‘Hamburg Demonstrations’: the often overlooked Peter Doherty masterpiece
Peter Doherty will always be best known for his work as the frontman of fresh-faced likely lads, The Libertines, who blazed onto the UK’s rock scene in the early 2000s as these shores’ answer to The Strokes. Their debut racket of Up the Bracket and eponymous follow-up featured a bunch of rambunctious rockers with one foot in England’s gritty post-Britpop rock scene and one foot in America’s punk and rock and roll past.
Drawing on inspirations dating as far back as the 1950s, through to the CBGBs scene and sounds of New York in the 1970s and combining them with a more contemporary Devil-may-care attitude, the band were rough around the edges; they were angular and exciting and unpredictable and messy, and they missed as many notes (and gigs) as they hit. In fact, they were too rough, messy, and unpredictable to last, and after just two albums and a handful of years together, they fractured off into a series of side projects and sister groups.
Fellow main man Carl Barât has worked as a solo artist but also had a second band, alongside Libertines drummer Gary Powell, Dirty Pretty Things, while bassist John Hassall played in both the April Rainers and Yeti. Peter Doherty, meanwhile, formed Babyshambles and, more recently, the excellent Peter Doherty and the Puta Madres, but his own solo albums have flown most under the radar, despite containing some of his best music.
His next solo release, Felt Better Alive, will arrive later this year and the title track single recalls the sound of his best solo album, from 2015, Hamburg Demonstrations.
Working with a more acoustic palette than you’ll hear anywhere in The Libertines’ discography and on a bed of heavenly backing singers and piano lines which soften the fractured edges of his voice, Doherty demonstrates a deft touch and tone right from the start of the opening track ‘Kolly Kibber’. Amongst all of the charming loose ends and throwaway notes, he leaves to fade away as he sings, he teases out his vowels with a Dylan-esque drawl.
Halfway through the song, he breaks out into a broken German demonstration for a verse or two, but his delivery in the dialect recalls the energy of two French singers instead. Doherty delivers a touch of the confident slur of chanson extraordinaire Serge Gainsbourg, as well as the gritty yet sensuous, almost pleading, tone of Françoise Hardy.
‘Down for the Outing’ proves he was still up for the fight at a time when he’d been written off as a has-been by the press and rolls on with a funky, swaggering groove and easy energy. ‘Hell to Pay at the Gates of Heaven’ is a stop-start riot of absurdities which combines Doherty’s obsession with old Britannia and Albion, music hall style rhythms and what sounds like The Kinks’ ‘Dead End Street’. ‘The Whole World is Our Playground’ could act as Doherty’s calling card, his trademark and his manifesto. It’s a sloping and sneaking wonder, a casual crash of lurching, farcical and nonsensical phrases that actually feel like they make a lot of sense whenever you hear them.
It’s not just Doherty’s ramshackle energy, exemplary melodies, and sweeping acoustic instrumentation that make this such a captivating album. There is a real through line of excellently crafted atmospheric energy and intent that runs through the heart of the release, but it’s all underpinned by his fantastic lyric writing and turns of phrase, which sound so effortlessly emphatic and profound. The best of this comes on a song that features on the album in two different versions.
‘I Don’t Love Anyone (But You’re Not Just Anyone)’ is a beautiful phrase in and of itself (and topped in the lyric with the line “you’re not just anyone, to me”), which contains such a world of affirmation in such a few words, but it’s an even better song and one in which Doherty expertly expands on the sentiment, capturing all the delicate, fragile, determined and iron certainties that come with being in love. In both the slow string cascade and the more up-tempo rendition, it’s the soul of the album and one of Doherty’s greatest works.
At the end of this weird and wonderful odd-ball album, there is still time for one more surprisingly and unexpectedly beautiful track. ‘She Is Far’ feels like a punch to the gut, with Doherty’s almost whispered vocal a mixture of relief, resignation and hope sitting beneath a simple acoustic guitar line and, most importantly, a devastatingly gorgeous high-pitched violin line.
Though they’re no longer so fresh-faced—and honestly, who could or would expect them to be, after all, they’ve put their bodies and minds through over the years—The Libertines reformed right around the time that Doherty was making Hamburg Demonstrations. They have gone on to release some of their finest songs and albums and have continued to exhibit the levels of chaos at their live shows that we’ve come to expect and accept of Margate’s most famous residents in the ten years since.
