Peter Doherty is the mongrel offspring of what happens when the NME quick-we-need-a-cover-star machine mates with a tabloid TV mentality. The Libertines were at best an okay band making Jam-my dodger noises, but somehow Doherty parlayed his B-list pedigree into full-on public enemy status. What’s he got that Peter Perrett, Johnny Thunders or any of those other skag-addled dum-dum boys who pawned their talents for another baggy didn’t?
That’s one to divide any dinner party. The starry-eyed and softheaded dress him up as an Elizabethan urchin made good and then reduced to back alley hand-jives to support his habit. Detractors regard his career as a squalid litany of public embarrassments, bungled gigs and a general contempt for punters gullible enough to pay for the dubious privilege of watching a guy fall apart while his supermodel missus suffers the fallout.
The bewildering thing is, Down In Albion is a damn fine – if frequently derivative – record. Doherty’s no Caruso, but he can enunciate like a slightly more gonzoid Jarvis Cocker without succumbing to mockney excess. The band are – and this can’t be overstated – a jack-be-nimble-and-quick bunch of buggers adept at mixing sophisticated rhythm (flecks of white funk and punky reggae, plus a guitarist who seems to have heard a few Bob Quine licks in his time, evident from ‘La Belle Et Le Bête’ and ‘The 32nd Of December’). If nothing else, they do a bang up job of impersonating The Only Ones’ mix of urban menace, runt attitude and session-level chops.
It’s also evident that Mick Jones did a lot more than put his feet up on the desk and let the tapes roll. Yes, his approach is so verité as to verge on the demo-like, but this is offset by his obvious skill at eliciting spirited performances from his charges.
That said, his and mix engineer Bill Price’s combined influence often threatens to overwhelm what is still a fledgling band. ‘Pipedown’ bristles with ‘Clampdown’ fractiousness, while ‘Sticks And Stones’ apes the skanky-ho strut of ‘Hammersmith Palais’, although tunes like ‘Killamangiro’ do testify to Doherty’s ability to pen sterling tunes, even if many of them are Clash retreads garnished with a bit of ‘Hitsville UK’ bassline here, a shouty woah-oh backing vocal there.
But if the band learned their dub moves from Sandinista rather than Black Ark '45s (there’s a full-on toast in the form of ‘Pentonvile’), most of their contemporaries never made it past Regatta De Blanc. And for a song as good as the big bleeding-heart ballad of ‘Albion’, a real Stones circa '69 wasted youth valentine, I’d forgive Pete Doherty his trespasses. Down In Albion ain’t no London Calling, but it is about the best album Nikki Sudden never made.