Peter Doherty @ Proud

22nd April 2009

Penned into the stables at the Proud Gallery in Camden, boys in skinny jeans were asking girls in polka dot dresses, “why can’t we go in the main room?”

Pete Doherty was there.


For hours we waited. While making-do with Proud’s adequate but unadventurous playlist, the patience of the pretty poser girls and the anaemic indie kids was thoroughly tested. They stood about outside, restlessly chaining their umpteenth cigarette of the evening, until finally word got around: the doors had opened.

We poured through. There were some guys in skinny jeans on stage, but no-one recognised them. “Are they his backing band?” asked a too-tall man standing too-far forward.

No. They were ‘Vaults’, one of those bands who tediously refuse to put the definite article before their name even though it’s crying out for it.

Maybe ‘Vaults’ were excellent. Maybe they weren’t mediocre hitless me-too’ers. Maybe they sounded adequate and unadventurous because we hungered only for most the evocative lyrics of our generation.

Whatever. Vaults weren’t Pete Doherty.

So we trooped back outside. We smoked our umpteenth-plus-one cigarette. Some were heard cursing that they might miss their last train.

But when finally cigarettes, Vaults, and frantic phone calls to Transport For London were over, it almost took you by surprise. It began with screams, then came “PETE!” swaggering onto the stage, and before you could elbow past too-tall man standing too-far forward, a belting (but perhaps most importantly, unironic) performance of ‘What a Waster’ was over.

Doherty was on fine, crowd-pleasing form, smashing through his greatest hits while treating us to a total of six Libertines tunes. The pace was almost business-like, and he barely uttered a word between songs, save for one moment early on when he started to complain about the quality of the lighting.

“It’s so dark out there I can barely see you! Err, can anyone see a Graham Coxon in the house?”

And to the delight of all, up strolled a sheepish-looking Graham Coxon to the stage. He looked nervous, maybe from being so unusually close to the hungry mob, or maybe because of Doherty’s liberal attitude to tempo. Songs would race forward at twice their usual speed before he’d suddenly slam on the brakes and do the final chorus at a canter. Regardless, the two shared a cockle-warming chemistry, even (or especially) when things around the edges got a little rough.

Yet after a couple of songs Coxon was gone and Doherty was alone, although still amply filling the stage all by himself. And “alone” must surely be a poor word to describe a man with four hundred people screaming his songs back at him. In these intimate surroundings, with Pete at his effortlessly entertaining best, there can’t have been a soul in the room who felt alone.

That said, the soul-less were there too, watching the whole set through the viewfinder of their cheap camera-phone, fantasising no doubt about the number of hits their grainy pictures might get on Youtube. Too-tall man standing too-far forward was one of them, leaning over the row ahead of him with arms fully out-stretched, grinning smugly at the good-looking but awful-sounding footage he was recording. Where did this cult of joyless camera-phone people come from? Are they perhaps descended from the losers that read all their album sleeves nine times over in order to learn lyrics?

Was it really worth it?

Whatever. Someone please take them away and do something horrible to them.

Yet in spite of nuisance support acts, and nuisance camera phones, Doherty was great. When stripped down to just the man and his guitar, his brilliance as a song writer is indisputable. He enraptured the crowd, as they sang along loudly to the songs they knew, and listened respectfully to those they didn’t. He remains a living legend, and everyone needs to hear the web of sound he spins when he picks up a guitar.