The sudden adoption by anyone of their full Christian name when the short form has served them perfectly well for years signals the desire to be taken ‘seriously’ more clearly than if they were to have ‘Please take me seriously’ tattooed in capitals across their forehead. In the case of former Libertine, now leader of Babyshambles and Mr Kate Moss (though not this week), Pete(r) Doherty, the lofty ambition is literary, hence the publication of 20-odd, carefully dog-eared, tea- and blood- and lord-knows-what-else-stained journals collected under a title so comically grandiose it would curl the toes of even the most pretentious sixth-former.
Doherty’s diary entries cover the period from 1999 to January 2007 and so run the experiential gamut from pre-Libertines obscurity (‘I want to create a band that people will be sorry to miss and obliged to adore’: February 10, 1999) and life as an attendant at the Prince Charles Cinema, through the netherworld of drug addiction, rehab, jail, band fall-outs and that extraordinarily high-profile relationship, all of which have been exhaustively documented by tabloids from London to Lagos. Alongside Doherty’s writings are photographs, collages, random scribblings, tear sheets from newspapers, sketches and assorted notes-to-self, all of which reveal very little, save a soul both utterly determined to secure his place in history and so desperate to present himself as an intellectual that he lists the books he’s read and the films he’s seen (no ‘Fellowship Of The Ring’ here, strangely). Mere mortals, of course, manage to remember such things, which places Doherty at one with his audience, the stupendously solipsistic MySpace generation for whom no thought is too trivial to be shared, no opinion too banal to express.
The most tiresome thing about this collection, however, is not the staggering degree of bloated self-regard which bulges from every page – arguably, that necessarily informs every readable diary – but rather Doherty’s mannered writing style (does anyone who’s not 70 and dressed in tweed really use the word ‘fellow’?), plus the simple ordinariness of his navel-gazing. Doherty’s diaries may be frank but they’re hardly revelatory, which makes you wonder why he bothered. Presumably, it was just for the craic.
