Chasing Amy.
Posted: July 25, 2011 Filed under: how i was made | Tags: amy winehouse, london, peter doherty, Rhian E Jones, russell brand Leave a comment »I’ve written here on the influence and significance of Amy Winehouse. Haters can swivel.
I’ve little else to say, apart from some disjointed reflections on the similarities and differences between her and Doherty in terms of public attitudes, how men and women are allowed to do downward spirals of self-destruction, and the horrible nature of the ~London ~scene in the first half of this decade – but that all seems somewhat crass and premature. In the meantime, and especially on that last point, have Russell Brand with the only decent tribute I’ve read yet.
Being a female music fan online and offline
Posted: September 19, 2010 Filed under: how i was made | Tags: 1990s, 2000s, kenickie, music as politics, music journalism, patti smith, peter doherty, punk, Rhian E Jones, riot grrrl, shampoo, the adverts, the libertines, the slits, x-ray spex 1 Comment »While the 1990s weren’t the greatest decade for feminist comings of age, as a small-town girl who loved her music, I didn’t do too badly. I’d grown up on the leftovers of punk, awed and enthralled by women like Poly Styrene, Patti Smith, Ari Up and Gaye Advert. Closer to home, I had Shampoo’s deadpan, dead-eyed bubblegum-punk and Kenickie’s bracing uber-proletarian blend of grit and glitter.
Like this:
But all of that’s what the point is not: Peter Doherty, Grace/Wastelands
Posted: March 24, 2009 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (recorded) | Tags: albums, how i was made, peter doherty, Rhian E Jones, the libertines Leave a comment »I first encountered Peter Doherty as a solo artist, courtesy of acousticalullaby, before I was even aware of the Libertines. As the gentle, intriguing product of an education in the classical and countercultural canon, self-mythologising and superior Smiths-fanboying, I liked those songs a lot. To some extent I’ve always thought of them seperately from their and Peter’s Libs and Babyshambles incarnations, like juvenilia that you lock away in a drawer in your childhood home to avoid their idealistic rough perfection being tainted by the real world’s messiness and disappointment. And then All That Shit happened, of course, and it’s been a good two years or so since I listened to any efforts of Dockers the Tabloid Demon with anything approaching enthusiasm. Grace/Wastelands is not really a return to solo acoustic form – I think that particular Peter might be gone for good – but I like it a surprising amount.
The Old Songs – ‘A Little Death…’, ‘Sheepskin Tearaway’, ‘Lady Don’t Fall Backwards’, ‘New Love Grows on Trees’, the padding out of ‘Snakey Road’ into ‘Palace of Bone’ and so on – are too familiar to have much impact, although the first two in particular are done more justice than in previous versions. And although the words often do mark a return to form, the tunes are less memorable than they need to be. Except for ‘Sweet By and By’, bless it, which wouldn’t be out of place on Legs XI. ‘I Am the Rain’ is gorgeous and accomplished. (It was done first by The Bandits, though, surely?)
I’m also afraid that I can’t ignore the dread term ‘concept album’ hoving into view. I like the title (although I’d like anything that followed ‘Shotter’s Nation’), not least for its indication that he’s regained some of the power and charm of his earlier propensity for wordplay, but the album does indeed seem to divide along these conceptual lines: a state of grace defined by playful provincial innocence shades into the sparse, bleak confines of a grown-up urban wasteland. One could even make a Pseud’s Corner case for the album’s allegorical females – The Last of the English Roses vs Salomé – being each land’s respective ambassador.
We meet the English Rose early on, over a backbeat that pulses and shimmers like an early-adolescent Friday night should. She’s pint-swilling and politically astute, and how pale, thin and eyes-forlorn she is we neither know nor care. If she has a precursor it’s Sharleen from ‘Campaign of Hate’: aggressively witty, street and wise, sexually voracious and more than a match for (one of) the boys. Mixing sauciness with ‘skipping and dancing hand-in-hand’, the song shows us a prelapsarian school-holiday summer that fades into the wintry metropolitan wastes of ’1939 Returning’.
Peter’s magpied a lot, not least from Eliot, to conjure urban isolation: the rain and ‘dreadful cold’, piles of rubble and squalid shelters, dust motes in early-morning light. ‘Salomé’ is steeped in bathos, the artist’s ideal of exoticised decadence set in a freezing front room. His vision’s seductive ‘soft white fur’ is gently peeled back to reveal her, nightmarish and rapacious, holding him in thrall. Her dancing brings together the city’s objectified women, whores and music-hall turns, doomed to eternally entertain and demanding the heads of their captors.
The sadness and regret that seems to permeate the album intertwines itself with the heavy strings and sparse guitars. There’s little here in the way of extreme emotion – no ‘Fuck Forever’ or even ‘French Dog Blues’. His vocals slip from a yearning lilt in praise of idylls past to a modern libertine’s exhausted, jaded listlessness. As a whole, the album effectively mourns a lost Arcady, and notes with weary resignation the failure to build it anew in the city’s dark satanic squats, cells and crackdens, and the destruction wrought in the attempt.
Cast our dreams in solid gold: Peter Doherty, the Rhythm Factory, 17.01.07
Posted: January 19, 2007 Filed under: Raves, Reviews (live) | Tags: gigs, how i was made, peter doherty, the libertines 1 Comment »A night of pluses and minuses.
+ I seem to make a habit of seeing him in the New Year: 2005 was spent hopping on and off the Oxford Tube for the George gigs, and in 2006 there was Jazz After Dark and the last time I saw Babyshambles, at Cambridge. The latter was an excellent, redeeming gig, but left me without much of a desire to see them again. Mostly it’s the feeling that you shouldn’t push your luck. Maybe it takes me a year to get over that.
+ Ohhh, Lefthand. I’d like to think my enjoyment of their set was some sort of Pavlovian response to how hard Alan Wass seems to be trying to channel Rolling Thunder Revue era Dylan – which let’s be fair, is a better generic look than drainpipes and a trilby.
+ Peter is due on at ten minutes past midnight. He turns up about thirty seconds early.
- I hate being short. There’s not even any point trying to defend your pitch, since the mass surge forward with which most gigs start off inevitably moves you to the side unless you’ve got something to hold onto. Why are so many fanboys the same ridiculous height as Pete? Also, bloke in front of me, when you’re that tall you really don’t need an Afro and a puffa jacket.
- So yeah, for the first half-hour or so all that can be seen of him is a trilby and a pair of eyebrows. In good voice though, especially for an early and endearing ‘At the Flophouse’.
+ ‘Don’t Look Back Into the Sun’ turns into ‘Don’t look Back In Anger’. I’ve been waiting years for that to happen. Oh, and George Michael’s ‘Faith’ (yep) turns into ‘Horrorshow’, which is less expected.
+ Uncanny Hand-Eye Coordination and Defiance of the Laws of Physics #6875: catching a (lit?) cigarette and making it balance up-ended on his palm. He is probably a footballer in some alternate universe.
+ It says something for his range and repertoire that at one point everyone in the place seems to be requesting a different song. I’d have liked ‘East of Eden’ just because it most clearly references a grand tradition of faux-naif acoustic minstrelsy that I like very much, and hearing it live amplifies that aspect. I can’t complain though, I did get ‘Vertigo’.
+ ‘Vertigo’. Yeah, that was weird.
- Oh, mate, you’re not the Specials. I can toast better than Purple. I can do without ‘Killamangiro’ as a pointless, bukakke’d shadow of its former self.
+ ‘The Delaney’ with the extra verse!
- His attempt to set fire to the ceiling doesn’t get far. I marvel at a) the Rhythm Factory’s flame-retardant properties and b) how few people were reaching for their coats.
- “Oh, Headlock, haven’t seen you since the ‘accidental death’.” Incidentally, as you might imagine, he’s capable of verbalising speech marks.
+ He’s either wearing two hats or I’m having an odd variant on double-vision. I think it’s the former.
+ There is, I realise, nothing equivalent to ‘Fuck Forever’ or ‘Gang of Gin’ tonight. It’s celebratory and cathartic in a more-or-less wholly positive way.
+ Bloody hell, he’s just not stopping.
- The place seemed to have cleared out considerably after the first ninety minutes. I guess there were last trains to catch etc, but still. Maybe people get bored.
- Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be me / Nor would you want the shame and the strain of my name… Listening makes me think of all that’s happened since I heard it first, and self-mythologising and self-fulfilling prophecies and I don’t really know what to think.
+ Sometimes I think boys Get It, in a way girls rarely do. (And then I usually reconsider.) There’s two boys weaving and staggering and sharing fags in front of me and yes, from one angle they’re just loud, plastered and obnoxious, but then you turn your head and there is genuine pleasure in being here, being here together, and genuine love of the music.
+ On that note: gigs with mass singing along are great enough, but when the words everyone’s singing are this good, it elevates everything. ‘Time for Heroes’ is the obvious example, I guess. Everyone needs someone they can sling their arms around and bawl We’ll die in the class we were born / But it’s a class of our own, my love…
+ ‘I Wish’. Okay alright, you are the Specials a bit.
