I wonder how many older Millenials like me were similarly ‘madeleined’ by Pete Doherty’s recent interview with Louis Theroux last week. Though the Libertines frontman was barely recognisable beneath a plump face and sinister moustache, a few guitar chords were enough to bring the Noughties indie scene rushing back: the converse trainers; the NME subscription; the sweet shots in clubs off Tottenham Court Road. The heartache. Living out a well-trodden middle class infatuation, I had seen in the Libertines everything my safe upbringing inhibited: romance, raw feeling, libertinism.
Watching the interview, however, I felt I had missed a surprising key to Doherty’s work: his love of country. In one of the most poignant moments, Theroux asked what had motivated him.
Doherty: We wanted to die for something
Theroux: Do you mean literally?
PD: Yeah, I think so… For something worth dying for basically.
LT: And in your case it was..?
PD: (pause).. this crackpot vision of England that I had… For me, being able to enjoy, appreciate, to be moved by, be consumed by the poetry and history of England.
Behaviour we had admiringly taken for reckless abandon Doherty reinterpreted as a reaching towards a nobler self-sacrifice. So what was this vision of England he claims he was willing to die for?
Imperial nostalgia, perhaps? The signature Coldstream Guards redcoats worn by the band and the Union Jacks that bedeck their music videos show a clear interest in the British Empire and its combustion in the fire of the Great War. Doherty’s father was a major in the Royal Signals and won an MBE; his mother a lance-corporal in the nursing corps. He grew up in army garrisons where his keen mind must have grappled with that odd mixture of historic pride and exhausted powerlessness that typified late twentieth century British military life. A latter-day Kipling (whose poem ‘Gunga Din’ was taken as a song title), lines like ‘When the sun they said would never set finally set again’ express a wistfulness about Britain’s previous military glory.
He is frequently drawn to the tragedy of the trenches too. He lists Wilfred Owen among his favourite writers, knows Dulce et Decorum Est by heart and took Anthem for Doomed Youth as a title for both a song and album. In another moving part of the interview, Doherty can hardly bear to watch as Theroux shows him footage of the poem he recited from memory after winning an NME award: Siegfried Sassoon’s brutal Suicide in the Trenches. Is he in thrall to the fatal valour shown by the young boys of that generation or is he, like Orwell (another influence) expressing his sympathy for the common private against heartless officialdom?
When he is not singing of imperial ‘battalions’ and last posts on the bugle, Doherty’s imagery goes further back into the mists of British history. His frequent use of ‘Albion’ in his music and poetry naturally conjures up Blake, who used the ancient name for his mythological history of Britain from the Druids to Newton. Is his scope larger – an attempt, like Paul Kingsnorth’s, to re-spiritualise these lands, reclaiming the human from the machine?
It would be welcome to see in Doherty’s work a coherent thread and project that, even if thwarted by the circumstance of fame and addiction, might have added up to a meaningful critique of the contemporary British moment. Doherty may himself feel that he is a new Blake, trying to re-weave the rainbow over an island disenchanted by a desiccating materialism.
Alas, listening to his music again for the first time in two decades, the most direct line that can be drawn is not to the Christianity-infused Jerusalem of Blake but the Jerusalem of Jez Butterworth and Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron. Take altogether, his Albion is a Green Man arcadia without rules or authority, where people should be allowed to behave as they wish.
Like every Romantic vision untethered to transcendent goods, Doherty’s vision reveals itself, when it mattered, to be shallow and narcissistic. It had no uplifting power towards self-sacrifice, was likewise powerless to prevent him from acts of moral indifference: betraying his best friend by breaking into his house; leaving his two eldest children fatherless; running away from the scene of a death, possibly a murder. His vision was ultimately bankrupt before an addiction that conquered every other creative instinct in his life, and whose deeper causes are left strikingly under-explored in Theroux’s interview. Like Kerouac, who thought himself the next Hemingway before becoming addled and distracted by addiction, perhaps Doherty had the talent and the beginnings of a vision that might have been able to speak to our own time with more permanence. Alas the hopes he cherished of death-unto-self became, in the final analysis, an act of narcissism: a triumph of the self. His manifold character flaws suggest he was perhaps always fated to live across the sea in Normandy, evading petty bills, engaged in that stock British sentimentality of ruing what might have been.
Will Orr-Ewing 