Pete Doherty slowly unwraps the bandage around his left hand. “Do you want to see something really horrible?” he asks, before unveiling the wound he apparently received after attempting to save a hedgehog his dogs had caught. The fact that Pete Doherty getting an infected cut on his finger became national news suggests that public interest in his life remains high a decade and a half on from what you might call the Potty Pete era, when a cocktail of critical acclaim, high-profile romantic relationships and a willingness to flog stories to the press for drug money made Doherty the British tabloids’ leading bete noire. At the time, the Metropolitan police seemed to direct a significant proportion of their resources towards arresting him on a regular basis.
It’s a thornier question whether the public is still interested in his music. His last solo album, Hamburg Demonstrations, barely scraped the charts; the major label that bankrolled his solo career throughout the height of his notoriety seems to have bailed out some time ago; tonight’s venue is conspicuously not bursting at the seams. His latest, an eponymous album recorded with new band the Puta Madres, adds a vaguely gypsy-folk sheen although live, shorn of the album’s Dexys-circa-Too-Rye-Aye violins, it feels more like business as usual: trebly, shambolic indie rock that sounds as spindly as its author looks.
That makes it highly unfashionable by 2019 standards – a time when the kind of music that was once the NME’s lifeblood has such little grip on the collective imagination – although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not good. As ever with Doherty, his fatal flaw is a lack of quality control, and some of what’s played feels deeply ordinary. But at its best – the ramshackle country-rock of Hell to Pay at the Gates of Heaven; Travelling Tinker’s surging, powerful lament for his late former bandmate Alan Wass – it picks its way through his back catalogue carefully enough to remind you the reason people started making a fuss about Doherty in the first place. He can still cut a charismatic figure on stage, and he’s still capable of writing songs that suggest he’s not the washed-up addict he’s frequently dismissed as.
But, just as the round of interviews to accompany the new album suggested that things were as chaotic in Doherty’s life as ever – still living in a flat with blood on the walls, still offering to sell journalists his clothes for ready cash – so the gig follows suit. After 45 minutes, songs begin to collapse a few bars in and Doherty abandons the stage, claiming he’s “going to take the band backstage and give them a really good talking-to”.
Ten minutes pass – during which the audience stays put, but seems uncertain whether the gig is over or not – before the stage is taken not by Doherty, but two husky dogs. When he re-emerges, the dogs wander around as he sings fragile, beautiful versions of the Libertines’ You’re My Waterloo and Babyshambles’ Albion, the latter a song that gives the Springsteen-esque notion of hitting the road and escaping a wittily British twist: potential destinations for his mythic journey include Oldham, Yeovil and Watford. Then Doherty’s girlfriend wanders on unannounced and belts her way through a cover of Love’s junkie lament Signed DC, her voice curiously X Factor-ish and heavy on the vibrato.
The audience take all this better than you might think. He’s clearly down to his diehard fans these days, and, presumably, the one thing being a diehard Pete Doherty fan requires is patience.
