Things that are honest, vulnerable, raw, and true are very often met in this world with derision, disdain, blockade, and attempted destruction. Real hedonism is a heaven of hard-won visions, and the truths of the gutter – where farce and fantasy messily coexist – are not available in the Edenic ethereality of the aerie at all. There is a kind of characterful, gravitas-infused genuineness that can only get born in a grimdark chimera. Peter Doherty has lived just such a red reverie for nearly the entirety of his time on this Earth, and he very much has the sounds and stories to show for it, a fact he demonstrates to superlative effect on his latest solo recording entitled The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime, in collaboration with the accomplished French composer and producer, Frédéric Lo.
With three previous solo outings in hand, two decades as the dishabille darling of The Libertines for his eternal legacy, and the rebranding of Bacchanal that was Babyshambles to his chaotic credit, Doherty’s latest is a formal shrugging off of a calamity coil that has constricted him too tightly for too long – a judgment only he could make and has. This record is the artful dodger turning himself in, courageously, willingly, and with gallons upon gallons of grace. The musket and tomahawk of Peter Doherty’s shadow ventures arrive here built for benedictions and wonder, and he has never turned egress and erosion into a more Arcadian dream in all his fabled career. He presents himself as every archetype of the sable vagrant imaginable on The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime, and all of them know what it is to be able to dream-hop and time-travel in a body that stays notably mortal and place-bound.
For anyone paying proper attention, Peter Doherty was and remains as famous for being literati as he ever was for being louche. One listen to The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime will give any who do not already know the quick and unassailable understanding that Doherty is, and has always been, a poet. If he is also a “criminal” by any definition other than the romantic one, we should all be so lucky. There is a palpable and powerfully primordial reason why Kate Moss famously said of and to Doherty, “You’re in my veins, you fuck.” Anyone interested in being at all transparent with their inner self must admit the same, and most of us have enjoyed none of Kate’s proximity as a reasonable excuse. Doherty’s street-won risk and spirit is, arguably, the better part of us all.
To be clear, this is not a record that glamorizes the inevitable physical and emotional fallout of protracted substance abuse nor provides topical ruminations on how to write a living eulogy for oneself. It is simply one that peerlessly puts forward the perspectives, possibilities, and peculiar peace that can only come to those who have come out the other side of such a visceral near-miss. Illuminating the timeless tug of war between the wants of the body, riven in a particularly cannibalistic way during his time in the trenches as heroin’s own hard-rock Bukowski, and that of the winged spirit – drawn on downy dreams – has long been Doherty’s calling card. The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime is prodigious for being the first time he has signaled us sober, and the first wherein he is not being made to feel like the soundtrack-trainwreck in the movie of his own music. This is also his first offering through Strap Originals, a boutique label he founded for the promotion of anti-vestal vestiges exactly like himself.
This time around, Doherty is like Scott Walker and Richard Hell in one person – in all things and as ever, a boy Andy Warhol would have melted into the floor over, but still Whitechapel all the way. Having recorded The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime with Lo in a Norman house called Cateuil, Doherty has victoriously brought his infamous Old England to the forevers of France and is indulging his lifelong Gallic tastes in the most delectable baroque-indie manner with this set of guileless songs.
Beyond his stately and diversified career as a producer and composer, Frédéric Lo is a masterful musician and singer-songwriter in his own right, having completed retro-riche bodies for himself as well as in conjunction with artists like Daniel Darc, Pony Pony Run Run, Stephan Eicher, and Maxime Le Forestier, to name but a few. Juxtaposed against Doherty’s caliginous history of black marketeers and slippery eels, you might at first believe these two would be temperamentally mismatched. However, quite the opposite is immediately obvious; Lo’s Francophone arrangements bring an equilibrist’s livery to The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime, and this album appears much like the love amulet of a solar flare kind of union featuring each man’s most indelible mark.
Doherty and Lo have cast themselves as secondary stars in their own collaborative cosmos as The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime centers itself around lyrical and allegorical appearances by a panoply of other luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Dashiell Hammett, Émile Ajar, Peter Lorre, Jean Seberg, Humphrey Bogart, and even Thomas Hardy in the form of the twelfth and final tune on the album. There are also heavyweight harmonic spirits in the vocals themselves, with Doherty seeming to channel chanting souls ranging from Serge Gainsbourg to Leonard Cohen at times, but always with his signature dusting of the derelict drifter’s diminuendo.
Pickpocketing your private passions straightaway with titular opening track, “The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime,” is a mystery of a song that saunters itself down a crooked French alleyway like Arsène Lupin himself, the gentleman burglar-detective of Maurice LeBlanc’s novels – France’s elfin, ethically questionable, and hugely popular answer to Sherlock Holmes – and the character on whom this piece is based. Doherty lilts, “Je suis ici” (I’m here) and quiveringly asks, “Have I begun this too weirdly?” Not in the slightest, Mr. Doherty. The guitars are a welcome bee sting, and the castanets confetti that crank the sweetness-volume on the honey-venom.
“The Epidemiologist” begins with an elegant piano melody and the word “fuckery,” as all great songs must do. Doherty is almost Velvet Goldmine here, lounge singing (but in the way a pirate sparrow might) brutally erudite lyrics like, “Little pink Kenzo, little blue benzos / Hip Hop, Be-Bop, old blues and punk rocker / Heads that are shrunken still can be clever/Ships that are sunken can still hold treasure.”
Having already got “The Ballad of Grimaldi” under his foxily artistic belt, “The Ballad Of” stands in as the spoken word and whispered-in-places little cliffhanger brother to that prior ditty of the damned. Peter Doherty has always been brilliant at singing fanged folklore to life in a Dickensian story he was making up as he went along, and here he describes “living in flashback” whilst the horns and woodwinds of a French orchestra seem to tell his tale for him in the broken cursive of boreal forests.
Lead single “You Can’t Keep It From Me Forever” contains an intro that sounds like tolling bells at a church no one knows exists and then promptly becomes the bounciest track on the record, full of so much daylight-made-of-night-dreams that it should surely have been the hidden track on the official soundtrack to Garden State. That this one is the jago-journeyman realistically reflecting on how long he will be able to maintain his hard-hewn clean veins makes it feel that much more like it comes straight from the navel of the ne’er do well world.
This writer holds that “Yes I Wear a Mask” has been multiple times misread by other publications as a paean playing with pandemic imagery. When you hear Doherty croon, “I sing the sweetest saddest song, to cloud all of my wrongs,” there is nothing of COVID in it, but much of self-crucifixion. This one shows what is plush about a paucity of sound and feels like a gallery of Doherty’s golden hours peered at through a lattice of pale flowers.
“Rock & Roll Alchemy” is a richly simple acoustic diapason dressed in gunmetal fustian, and its “Parodie artificielle naturelle” freeform lyrics sound as though Doherty is doing word association with French adjectives describing himself in a way both self-deprecating and savored. “The Monster” is both a chime and a confession, a halting rhyme to that which has attempted to devour him at every step on his way to and from the destinations that made these songs possible – and the love he bears that ever-leering leviathan under his own skin. The line “La vie est tendre, belle et violente (life is tender, beautiful and violent) / The monster assures me” could well stand alone as the message of the entire album. Rehab culture and the cult of toxic positivity would have it that there is nothing worth running to ground in abject abasement. Peter Doherty knows better, as does any addict that survives with his soul intact.
In “Invictus”, Doherty shows that his voice can go as low as he himself has been and that the resulting gravel itself is holy with hurt, while in “The Glassblower” he applies his prowler’s prowess atop a harpsichord to convey his connection to the pith of what were once common artisans, now long lost to the changes of the centuries. “Keeping Me On File” is nearly a beach song in its frothy nature; it has strands of sand and sea in its jaunting step and warmth in its wish – that of remaining in someone’s romantic rolodex – a very human hope, even for one with such a homeless heart. Meanwhile, “Far From The Madding Crowd” is a piano-blessed ballad emblazoning Doherty’s sense that his only place of belonging is within the madding throng – a collective locality denied us all for roughly two years – and the absence of which is worried here like a wound by the inquisitive fingers of his voice. This final song on The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime then twirls away at the end in a tipsy toe-shuffle, closing the album in a way that makes you feel like you are waking up from an afternoon reverie. That the end feels like a beginning, or that there should be a gently hinted refrain of renewal in resolution, is thematically symmetrical as well as being exceedingly satisfying to the ear and mind.
There are things that can be learned from traitors, turncoats, defectors, and double agents that the pure of heart can never teach you, and what the tamer elements of society may call moral monstrosity is often the mother of all mythmaking merciful hearts. By the same token, deceleration and stagnation are not synonyms, and stillness means something different to those rare individuals who have lived at life’s highest velocity. Peter Doherty is, and has been for some time, by far the most vivid and youthful example extant in music today of an ethos that is much older even than any of the characters he conjures in this picaresque parable of an album: live fast, die young several times, yet stay alive at any cost and keep writing all of it down. Listen to The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime out of doors, in the equinoctial sunlight, with the Spring streaming in, surrounded by flowers if you can, and with something in a glass that makes your skin buzz – for this is where this record was born and where it lives, and also what it contains at the highest concentration deliverable by one distilled human voice.
Any life wistfully and whimsically lived is positively swarming with dichotomy and paradox. You certainly do not have to have ridden the true “horse” with no name to any of the destinations Doherty did to know this. Like Iggy Pop and Anthony Kiedis before him, his iconic brothers in that X-rated X-Men Academy who successfully beat back the Beast baying beneath their hat brims, he seems firmly stood upon the cognizance that he will always wear the stitched moniker of that internal suicide sect, and this record looks that terrible and inviolable certitude straight in the face. Yet there is an enormous gap between being wayward and being wicked, and precious few are the beggarweeds that can build such temples of paisley as The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime out of the soul-trials in their tramp-dom.
To you Mr. Doherty, from one vim-full vagabond to another, and as the poet Diane Seuss once said in a commencement given at Bennington College to a class of aspiring writers: “I wish you a sexy, dangerous, jazz-shaped immortality. I wish you the touch of the hand of the dead through the page; I wish you the will, the courage, to resurrect them via your attention. The guts to deconstruct the lies. I wish you a daisy chain of memorable kisses that link you back to your ancestors, and forward to those writers you can barely imagine. I wish you the power of the threshold, the page that, as Gregory Orr has written, is shaped like a doorframe that stands at the seam between disorder and order, death and life.” Thank you for taking us with you to all the wherevers you have been, once again. No matter what the non-nomads may croak on about in their killing comfort, it is indeed a top-heavy task that requires the very scarcest forms of gallantry and mettle – and one that likewise takes a poet and a born thief (of hearts) to ever faithfully narrate.
