Having led the proverbial horse to water on Babyshambles' last album, Shotter's Nation, only to see it relieve itself all over the studio floor, it seems amazing that Stephen Street even countenanced the thought of producing Peter Doherty's new album. For the Britpop drill sergeant who helped to turn Blur and Kaiser Chiefs into lean hit machines, it must have hurt to see his name on a record so thin on inspiration that the finished track listing featured Kate Moss's debut writing credit and a song that the guitarist used to play in a “socialist Oi! band”. Worse still, in interviews around the release of the album in 2007 Doherty ungraciously complained that Street made them play songs over and over again, sometimes having the temerity to force them to finish other “ideas”.

If Doherty sounded like a man who didn't know that this is actually what producers are paid to do, that's hardly surprising. Up to this point, Doherty's favoured knob-twiddler was Mick Jones - less a producer, more a man blessed with the ability to press play and record at the same time.

The new single Last of the English Roses is the first serious signal that the faith shown by his dwindling band of diehards may yet be reciprocated. Ghostly melodicas swirl around a great pop chorus, appealingly undersold by a drawl that - for the first time in ages - doesn't sound in thrall to its own myth.

Incredibly, there's no shortfall in the quality of what surrounds it. The decision to draft Graham Coxon in on second guitar immediately comes good in the opening strains of Arcadie - whose acoustic interplay could have come straight from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn's seminal 1966 album Bert and John. Melody eddies in almost every corner of what follows. New Love Grows on Trees and Palace of Bone resound with a dewy morning zip that reminds you why Doherty once inspired such devotion.

Stylistically, we're on similar territory to the romantic English ruminations of Down in Albion in 2005. Save for Street's steady guidance, the crucial difference is that Grace/Wastelands is rattling with songs that match the lofty poetic conceits that spawned them. 1939 Returning is a lilting assemblage of wartime images - soldiers that never return, “London urchins” negotiating rubble - lent a slight sepia melancholy thanks to a perfectly weighted string arrangement from John Metcalfe, formerly of Durutti Column.

However, amid stiff competition, it's probably Salome for which Doherty reserves the best vocal performance of his recording life. “I've had enough of the dreadful cold,” he sings, with a pitiful tenderness that suggests the Salome he's singing about might not be a person. Once again, hats off to Street for reining in his customary bells-and-whistles pop construction and shading in the space around Doherty with simple, autumnal brushstrokes.

For the first time since Doherty's early days in the Libertines, you can hear work in these songs. That may not sound like a revelation, but in the past five years its not the raw material that his music has lacked but the application. Let the positive reinforcement begin.

(Parlophone, TS £10.76)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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