Babyshambles Shepherds Bush Empire, London W12
A band turning up, complete and on time, to their own gig wouldn't normally be - shouldn't normally be - cause for celebration. But such rules don't apply in the case of Babyshambles, the often beleaguered outfit led by Pete Doherty, the very, very bad boy of British rock.
Like some haughty supermodel, Doherty's time-keeping is legendarily bad. He turns up to gigs hours late, or not at all. Babyshambles failed to show for an all-important Oasis tour last July, making enemies of the Gallaghers. Then, in October, they pulled gigs in Norwich and Coventry.
Before a spell on remand disrupted Doherty's current tour, his band were already suffering from the loss of their pivotal guitarist, deputy songwriter Patrick Walden. You might recognise Walden from pictures of Babyshambles - he's the skull-faced longhair who makes Doherty look healthy. With Doherty on guitar, the 'Shambles carried on as a three-piece for a while, with Walden dropping in for a guest spot once. But Walden is reinstated tonight, playing with renewed vigour; his reasons for leaving - and, indeed, for coming back - unmentioned.
Even more sensationally, Doherty is here too, all gangly, restless, six-foot-something of him, topped off with a crushed-felt trilby. Despite his criminal record and a string of guilty pleas to these latest drugs charges (seven in total), Doherty escaped a custodial sentence earlier this month. Instead he's got a 12-month community service order, and a Naltrexone implant to thwart the effects of heroin. This rescheduled Shepherd's Bush show isn't Babyshambles' first since Doherty got out of Pentonville prison (they did a brief set at north London venue Koko 10 days previously) but it still feels like an almighty party, a homecoming for the prodigal son.
'Hi, we're Babyshambles,' Doherty rasps, a few songs in, 'brought to you by the National Probation Service.' And towards the end, with not a little irony: 'We're reformed for this tour.'
You'd expect a band as notoriously ramshackle as Babyshambles to be unsteady on their feet after everything they've been through these last few weeks. Instead they are tight, intense and even professional, starting promptly at 10pm and departing without an encore 50 minutes later. And although Doherty arrives onstage as sweaty and dishevelled at the start of a gig as most singers are at the end, he is in control. He spends his time wrapping himself in his microphone cord, pacing and twitching. But he doesn't forget his words, or fall asleep - all past sins of the Babyshambler. A stagediver even gets rewarded with a picture of himself with the singer, taken by Doherty himself.
There's another surprising transformation, too. Songs that sound ropey and unfocused on record - Babyshambles' debut album of last year, Down in Albion - take on a new cogency tonight. 'Loyalty Song', for instance, was once a track buried at the back end of an unravelling album. Tonight it's revealed as a charming set-opener, all dreamy jangles and poignancy. 'Pipedown' is a terrific punk lash, a great Pogues song in all but choice of intoxicant. The band swerve briefly into 'No Fun' by the Stooges, and no one misses a beat. This big traditional venue may lack the low ceilings and exchange of body fluids of Doherty's cherished living-room gigs, but some of the intensity is still here. A refugee from the moshpit passes out in my arms; people are hugging. And Babyshambles' songs aren't all the sickly little demos many (myself included) thought they were. 'A Rebours' is ragged but rousing, another fine excuse for a pogo and a holler.
It's funny how pap shots portray this singer as a doe-eyed weed, a sweet-faced boy enfeebled by drug use. Tonight you're reminded that this strapping frontman has a lot more in common with Liam Gallagher than you'd expect from a man whose band are, ostensibly, the Smiths of squalor. When he's not strangling himself with cable, Peter's stalking around the place with a kind of repressed hostility, tearing open the collar of his shirt, baptising the crowd in beer. Some of this feral energy makes its way into his vocals, too. Doherty delivers 'Black Boy Lane' (once a Libertines song) with power and commitment, before a passionate version of 'Down in Albion' that has everyone baying along.
He spends the band's closing anthem, 'Fuck Forever', stepping on and off the monitors like an incensed jack-in-the-box, a man torn between the need to take care of business and finish these tour dates, and his own appetites. And then, as quickly as he came, he is gone. As the stalls and the balcony entertain themselves by throwing beer cups and clothing at each other, Pete Doherty, just for once, is nowhere to be found when the trouble kicks off.
