Why do we even bother? Same reason we dribble with the fever of a medieval execution spectator every time we walk past a news-stand screaming “MADDY IS DEAD (PROBABLY)!” or “MADDY MUM HASN’T BLINKED SINCE JUNE!”, we suppose. Waiting either for the long-overdue manifestation of an improbable epiphany, or for the whole tiresome saga to fall apart spectacularly enough to retrospectively justify our voyeurism. The chances though of Peter Doherty knocking together an album even vaguely deserving of the widespread notoriety foisted on him by bloodthirsty tabloid editors is about as likely as Parlophone ever getting a return on their investment. He has a handful of ageing inspirational moments to his name at best and ‘Shotters Nation’, you may not be surprised to learn, does nothing to upset he order of things.
Babyshambles (for it is more than just he, apparently, which could in fact be part of the problem) remain fairly average fare in a post-Libertines world, a glaring anomaly considering their membership to the genre’s VIP booth should be routinely assured. What producer Stephen Street has managed to get out of them though, if nothing else, is consistency and coherence, 12 times over no less, which has to surely put him at the top of his game and deserved of a sit down at the very least. If the rumoured tensions between band, leader and producer throughout the drawn out recording process are true though, these fail to manifest themselves at all in the sleek emotional neutrality of the final cut – perhaps further evidence of Doherty’s retreat from the raw qualities that saw him shine in the first place and act as adhesive to his hit and miss, scatterbrained creativity.
It’s his poetic lyrical leanings, and delivery thereof, that save the album from disintegrating entirely into a beige vacuum under the weight of plagiarism and wasted influences (‘Crumb Begging Baghead’ alone manages to steal fragments from The Charlatans, Jimi Hendrix and bizarrely Four Tet – which is a creative mesh we suppose, but representative of an album deficient of its own ideas). The words you know are his own, the constant self-referencing leaves that in no doubt, and there is some value in that – even if its only the same value as picking up a paper to gorge and salivate over speculation of how a dead 3 year old may or may not have been hidden the boot of a hire car. In fact he’d probably be better off as he started, before rock ‘n’ roll got its claws into him (or was the offence committed the other way around?), with a sheet of paper and a microphone. But he’s not. And if he doesn’t take the band down with him, the band will surely take him down instead. Quite an arrangement they’ve got there.