Hamburg Demonstrations is Peter Doherty’s second solo album, following 2009’s Grace/Wastelands, and the former Libertines frontman finds himself in a peculiar position. Ten years after a bitter split, the band made its spectacular comeback: playing at Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury before releasing the album Anthems for Doomed Youth in 2015. To many fans, this seemed a fitting conclusion, and the band went their separate ways on a happier note (bassist John Hassall’s new band The April Rainers are set to release their first album, while drummer Gary Powell is touring with The Specials).

At the same time, media interest in Doherty’s own life has also cooled. It’s been years since the prison sentences, the fling with Kate Moss and the constant Daily Mail headlines. Following his completed treatment at the Hope Rehab Centre in Thailand, there have been no public signs of his much-covered drug issues. Now in his late 30s and a father of two, Doherty’s insistence on being called ‘Peter’ is perhaps the clearest indication of his determination to show that he’s more than just Party Pete, the tabloid villain.

The great challenge for Doherty with Hamburg Demonstrations was thus to find a way to keep fans interested without sliding into the overbearing nostalgia for the good-old-days that (perhaps forgivably) afflicted Anthems for Doomed Youth. Thankfully, he largely manages to achieve this. Many of the songs on the album, such as ‘Birdcage’, and ‘Down for the Outing’ have been floating around for the last few years, and its last track, ‘She Is Far’, which describes a walk through London in the winter, was written in the Libertines’ very early days. But there is strong newer material too.

‘Hell to Pay at the Gates of Heaven’ repeats the refrain “Come on, boys, you gotta choose your weapon – J-45 or AK47,” and tells the listener that “you join a band, or join an army”. Doherty will play at the reopening of Bataclan in Paris on 16th November, a year on from the deadly ISIS attack at the venue. The song draws a conscious, bold comparison between the disaffected youths that pick up guitars, and those that pick up automatic rifles. Musically upbeat but nonetheless poignant, the song’s grounding in a real-world tragedy makes for a welcome change (even for Doherty’s fans) from the literary illusions and Arcadian romanticisms that usually dominate his work.

The strongest song on the album is ‘Flags from the Old Regime’, Doherty’s tribute to his deceased friend Amy Winehouse, which is recorded at a slightly quicker tempo (and with a slight name change – “of” to “from”) than the version released as a single last year. It’s easy to imagine the role that the death of his (literal as well as figurative) partner in crime must have played in destroying the romance of rock n’ roll for Doherty. Lines such as “You stand up there/ In front of the whole world/ But you don’t feel them songs no more” and “I don’t want to die anymore/ Any more than I did/ Want to die before” are, in context, as good as anything Doherty has ever written. It is fitting that the song is followed on the album by the more melancholy of two alternate versions of ‘I Don’t Love Anyone (but You’re Not Just Anyone)’.

Hamburg Demonstrations is a far cry from the raucous energy and brashness that made the Libertines’ debut Up the Bracket one of the best albums of the early noughties. But after 15 years, so it should be. The album certainly has its weak points. While Doherty has used literary reference to great effect in the past (see the superb Libertines song ‘Death on the Stairs’), the opening track ‘Kolly Kibber’ is just a confusing mess for anyone that hasn’t read Brighton Rock. Yet on the whole it’s an album full of both wit and sorrow, and a highly accomplished work