The Lonely Villein: Unpublished Notebook and 2003 Prison Journal of Pete Doherty.

Sep 11, 2015 | Uncategorized

 

 

MANUSCRIPT NOTEBOOK WITH LYRICS, LONDON AND PARIS, 2002-03

“Do you see a glorious and illustrious career ahead?”
Pete replied “Personally I think we’ll both be dead by Christmas”
NME interview, late 2002.

Pete Doherty (born 12 March 1979) is an English musician best known for being co-front man of early noughties rock band The Libertines, alongside Carl Barat.

Many of Doherty’s journals, detailing the rise of the Libertines and later their rapid descent, are collected into The Books of Albion, published in 2007 by Orion Publishing Co.

Peter Harrington however has one previously unpublished journal, dated over 2002-3, just as Doherty, Barat, bass player John Hassall and drummer Gary Powell, were hailed as “the best new band in Britain”.

 

MANUSCRIPT NOTEBOOK WITH LYRICS, LONDON AND PARIS, 2002-03 Pete Doherty

 

 

The Libertines were the first band ever to feature on the cover on the NME before their first album was released. Tucked into the back of the journal, a single sheet of paper details Doherty’s musings on their first interview, 1 May 2002, which would propel them to national stardom.

 

All this pompous description – and yet it is so natural. All the slut & dirty, dirty rough old ground crawled along – its all there. Saying ‘one’ is saying ‘all’ and the moment is all that matters. If we do receive a good write up in the NME next week my world will alter slightly. I should not be able to care much less, and yet. And yet Roger Morten strikes strikes such a charming chord in my consciousness. This presence, knowing eyes behind sunglasses, Little in the way of revelation. What will he right ? Will there be a photograph? Will be famous by Thursday? A question on the point of fame…

Johnny’s dark & chaotic friend – Dave – spoke ill of fame’s touch. Do I want it? The crassness of hype & everyday confusion & duties to those who tug in your arm in the queue? Yes! Yes! And Thrice Yes!

One of the first acts to self-release music on the internet, it was through an intricate network of email, texts and web forums they were able to invite scores of fans to ‘guerrilla gigs’ in their east London flat. This was a particularly busy period for the so called “Albion Rooms” with fans packing themselves in as the police vans rolled up outside.

 

91986_7

 

This journal opens with a brief discussion on Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, war, social hierarchy, and the breakdown of the state.

Though Doherty is famed for his songwriting partnership with Barat, he has long written poetry, often reciting Burns, Browning and Dickinson in interviews. At the age of 16, he won a poetry competition and embarked on a tour of Russia organised by the British Council.

There are many stream-of-consciousness drafts in the journal, including:

IN A SMALL TOWN JUST ABOUT A MILE FROM ANYWHERE

The chimneys sang – silent suicide
The local graveyard, familiar
to village underlings enslaved
in paper handchains,
Green trees and grass knew nothing,
They swing still grotesque
and poison.
And upon the harrowing landscape, bounding, a
molten submarine,
Up peri-como-scopes.
Can anything in life be more horrible!
The inquest of existence pleads, Guilty.
He stands like a savage
indecision of his own

The journal contains many early versions of lyrics for songs that would later be released by The Libertines, or Pete’s second project, Babyshambles.

91986_3

 

“The Ha Ha Wall” (or simply “Haha Wall”) is a track #7 on The Libertines’ 2nd album The Libertines (2004). The track is credited to Doherty and Barat. There also exist a couple of rough versions including one by Babyshambles for the Sailor sessions.

Doherty has said of the song, “‘The Ha Ha Wall’ dates back to the very first night Carl and I … actually sat down as friends with guitars in about 1998 … He was really proud of his Union Jack tea towel and this old guitar he had, and the first song we wrote together became ‘The Ha Ha Wall'” (Kids in the Riot pp.185-186). Written approximately two years before the official album version was released, the notebook shows a still incomplete version of the lyrics in verse two.

A version of Through the Looking Glass appears, with chords, in the notebook. It is not the first incarnation – a previous diary (circa 2001) holds frantic paragraphed notes of what would later become the lyrics. This version, though written in song format, is far from complete.

Among the photographs of Doherty are reviews of The Libertines, king skin packets glued under scribbles, postcards and polaroid strips. An address for a Parisian antique dealer is pasted below a stream of consciousness entitled “Arbeit Macht Frei” – another well-known song title, that would later feature on the sound track of film Children of Men.

Newspaper clippings “Hiroshima’s Children pause for peace”, and a set of pictures showing Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair are also included without explanation.

 

91986_5

 

 

 

MANUSCRIPT PRISON JOURNAL WANDSWORTH: AUTUMN 2003            

 

91983

 

“Afternoon… Window crusted with dry summers flake & a lonely fly, all a screen ignored by the viewer who though facing it, stares and stares straight throughout his silence.”
                  -The first line of Doherty’s prison journal.

 

91983_1

 

 

On 7 September 2003, Peter Doherty was sentenced to six months in prison after breaking into Carl Barat’s flat. He was released on 8 October 2003.

This prison journal contains excerpts and drafts of Lonely Villein, Doherty’s projected semi-autobiographical novel. Drawings include a figure (repeated three times) modelled on Henry Wallis’s painting The Death of Chatterton, and a crude sketch of two prisoners sharing a cell with the caption “I love Heroin”

The Villein passages are not confined to basic prose, the narrative extends to long form poetry, a snippet of which reads:

An illusion:
the window appears clean now, and the sky a
rich definite biro purple. The light in the
room is deceptively dull, as Villein has
hung a pale green linen sheet from crooked screws,
soothing the harsh electric white that blares
from the plastical case.

Doherty has also transcribed poems an impassioned speech from Oscar Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua on the back cover of the prison diary.

 

91983_8

 

 

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