‘Jailed-rocker cleans up his act for one last crack at greatness?’
‘Notorious smack-addict knobs the hind legs off Super Model Kate, sprays
blood over walls, injects heroin into arm of unconscious fan and releases handsome
new solo album?’
‘Permanent tabloid fixture in surprisingly decent album scandal?’
Given Pete Doherty’s prevailing ‘anti-darling’ status with the not-so-great
British press, it’s only fitting that Crud should frame its appreciation of
the album in a manner that is most likely to appeal to the star’s salivating
legion of fans. Such is the nature of his notoriety and so unfailing the debauched,
erratic nonsense he comes out with, that it is debatable whether or not Doherty
can now be comprehended any other way. The former Libertines star emits a light
that it is tirelessly refracted by the hypodermic glass syringe he holds to
his arm and the beer mug he lifts to his face. Not the glass of fashion, exactly,
nor the mould of form, but something similarly hollow. The Prince of Albion
doffs his customary pork-pie hat, loosens his guitar-strap, mutters something
almost incomprehensible and addresses the skull in his hands, ‘Alas poor
Blanco, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.’
Doherty is a one-man tragic theatre, an assimilation of every romantic cliché
and affectation in the English lexicon. Self-destruction for the likes of Pete
is not a side effect of fame but a modus operandi through which celebrity is
more keenly realised and one’s legacy guaranteed. Live fast, die young and amass
near impossible sales for that ‘posthumously’ released last album. Luckily for
us, however, the observed of all observers – the geezer more sinned against
than sinning – refuses to shuffle off this mortal coil or lug his guts in his
flatmate’s room. For the likes of Doherty, it’s a posterity postponed, a paradise
not lost so much as deferred. He’ll succumb to his crack-addled destiny eventually,
his noble mind tragically ‘o’erthrown’ by one too many scores, but for now we’ll
have to make do with his occasional lapse into greatness and productivity.
Recorded over eight weeks of sessions in autumn 2008 at London’s legendary
Olympic Studios under the discipline and guidance of producer Stephen
Street and Blur’s Graham Coxon, ‘Grace / Wastelands’ sees the
beautiful poetic waster ditch the punkish cartoonery of the ‘shambles, pick
up his acoustic and bang out the kind of tunes that an eighteenth-century farmhand
would be proud of. The songs themselves are not that new (many of them already
being available as demos and home recordings), the novelty is in how Pete’s
blurry mathematics gets shaped and reapplied by folks who at least have some
basic command of numbers.
From the first dampened chords and impromptu count-in of ‘Arcadie’, Doherty
can be seen marking out his territory. If you enter this world, you do so under
Pete’s conditions; nobody labours, nobody works and unemployed shepherds are
permitted to go about collecting their ‘Jobseekers Allowance’ without worrying
about being enrolled on some ghastly ‘New Deal’ training programme. And it’s
a caveat that reappears at intervals throughout. It’s there yawning amongst
the bottles and overturned boxes of the Hoagy Carmichael ragtime scat-fest,
‘Sweet By and By’ and there loping alongside the boozy bottleneck surrender
of ‘Sheepskin Tearaway’ – sung here with long-term soul mate, Dot Allison. Of
course, it’s all the usual recreational activities on offer – making love in
the morning, indulging a wretched opium dependency over a pot of tea in the
afternoon, and generally falling over. And it’s nowhere more beautifully realised
than on ‘Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards’ – a song that sees Doherty pilfer the bonhomie
of Bacharach, the sophistication of French Wave cinema and all the cheery, toothless
charm of a first kiss. It’s a little awkward, a little imperfect and all the
more faultless because of it.
In spite of all the obvious dangers presented by street-wise tunes like, ‘Last
of the English Roses’, it is, for the most part, an idyllic and surprisingly
serene affair, as kick-off track, ‘Arcadie’ makes abundantly clear. Lightly
skipping beats and brushes, rootsy, skiffling guitars and a vocal so soft and
easy going you could stuff pillows with it. It’s private but by no means solitary.
Would this album have been the same had it not been for the masterful strokes
of Street or those classic Coxon fret signatures? Probably not. The pair provide
some much needed definition to Doherty’s fuzzy logic, adjusting the lens on
his often rambling narratives and woozy, semi-literate gobbledygook – but it’s
a criticism you could also level at Alex Turner and Miles Kane, whose similarly
frantic two-week fit of blazing, theatrical romance at Black Box Studios
near Nantes in France gave birth to the scruffily grandiose, ‘Age of Understatement’
album. It’s the task of the artist to phlegm up his schemes from the gut and
the task of the producer to frame these sticky messes. The success of the marriage
arises from the sprawling, blurry brushstrokes of Doherty on the one hand and
Street’s skill in applying detail.
As you might guess from someone who has been known to cite authors like Jean
Genet and the Marquis de Sade as influences, literary pretensions are never
very far away. How much weight the references carry though, isn’t certain. That
the singer wishes to be taken seriously as an artist is clear from the album’s
cover-art, produced by French artist Alize Meurisse in collaboration with Doherty.
A scruffy and erotic retelling of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Salomé’, the cover of ‘Grace
/ Wastelands’ displays a semi-naked woman kneeling beneath a bloodied plate
whilst in the thrall of some forbidden pleasure or other. Whether it’s significant
or not, Wilde’s interpretation of the Bible myth depicts the saucy little temptress
as a necrophiliac, killed the same day as the man whose death she had requested.
And the parallel is not a superficial one either as there’s more than one track
on the album that points up the singer’s morbid and ostensibly erotic fascination
with death. It’s there in the grandiose and orchestral, ‘A Little Death Around
The Eyes’ – a tune bejewelled by all manner of harpsichords, strings and magic
‘Morricone’ moments – and its sister-song, ‘New Love Grows On Trees’ – the musical
equivalent of living in a ruinous château in Prague and exchanging secrets over
a couple of glasses of absinthe. Both songs are of such lush cinematic magnitude
that they could double for Robbe-Grilles ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ had it not
been for Pete’s rambling boozy vocals looming like a drunk over the pair’s meticulous
arrangements.
It is a Baudelairian paradise, offering up the dark side of bohemian life in
a way that cheerfully offends public morals and puts a big fat saucy smile on
beggars and thieves alike. Doherty is by turns a ragamuffin street child and
a sullied Victorian gentleman slumped unconscious in some opium-den in Limehouse:
part Artful Dodger, part Oliver, part Bill Sykes and part Fagin.
It’s all a bit of an act, of course, but it’s a role he continues to flesh
out with experiences from his own life and those he inflicts on others.
All in all, it’s perhaps only a partial return on our investments, but given
the current financial climate, and the fact that Doherty was spawned in the
first place from the excesses of unregulated critical worship and from the ash
of a million discarded fag-butts, that’s no small triumph.
Suggested downloads:
‘Through The Looking Glass’ 1~ A tune that combines all the
wriggling guitar chemistry of Coxon’s ‘Chemical World’ and ‘Country House’ with
a pissed-up Lewis Carroll. Like many of the tracks on the album, fans will already
be familiar with it from his Jazz After Dark sessions.
‘Broken Love Song’ ~ Pete revives the Woolfman for stunning ‘For The
Lovers’ sequel.
‘Lady Don’t Fall Backward’ ~ Dressed up like ladyboy. Doherty’s finest
moment to date. Dig the Tower Ballroom Wurlitzer organ. What a beauty.
1 ‘Through the Looking Glass’ has now been replaced by ‘I am
the Rain’ on both US and UK releases.