Andrew Kendall is a well known music photographer who began working for the music magazine NME in 2003. He has taken many photographs of Peter Doherty, Peter Wolfe, Babyshambles and The Libertines, that may be viewed at his official website and on the old version of his website.
On 17th April 2006, Andrew Kendall posted on the official Libertines forum with a link to two torrents. The first was 1.54 GB and was called Laptop Recordings. Inside this torrent file was a .RAR that contained 123 MP3s that Peter Doherty had recorded on his laptop. Although a lot of it was talking and background noise, there were also many unheard tracks in the Laptop Recordings, such as a version of Loyalty Song (Called "Wolfdream") with Wolfman singing lyrics, or the very first recording of A Fool There Was. As well as Wolfman, Chev and Dot Allison also feature on some of the songs.
The 123 tracks were also re-uploaded to The Libertines media website, Albion Arks by 23rd April 2006. The recordings in the folder were given to Andrew Kendall some time between the release of "The Libertines" and the release of "Down in Albion" (between September 2004 and November 2005). Kendall commented on the official Libertines forum that it did not feel right releasing them when so much was going on with the bands, and decided to hold them back. He also said that he wasn't comfortable with uploading everything from the Laptop Recordings, due to the amount of private conversations, and unreleased tracks they contained, however [Doherty] insisted, as he didn't want the material from his laptops to be lost forever, without fans being able to hear it.
The second, and larger, of the .torrent files that Kendall uploaded contained Doherty's "My Music" folder from his laptop. Inside this was a collection of his favourite music (including released albums such as The Smith's "Meat is Murder", and live tracks such as sets by The IV's, the band featuring Scarborough Steve.) There were also unreleased tracks by Doherty's own bands, such as Babyshambles' Diamond Liner sessions or The Libertines' Monitor Mixes from their self-titled album.
NameAndrew Kendall
