PETE DOHERTY: Last of the Rock Romantics
by Alex Hannaford
Ebury £16.99 pp344
Pete Doherty and the Libertines have been the most newsworthy characters in pop since Blur and Oasis conducted their Battle of the Bands in the 1990s, but to claim that they “changed British culture”, as Anthony Thornton and Roger Sargent’s book does, can hardly fail to provoke hilarity. The Libertines were a quartet with huge potential that mostly went unfulfilled in their chaotic two-year career. They wrote a handful of excellent songs and inspired fanatical devotion, but it’s possible that posterity may remember them merely as “the ex-band of Kate Moss’s crackhead boyfriend”, as one sceptical internet commentator put it.
These two books approach the Libertines saga from opposite directions. The Libertines Bound Together is incapable of making the faintest pretence of objectivity, since the authors were as much participants as observers. Writer Thornton and photo-grapher Sargent really were on the spot (be it the van, the pub, the East End squat or the dressing room) while most of the squalid Libertines saga went down, capturing the queasy zigzags of the band’s career for the NME. Both were sucked into an intensely emotional relationship with the group, and their pain at witnessing Doherty’s slide into drug addiction and the way this drove a wedge between him and his soulmate Barat is displayed like a row of tattered campaign medals.
Alex Hannaford has taken a more orthodox approach, relying on such unfashionable devices as research, and interviews with witnesses and participants. He wasn’t riding the whirlwind in the way Thornton and Sargent were, but since being caught in Doherty’s gravitational field seems to trigger hallucinations and loss of judgment, this is surely no bad thing for a biographer. His account offers more in the way of critical balance and objectivity, and is by far the more revealing about Doherty’s background and his calamitous affair with Moss. Hannaford even quotes less-than-admiring press reviews, such as the Independent’s jibe about the Libertines being “roughly the 13th inheritors this year of the NME’s ludicrous weekly Your New Favourite Band mantle”.
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Thornton, roped firmly to the NME’s mast, has little choice but to keep hammering home the paper’s official line about Doherty’s ineffable wonderfulness. His chapters are prefaced with quotes from Byron or George Eliot or Charles Dickens, as if Doherty were a one-man artistic movement rewriting pop history while altering the course of English literature, though quotes from his diaries or letters suggest facetiousness as much as profundity. Thornton frequently finds himself hoist by his own infatuation, lambasting the tendency of music writers to pontificate over CD box sets of “classic” rockers while simultaneously making grandiose claims for the enduring impact of a band whose existence was overlooked by vast swathes of the public. When Thornton tries to propose the Libertines as a reincarnation of the 1960s counterculture, representing “freedom of expression” and “freedom of intelligence”, you can hear the splintering of thin ice beneath his feet.
If the Libertines made any difference to anything, perhaps it’s in the way they opened some ears to different musical possibilities, a point that emerges from both accounts. Certainly their waspish, tongue-in-cheek Englishness, often resembling a crafty splicing of Morrissey’s campery and the speedy chordsmanship of the Jam, made a refreshing contrast to imported American teen-metal, but already their absence has been papered over by the arrival of Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys. Barat and Doherty have both formed new bands, but that white-hot Libertines moment is past.
Thornton’s book is at its most effective in evoking Doherty’s personal charisma. His openness to fans, his willingness to bare his innermost feelings to complete strangers and put on impromptu performances in tiny living rooms meant that large numbers of people became convinced that they were his closest friend. The process was hastened by the singer’s incontinent soul-barings over the internet, where he maintained a continuing dialogue with all and sundry.
Both books stress Doherty’s literary qualities — his aspirations as a poet, his love of Oscar Wilde and Siegfried Sassoon, the idealistic notions of Albion and Arcadia (“a poetic vision of England in which nobody was tied to society’s rules,” says Hannaford) he shared with Barat. And they both detail his depressing junkie traits of flakiness, unreliability and mood swings, repeated rehab only magnifying his lust for class-A drugs. Yet pathos and bathos are only a misprint apart, and finally you may be left wondering how seriously you can really take a man who idolises the hoary old cockney novelty act, Chas & Dave.
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