
the face of a 12 year old who was witnessed more than he can
handle, teeth and lips cracked and rotten, skeletal and in need of
a good kip and a fish supper.
Being addicted to something that’s destroying your soul is a
terrifying experience that probably more people know about than
folks might assume. Attempts to beat it in order to please friends
or family will invariably fall to a mangled heap. It needs to be a
solo operation. The chances of Pete gaining the momentum, though,
when one looks at those surrounding him, from the manager that
halts interviews so as his #1 attraction can go smoke rocks in a
spare room, to the groupies that thrill with every hint of
impending tragedy, seem depressingly slight.
But there’s hope, man. And look at this shit right here, a
motherfucking paragraph or sixty flung to the wind when all a man
meant to do was discuss the recorded works of Mr Doherty.
The point is, Kilamangiro is only the second official release, but
at least a half dozen albums-worth of material is available on the
web-net, some of it published at www.babyshambles.net, alongside
Pete’s scribblings and musings, and others at various points here
and there, points which could probably be spotted pretty quickly
with a google-shaped map of some sort.
Throughout these intense collections of gutter poetry and
ramshackle instrumentation, Kilamangiro crops up several times, in
various states of completion. Mostly, though, it appears under
it's original title, Kill A Man For His Giro, rather than the
horrible pun it’s been burdened with now. It also appears on the
bootleg collection of Libertines recordings, The Sailor Sessions,
illustrating the level of give-and-take between Libertines and
Babyshambles material. What Katie Did, for example, appears not
only on The Libertines self-titled second album, but also on
Babyshambles HQ Sessions 2, not to mention the likes of Don’t Look
Back Into The Sun, Music When The Lights Go Out and Can’t Stand Me
Now (retitled You Can’t Stand Me) on Peter Doherty – Untitled
Album.
The earliest Babyshambles recordings are by turns exhilarating,
haunting and distressing. Recorded with what sounds like a
microphone shoved up the hole of a cat on the next street, they
reek of smacked-out oblivion. Most feature Doherty strumming on
his acoustic, but quite a few are full-band numbers, although no
better recorded for the most part.
What emerges is a series of complete songs and a plethora of
fascinating sketches. Above all, one realises just how talented a
motherfucker Doherty is. Stripped raw (although it’s hard perhaps
to imagine anything much rawer than those official Libertines
records, in so far as contemporary rock goes, anyroad), he has
nothing to hide behind, neither the horrorshow spectacle nor the
rollicking bravura.
Tender, beautiful moments abound. Whitechapel Demonstrations
features a solo cover of Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only
Ones. It falls apart at the end, for sure, but for just over a
minute a fella could get lost in it.
Glasses clink and fall about throughout the stop-start rendition
of Love On The Dole (recorded much earlier with The Libertines, as
can be heard on the Legs 11 Bootleg), Pipey MacGraw begins with
the riff which would eventually find its way into What Became Of
The Likely Lads, Skag And Bone Man sounds like someone making it
up as they go along, which it possibly is.
Whitechapel Demonstrations serves as a companion piece to the
aforementioned HQ Sessions 2, although the latter introduces
electric instruments and even drums, by God. There’s a lengthy
instrumental which sounds like a buncha riffs being tried out, and
seven minutes worth of Sheepskin Tearaway, seemingly recorded mid-
composition. Ditto the ten minute version of Stix And Stones.
Buried amidst all the work-in-progress of HQ Sessions 2, though,
are a handful of genuinely astounding tracks. Lust Of The
Libertines and Pipey O’Brady (a modish, pounding, electric
reworking of Pipey MacGraw) are excellent.
In addition to the Babyshambles recordings, there’s also at least
two Peter Doherty “solo” collections. Untitled, and the cynically
monikered Shaking And Withdrawn Megamix, are astonishing records,
so intimate and wounded that it feels disgustingly voyeuristic to
be listening.
Or whatever the aural equivalent of voyeuristic might be. The fuck
do I know?
Comparisons are drawn left and right between Doherty and
Morrissey, mostly for their romantic yet brutal portrayals of
London, but these solo recordings invite closer parallels with the
occasionally distasteful personal sneers Morrissey so enjoys of an
occasion. Just as the genius behind You’re The One For Me, Fatty
and Hairdresser On Fire isn’t beneath slinging some “Northern
Leeches” remarks in the direction of ex-bandmates, so Doherty
spends an exhausting amount of his time penning “subtle” messages
to Barat and friends, messages that would probably be arrested if
they were any less veiled.
Some of the stuff on Untitled, for example, makes even the single
version of Kilamangiro, with its spoken word address to Barat (“If
by any chance you’re listening, I want you to know that you broke
my heart”) seem a bit fucking vague, to be honest.
I mean come on the fuck on Peter Doherty, how about a house
address or something, so as we might better understand who you’re
yacking on about.
Of all the unofficial stuff available, Untitled is probably the
most rewarding, a consistently brilliant set of songs, mostly
uninterrupted. The seventeen tracks open with a gorgeous, fragile
version of Can’t Stand Me Now, Doherty’s angelic reading making
his lyrics all the more touching.
The chorus has been appended with the lines “Oh, I read every
review / Oh, they all prefer you”, and the line about “Cornered,
the boy kicked out at the world / The world kicked back a lot
fucking harder” is heartbreaking.
Listening to it, it’s easy to understand the mothering instinct
Doherty brings out in so many fans. You want to hug him, tell him
it’ll be OK, folks understand, man. You’re nowhere near as lonely
as you think.
We never got a chance with Cobain, is all.
Pipey MacGregor makes another appearance on Untitled, probably the
best of all available versions, Doherty howling his way through
the lyrics like a Delta Bluesman rudely uprooted and flung into
Camden. It’s also rather worrying. “I hear voices of evil, telling
me to do murder”, he intones.
Arriving in the middle of The Libertines, Music When The Lights Go
Out serves as an unbearably poignant reminder of the state of
Barat and Doherty’s relationship. Here, though, it is revealed as,
no bullshit, the finest break-up song since She’s Got A new Spell
by Billy Bragg.
“Well is it cruel or kind not to speak my mind,
And to lie to you,
Rather than hurt you,
Well I’ll confess all of my sins, after several large gins,
But still I’ll hide from you,
Hide what’s inside from you,
And alarm bells ring when you say your heart still sings,
When you’re with me,
Darlin’ please forgive me,
I no longer hear the music.”
Albion, similarly, is beautiful, one of Doherty’s odes to the
capital, a song that can be found on the earliest of Libertines
recordings, including, fittingly enough, The Babyshambles
Sessions. Stix And Stones features an array of mumbled lyrics,
amongst which “That’s the end” and “Don’t look back into the
motherfucking sun” are strikingly coherent. Most revealing is the
line; “They said I was as good as dead / But there was hope / But
not for you and me my friend.”
This is without mentioning Killamangiro’s somewhat cloying
refrain; “Why would you pay to see me in a cage… That the whole
world calls a stage?” Is that an example of blind self-pity, or an
acknowledgement of his own helplessness, his own inability to step
out from the caricature he ever-rapidly constructs?
Who the fuck knows.
Shaking And Withdrawn Megamix shares a number of songs with
Untitled, amongst which are two versions of My Darling Clemantine
(fuck all to do with Huckleberry Hound, or, indeed, the Kirsten
Dunst picture about Jim Carrey forgets that Kate Winslet was in
Titanic), You Can’t Stand Me, The Ballad Of Grimaldi and Stix And
Stones. Again, there’s a couple tracks heard on Libertines
records, like Ha Ha Wall for example.
Curtain Call buries some remarkably barbed statements behind a
jaunty tune and a mouthful of gibberish. In-between the yacking
about “You ignore, adore, McGraw me” there’s sentiments along the
lines of; “If you really cared for me, Christ knows you’d let me
be.”
In addition;
“The curtain was calling,
As the sun set on a distant shore,
You were in the mirror balling,
If you want it so much, you can have it all”
And that’s without mentioning;
“I defy you all,
You know twice as much as nothing at all,
I defy you all,
I want ten times as much as ten times you all”
This tomfoolery perhaps makes more sense when one considers
Doherty’s increasingly paranoid view of not only Barat, nor The
Libertines as a whole, but their entourage and, especially manager
McGee, a man who paid for Doherty’s rehabilitation more than once,
and who saw his hopes trounced as his genius-on-the-payroll
escaped to Paris and Thailand.
Shaking And Withdrawn also has a version of The Smiths There Is A
Light That Never Goes Out which lasts approximately two lines
before Doherty moves on to something else.
The second rendition of My Darling Clemantine is a more coherent
affair than the others, and as such, perhaps more disturbing. It
isn’t especially far-fetched to read it as a drug ballad;
“I bless and curse the day I found you, wonder why,
But you’re always welcome here”
Then the garbled “I really need you”
There She Goes has a finger-picked, Nick Drake-esque intro, with a
beautiful chorus dealing with the “dancing to Northern Soul”,
before venturing off once more on the “Dirty road to fame”.
The lyrics in the version of Can’t Stand Me Now are notably
different from the version on the second Libertines album, now
appearing to be an attack on Barat and MacGee;
“No, you’ve got it the wrong way round,
Two shadowed men tore in to keep him out and down”
Doherty sounds positively demented throughout the squealing, then
whispering, of the closing Stix And Stones.
The fact that so much material is available, for free, online,
speaks volumes about the importance of The Libertines, of Pete
Doherty, of Babyshambles. Harping on about quality-control or the
abundance of half-finished (or half-started) work-outs is missing
the point. Doherty has invited folks in, has completely removed
the barrier between “Artist” and “Audience”, something evident to
anyone who watched as 30 folks scrabbled for taxis outside
concerts following Doherty’s invitation to come round and hear
some tunes.
And also other extra-curricular activity.
I have a love for the fella, and yet being so enamoured of him is
a frustratingly disheartening affair at times. With no disrespect
to the other members of Babyshambles, what The Duke would love to
see is Barat and a cleaned-up Doherty reconciling and sailing the
good ship Albion as they so promised.
Witness this, plucked at random from the Babyshambles forum;
Peter – “from one extremis and to another
a pencil drawing of an occasion to see my peace
reflected
chalky and tired now in the window of a closing shop almost on the
corner
a peace is upon me though I've a thing to say that sticks throaty
in the spaces
whisper it up an alley to shadow like echoing light
the drawn out confessions of the morning to come
and oh
up the morning
yeah you
I loves ya .”
Han – “what happened.
tepholone?
let me know. oh. heard u were on seedyU.K. missed it
but please call about some other stuffs
ta-x”
If you know of another top-ten artist, fresh from number-one
success with no less than two bands, and a no.7 single with
another, who is willing, who in fact requires, this level of grass-
roots communication with the people who put him there, then
obviously you got some fuckin super-powered version of Google that
I ain’t ever even dreamed of.
Not that I dream about search engines, and if I did, they’d
probably be naked and lady-shaped.
Pete Doherty is a genius, a cherub-faced troubadour who has
unfortunately bought into his own myth. Self-destructive rock-
stars may be entertaining for the folks who pick up the NME for to
see what the crazy motherfucker has got up to next, but for the
folks who genuinely care, it’s incredibly painful.
NME voting him “Coolest Person On The Planet” a couple weeks back
(albeit tied at number one with Carl Barat), seems not only
stupid, but almost motherfucking homicidal. He may well be,
indeed, the coolest person on the planet, but the dead-eyed shell
falling from stages left and right needs no encouragement to
continue on that path.
You’re a genius, lad. Whether you feel the need to add some sort
of legitimacy to it all with a “tortured-” tagged on front is,
alas, something that needs to be addressed pretty fucking sharpish.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email
Babyshambles single, entered the UK Top Ten. The event marks
something of a watershed in the bizarre, deeply distressing and
agonisingly short history of the best band of the last
motherfucking decade.
The Duke could wax on and wax off about how amazing The Libertines
are from now till sometime next winter, most likely, and probably
wouldn’t even repeat myself, except for maybe a couple gratuitous
“motherfuck”’s. Chances are, though, the band will have imploded
before I get the first damn sentence out my face. The success of
the Babyshambles record, and the recent chaotic UK tour, makes
that all the more likely.
What it all boils down to, is that Peter Doherty was faced with an
ultimatum. Drop the crack, or get the fuck out The Libertines. It
was a tough-love approach, taken by the band, up-to-and-including
best mate and co-frontman Carl Barat, and also manager, Alan
MacGee, the man who discovered Oasis back in the hoary midsts of a
while back.
Doherty took himself off to various rehab centres, from The Priory
to Buddhist monasteries, returning to Britain after having bounded
free from both in pursuit of local dealers. He ended up in court
on a dangerous weapons charge, barely a year after spending time
in prison (after burgling Barat’s flat, grabbing laptops and
vintage guitars). It’s a ghoulishly compelling saga, and for folks
looking on, I imagine it reeks of nothing more than the antics of
another spoilt rock star.
For folks who actually give a rancid shit about the fella, about
the band, about the stunning, sublime music they create, it
amounts to a heartbreaking scenario.
So, shorn of ties with The Libertines, who did what they could and
then carried on fulfilling gig commitments without him, Doherty
took his side-project on the road. The Babyshambles tour this
autumn was characterised by late-arrivals (if, indeed, arrivals
were on the cards at all), last-minute decisions to abandon the
gig and invite everyone back to Doherty’s flat for an acoustic
session, and, of course, an army of Bohemian hipsters and culture
whores smoking crack with Doherty between performances, filling
his already dope-deluded head with ideas of grandiosity.
Pete Doherty is a sight, is what he is. Eyes sunk into his face,
the face of a 12 year old who was witnessed more than he can
handle, teeth and lips cracked and rotten, skeletal and in need of
a good kip and a fish supper.
Being addicted to something that’s destroying your soul is a
terrifying experience that probably more people know about than
folks might assume. Attempts to beat it in order to please friends
or family will invariably fall to a mangled heap. It needs to be a
solo operation. The chances of Pete gaining the momentum, though,
when one looks at those surrounding him, from the manager that
halts interviews so as his #1 attraction can go smoke rocks in a
spare room, to the groupies that thrill with every hint of
impending tragedy, seem depressingly slight.
But there’s hope, man. And look at this shit right here, a
motherfucking paragraph or sixty flung to the wind when all a man
meant to do was discuss the recorded works of Mr Doherty.
The point is, Kilamangiro is only the second official release, but
at least a half dozen albums-worth of material is available on the
web-net, some of it published at www.babyshambles.net, alongside
Pete’s scribblings and musings, and others at various points here
and there, points which could probably be spotted pretty quickly
with a google-shaped map of some sort.
Throughout these intense collections of gutter poetry and
ramshackle instrumentation, Kilamangiro crops up several times, in
various states of completion. Mostly, though, it appears under
it's original title, Kill A Man For His Giro, rather than the
horrible pun it’s been burdened with now. It also appears on the
bootleg collection of Libertines recordings, The Sailor Sessions,
illustrating the level of give-and-take between Libertines and
Babyshambles material. What Katie Did, for example, appears not
only on The Libertines self-titled second album, but also on
Babyshambles HQ Sessions 2, not to mention the likes of Don’t Look
Back Into The Sun, Music When The Lights Go Out and Can’t Stand Me
Now (retitled You Can’t Stand Me) on Peter Doherty – Untitled
Album.
The earliest Babyshambles recordings are by turns exhilarating,
haunting and distressing. Recorded with what sounds like a
microphone shoved up the hole of a cat on the next street, they
reek of smacked-out oblivion. Most feature Doherty strumming on
his acoustic, but quite a few are full-band numbers, although no
better recorded for the most part.
What emerges is a series of complete songs and a plethora of
fascinating sketches. Above all, one realises just how talented a
motherfucker Doherty is. Stripped raw (although it’s hard perhaps
to imagine anything much rawer than those official Libertines
records, in so far as contemporary rock goes, anyroad), he has
nothing to hide behind, neither the horrorshow spectacle nor the
rollicking bravura.
Tender, beautiful moments abound. Whitechapel Demonstrations
features a solo cover of Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only
Ones. It falls apart at the end, for sure, but for just over a
minute a fella could get lost in it.
Glasses clink and fall about throughout the stop-start rendition
of Love On The Dole (recorded much earlier with The Libertines, as
can be heard on the Legs 11 Bootleg), Pipey MacGraw begins with
the riff which would eventually find its way into What Became Of
The Likely Lads, Skag And Bone Man sounds like someone making it
up as they go along, which it possibly is.
Whitechapel Demonstrations serves as a companion piece to the
aforementioned HQ Sessions 2, although the latter introduces
electric instruments and even drums, by God. There’s a lengthy
instrumental which sounds like a buncha riffs being tried out, and
seven minutes worth of Sheepskin Tearaway, seemingly recorded mid-
composition. Ditto the ten minute version of Stix And Stones.
Buried amidst all the work-in-progress of HQ Sessions 2, though,
are a handful of genuinely astounding tracks. Lust Of The
Libertines and Pipey O’Brady (a modish, pounding, electric
reworking of Pipey MacGraw) are excellent.
In addition to the Babyshambles recordings, there’s also at least
two Peter Doherty “solo” collections. Untitled, and the cynically
monikered Shaking And Withdrawn Megamix, are astonishing records,
so intimate and wounded that it feels disgustingly voyeuristic to
be listening.
Or whatever the aural equivalent of voyeuristic might be. The fuck
do I know?
Comparisons are drawn left and right between Doherty and
Morrissey, mostly for their romantic yet brutal portrayals of
London, but these solo recordings invite closer parallels with the
occasionally distasteful personal sneers Morrissey so enjoys of an
occasion. Just as the genius behind You’re The One For Me, Fatty
and Hairdresser On Fire isn’t beneath slinging some “Northern
Leeches” remarks in the direction of ex-bandmates, so Doherty
spends an exhausting amount of his time penning “subtle” messages
to Barat and friends, messages that would probably be arrested if
they were any less veiled.
Some of the stuff on Untitled, for example, makes even the single
version of Kilamangiro, with its spoken word address to Barat (“If
by any chance you’re listening, I want you to know that you broke
my heart”) seem a bit fucking vague, to be honest.
I mean come on the fuck on Peter Doherty, how about a house
address or something, so as we might better understand who you’re
yacking on about.
Of all the unofficial stuff available, Untitled is probably the
most rewarding, a consistently brilliant set of songs, mostly
uninterrupted. The seventeen tracks open with a gorgeous, fragile
version of Can’t Stand Me Now, Doherty’s angelic reading making
his lyrics all the more touching.
The chorus has been appended with the lines “Oh, I read every
review / Oh, they all prefer you”, and the line about “Cornered,
the boy kicked out at the world / The world kicked back a lot
fucking harder” is heartbreaking.
Listening to it, it’s easy to understand the mothering instinct
Doherty brings out in so many fans. You want to hug him, tell him
it’ll be OK, folks understand, man. You’re nowhere near as lonely
as you think.
We never got a chance with Cobain, is all.
Pipey MacGregor makes another appearance on Untitled, probably the
best of all available versions, Doherty howling his way through
the lyrics like a Delta Bluesman rudely uprooted and flung into
Camden. It’s also rather worrying. “I hear voices of evil, telling
me to do murder”, he intones.
Arriving in the middle of The Libertines, Music When The Lights Go
Out serves as an unbearably poignant reminder of the state of
Barat and Doherty’s relationship. Here, though, it is revealed as,
no bullshit, the finest break-up song since She’s Got A new Spell
by Billy Bragg.
“Well is it cruel or kind not to speak my mind,
And to lie to you,
Rather than hurt you,
Well I’ll confess all of my sins, after several large gins,
But still I’ll hide from you,
Hide what’s inside from you,
And alarm bells ring when you say your heart still sings,
When you’re with me,
Darlin’ please forgive me,
I no longer hear the music.”
Albion, similarly, is beautiful, one of Doherty’s odes to the
capital, a song that can be found on the earliest of Libertines
recordings, including, fittingly enough, The Babyshambles
Sessions. Stix And Stones features an array of mumbled lyrics,
amongst which “That’s the end” and “Don’t look back into the
motherfucking sun” are strikingly coherent. Most revealing is the
line; “They said I was as good as dead / But there was hope / But
not for you and me my friend.”
This is without mentioning Killamangiro’s somewhat cloying
refrain; “Why would you pay to see me in a cage… That the whole
world calls a stage?” Is that an example of blind self-pity, or an
acknowledgement of his own helplessness, his own inability to step
out from the caricature he ever-rapidly constructs?
Who the fuck knows.
Shaking And Withdrawn Megamix shares a number of songs with
Untitled, amongst which are two versions of My Darling Clemantine
(fuck all to do with Huckleberry Hound, or, indeed, the Kirsten
Dunst picture about Jim Carrey forgets that Kate Winslet was in
Titanic), You Can’t Stand Me, The Ballad Of Grimaldi and Stix And
Stones. Again, there’s a couple tracks heard on Libertines
records, like Ha Ha Wall for example.
Curtain Call buries some remarkably barbed statements behind a
jaunty tune and a mouthful of gibberish. In-between the yacking
about “You ignore, adore, McGraw me” there’s sentiments along the
lines of; “If you really cared for me, Christ knows you’d let me
be.”
In addition;
“The curtain was calling,
As the sun set on a distant shore,
You were in the mirror balling,
If you want it so much, you can have it all”
And that’s without mentioning;
“I defy you all,
You know twice as much as nothing at all,
I defy you all,
I want ten times as much as ten times you all”
This tomfoolery perhaps makes more sense when one considers
Doherty’s increasingly paranoid view of not only Barat, nor The
Libertines as a whole, but their entourage and, especially manager
McGee, a man who paid for Doherty’s rehabilitation more than once,
and who saw his hopes trounced as his genius-on-the-payroll
escaped to Paris and Thailand.
Shaking And Withdrawn also has a version of The Smiths There Is A
Light That Never Goes Out which lasts approximately two lines
before Doherty moves on to something else.
The second rendition of My Darling Clemantine is a more coherent
affair than the others, and as such, perhaps more disturbing. It
isn’t especially far-fetched to read it as a drug ballad;
“I bless and curse the day I found you, wonder why,
But you’re always welcome here”
Then the garbled “I really need you”
There She Goes has a finger-picked, Nick Drake-esque intro, with a
beautiful chorus dealing with the “dancing to Northern Soul”,
before venturing off once more on the “Dirty road to fame”.
The lyrics in the version of Can’t Stand Me Now are notably
different from the version on the second Libertines album, now
appearing to be an attack on Barat and MacGee;
“No, you’ve got it the wrong way round,
Two shadowed men tore in to keep him out and down”
Doherty sounds positively demented throughout the squealing, then
whispering, of the closing Stix And Stones.
The fact that so much material is available, for free, online,
speaks volumes about the importance of The Libertines, of Pete
Doherty, of Babyshambles. Harping on about quality-control or the
abundance of half-finished (or half-started) work-outs is missing
the point. Doherty has invited folks in, has completely removed
the barrier between “Artist” and “Audience”, something evident to
anyone who watched as 30 folks scrabbled for taxis outside
concerts following Doherty’s invitation to come round and hear
some tunes.
And also other extra-curricular activity.
I have a love for the fella, and yet being so enamoured of him is
a frustratingly disheartening affair at times. With no disrespect
to the other members of Babyshambles, what The Duke would love to
see is Barat and a cleaned-up Doherty reconciling and sailing the
good ship Albion as they so promised.
Witness this, plucked at random from the Babyshambles forum;
Peter – “from one extremis and to another
a pencil drawing of an occasion to see my peace
reflected
chalky and tired now in the window of a closing shop almost on the
corner
a peace is upon me though I've a thing to say that sticks throaty
in the spaces
whisper it up an alley to shadow like echoing light
the drawn out confessions of the morning to come
and oh
up the morning
yeah you
I loves ya .”
Han – “what happened.
tepholone?
let me know. oh. heard u were on seedyU.K. missed it
but please call about some other stuffs
ta-x”
If you know of another top-ten artist, fresh from number-one
success with no less than two bands, and a no.7 single with
another, who is willing, who in fact requires, this level of grass-
roots communication with the people who put him there, then
obviously you got some fuckin super-powered version of Google that
I ain’t ever even dreamed of.
Not that I dream about search engines, and if I did, they’d
probably be naked and lady-shaped.
Pete Doherty is a genius, a cherub-faced troubadour who has
unfortunately bought into his own myth. Self-destructive rock-
stars may be entertaining for the folks who pick up the NME for to
see what the crazy motherfucker has got up to next, but for the
folks who genuinely care, it’s incredibly painful.
NME voting him “Coolest Person On The Planet” a couple weeks back
(albeit tied at number one with Carl Barat), seems not only
stupid, but almost motherfucking homicidal. He may well be,
indeed, the coolest person on the planet, but the dead-eyed shell
falling from stages left and right needs no encouragement to
continue on that path.
You’re a genius, lad. Whether you feel the need to add some sort
of legitimacy to it all with a “tortured-” tagged on front is,
alas, something that needs to be addressed pretty fucking sharpish.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email
