BABYSHAMBLES

The decline and fall of Pete Doherty draws numerous parallels with that of the much beloved Johnny Thunders as a previous generation of music fans were forced to watch a rock'n'roll icon fritter away his talent, besmirch his artistic reputation, and degenerate into a ghoulish cartoon junkie. By the end of his career he was left surrounded only by a circle of schadenfreude vultures, which unconcernedly dispersed once he had met his end, overdosed and robbed, in a stranger's seedy apartment. Like Thunders, Doherty was responsible for two classic rock'n'roll albums and was rightly hailed for a period as, finally, a true saviour of British rock. Of course, Doherty was always a walking disaster, even in the Libertines, and it is little surprise Carl Barat found it impossible to sustain such an entity with such an errant and erratic but nonetheless essential partner. Even without his songwriting partner things did still look up for Doherty. Indie kids flocked to his gigs with his new band Babyshambles and he broke into mainstream celebrity when he ensnared supermodel Kate Moss. (Mind you, anyone envious of such a 'catch' should pause to consider exactly what sort of woman would gladly devote herself to a man openly hooked on heroin and crack.) For a while, Doherty was flavour of the month but, as with so many other similarly-inflicted artists, his drug-induced lethargy meant he missed his moment when the iron was metaphorically hot and the buzz surrounding him started to ebb away. His attendence at his own gigs became increasingly inconsistent and the continued absence of studio material exasperated not just the potential fans but the band members, with a steady stream of ex-members highlighting the thankless and pointless task of supporting Doherty. By the time the album eventually arrived Doherty had lost the goodwill from the media and music lovers and had degenerated into nothing more than a clown prince, a one-man circus occasionally playing to a braying pack of sycophants, who spends his spare time fighting both paparazzi photographers and the law (and, as his hero Joe Strummer puts it, the law wins). But, lest it get obscured by the cloud of controversy, Pete Doherty is a talented man. It seems hard to remember now but there once was a time when he was the most exciting new rock'n'roll star in Britain. Of course, he should be at his peak now and it is tragic but nonetheless inevitable to watch his potential legacy slip away through his incorrigible behaviour. Down in Albion could have been another really great album. Unfortunately, it struggles to barely be a good one. The majority of the songs have decent melodies and chorus hooks but are obscured by the messy arrangements and sloppy muscianship. I realise this unprofessionalism is meant to be Doherty's 'thing' but from here it just looks like laziness. Which leads me on to Mick Jones's role as producer. Clearly he is a 'cool' name to associate with Doherty and the first Libertines album does sound pretty good. I cannot help but feel it was a one-off, though, and Jones's idea of producing is to turn up to a rehearsal and press play on a tape recorder. One wonders whether if Doherty had worked with a proper producer he may have been shaken into something resembling action. Mind you, Doherty probably sticks with Jones exactly so he does not have to leave his state of complacency. With an absence of external restraint quality control inevitably goes out the window and, at over an hour, this album should have obviously been cut by about 20 minutes and 5 songs. The clearest offender is, of course, "Pentonville" - a reggae track by his ex-cellmate at Pentonville police station, General Sherman, which is so jaw-droppingly awful it is almost funny. His own material is never as unlistenable but there are sloppy dirges that merely clog up the track-list. The stuttering "La Belle et la Bete" makes for a disappointing opening but the next ten or so songs (barring "Pentonville", of course) make a decent fist of sloppy indie. The likes of "Fuck Forever", "A'Rebours", "Pipedown", "What Katy Did Next", and "Loyalty Song" all have some decent hooks but nonetheless suffer from meandering, lazy arrangements. "The 32nd of December" is probably the only track to remedy such sloppiness with its dinky keyboard hook bringing to mind the old theme tune to 'Goal of the Month'. Furthermore, Doherty's smug clever-clever but actually not-so-clever twisting of words is a constant irritation, particularly the ten-years-out-of-date joke highlighting the homogeny between Tory and New Labour and the dreadful pun "Killamangiro" ('kill a man for his giro'). Doherty flirts with genuine artistic sincerity once on the wistful, romanticised homage to England "Albion", which completely rips the Kinks but does so in such a sentimental way it is hard not to be impressed. It is a blip on the album, though, and yet more evidence that Doherty could have made so much more of his ability if he wasn't so damn irresponsible and immature. As it is, this album is an early marker on his steady descent downwards and, at the moment, it is difficult to see where redemption would come from. Everyone is free to make their own mistakes and waste their own life but when the spectacle is so horrifically public it makes everyone seem somehow complicit. Johnny Thunders might have lasted until the early nineties but his death still came over a decade after his last great album. For Doherty, the countdown has only just begun.

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Email me at: jackfeeny@yahoo.co.uk