The Books of Albion by Peter Doherty

Bohemian rhapsodists
Reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray
First Published in The Independent: 13 July 2007

No matter how much mileage there is in the time-honoured doomed-young-poet-in-romantic-squalor syndrome, a small but significant embryonic talent as singer, songwriter and performer provides an increasingly flimsy peg on which to hang an entire industry. Pete Doherty's status as soap-op on legs, tabloid media event and Public Bad Boy Number One has swallowed his career whole and excreted artefacts like The Books of Albion. We seem to be getting the ephemera, juvenilia and feetnote before all but a tiny proportion of the basic text has arrived.

Imagine a shopping-bag's worth of notebooks filled with cuttings, doodles, scribbles, Polaroids, artworks delineated in blood and literary/lyrical works in progress, all painstakingly scanned and reproduced on glossy paper with a faux-leather binding decorated with a self-portrait (rather a good one, as it happens). Those with the patience to decipher the author's handwriting will not go entirely unrewarded: the unfuddled Doherty can be witty and sensitive, as the best of his songwriting has demonstrated.

Since he has, at the time of writing, been dumped by the "true love" to whom the artefact is dedicated - if the tabloid press is to be believed, she has recently hired a minder to keep him away from her - it is to be hoped that he has received a sufficiently decent advance to pay for his own accommodation. All in all, The Books of Albion seems less like a tribute to Doherty's talents than an exploitation of his notoriety. With luck, Doherty will be the one receiving the benefits of the exploitation.

Charles Shaar Murray's 'Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and postwar pop' is published by Faber

The Books of Albion, Orion £20 (324pp) £18(free p&p) from 0870 079 8897.

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