‘I don’t want to turn into Peter Libertine Rehab King’
His drug addiction forced him out of his old band. Will Pete Doherty be able to clean up his act for his new project?
The flat is a pleasant, airy space in Clerkenwell’s Exmouth Market, conspicuously bereft of bloody needles or scenes from Trainspotting. A pale, thin, but relatively healthy Pete Doherty – formerly Libertine and currently Britain’s most infamous rock star – is talking, with great articulacy, about how music should mean far more than drugs, while continually smoking crack and smack in front of me.
We are in his bedroom, which contains nothing more sinister than a bed, an electric guitar, a sofa, and two members (guitarist Patrick Walden and drummer Jemma Clarke) of his new band, Babyshambles. Doherty is expounding on his past, his future ad the drug addiction that has had him thrown out of The Libertines by his co-frontman and best friend, Carl Barât.
Their love/hate relationship began in 1997, when Doherty, 25, saw Barât, 26, setting off a smoke bomb while performing in a band in Liverpool. The pair, who call each other Carlos and Pigman, both had itinerant childhoods, with Basingstoke-born Barât’s time divided between his traveller mother and factory-worker father. Doherty was an army brat, born near Hadrian’s Wall, who had stints in Germany and Cyprus.
Before signing to the Rough Trade label, the poverty-stricken lovers of Tony Hancock, Graham Greene and The Smiths, lived in squats, disused pubs and factories, and even a brothel on Holloway Road. The pair charmed journalists with their louche, Withnail and I-style banter, English cultural references, and obvious attention for each other. But, it seems, the bond couldn’t survive the drugs that surrounded the band.
Music, insists Doherty, can save lost souls from things like addiction. “Getting fucking bogged down in being Peter Libertine: The Rehab King or Peter Libertine: The Junkie,” he says “was poisonous to what the music was in the beginning. Babyshambles has returned to the soul and the meaning that I get just from bouncing songs off sweaty masses of kids and diving in – it’s like diving into oblivion.”
No one can say that Doherty isn’t open about his behaviour and issues. The singer, songwriter and guitarist is aware that fans of is ribald, punky songs about high times, low-life and ‘Arcadian revelry’ are concerned that, any day now, they will be reading his obituary.
“All I can do is assure them that, in the past year, I’ve calmed down a lot. I don’t inject any more. But I know the only solution is to knock crack and heroin on the head completely before they knock me on the head. And that’s the plan. I’m gonna have a go at Detox Five. They knock you out for a few days so you go through the withdrawal when you’re sleeping.”
Despite his alarming drug consumption, Doherty is a smart, charming extrovert so obsessed by music that, halfway through the interview, he picks up a guitar and bursts into song. But, no matter how upbeat he attempts to be about Babyshambles, sadness and anger inevitably spill over because, somewhere else in London, The Libertines are busily preparing for the August release of their eponymous second album.
This album, largely comprised of songs written by Doherty, will go straight to number one. But Doherty won’t be invited to the chart-topping party.
He won’t be allowed to perform with the band until he conquers his addictions. But The Libertines are not The Libertines without the beautiful, intense friendship between Doherty and Barât, which is plastered all over the scuzzy, nagging Jam and Clash influenced dongs that they co-wrote, sung and dramatised in their emotive, reckless, homoerotic live performances.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the pair’s violent falling-out, the moment of triumph that they worked so hard for lies in disarray.
The hast, dramatic rise of The Libertines makes Oasis brothers Noel ad Liam Gallagher’s coke-fuelled sibling rivalry look like an episode of Teletubbies. After exploding on to the scene with incendiary love shows in 2001 and the sweary, banned debut single What A Waster, in summer 2002, the Bethnal Green based quartet saw their first album, Up The Bracket, go platinum and win them a 2003 NME Best British Band award. But the critical plaudits soon gave way to lurid tales of narcotic excess and the conflict between Doherty and Barât.
After various breakdown and punch ups, The Libertines’ summer 2003 tour ensued without Doherty as, for the first time, he was ordered by the band to give up drugs before rejoining. Doherty responded by breaking into Barât’s flat, and was sentenced to six months in prison for burglary. The sentence was reduced to a month on appeal.
Barât picked up Doherty from the prison gate and an emotional, triumphant reunion tour ended 2003 on a high. But, as the prolific Doherty launched his Babyshambles side project with an impressive, self titled single, guested on his friend Wolfman’s hit, For Lovers, and delighted fans with ‘guerilla’ gigs, where performances at tiny venues, art spaces, rehearsal studios and even friend’s flats were announced on the Babyshambles website hours before showtime, his three failed attempts at rehab infuriated the rest of The Libertines.
The last of these, in June, involved travelling to a monastery in Thailand. He fled within days diving back into heroin in Bangkok, and on his return to England, was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon. Today he is chain-smoking class-A narcotics as though they were Silk Cuts. Can’t Doherty see The Libertines’ point that he is impossible to work with while he’s heavily addicted?
“I don’t see it as relevant because Carl, well it is childish of me to say this and it might seem like backbiting, but last summer for example, I was thrown out of the band for taking drugs right? Carl was bang on everything last summer. He was propping himself up on the back of the tour bus, in a raging mood, and he was doing it all – up his nose, in his ear, up his arse.
“I don’t want to go to America for 10 months to promote the new album. Carl does. Carl wants to sell a million records. Good luck to him. But I can’t accept that he’s gonna call himself The Libertines and sing my songs.”
In the meantime, Babyshambles are writing and recording their debut album, and preparing for a September tour and a new single out later this year. Doherty is also fitting in some solo acoustic shows, including a gig at Camden’s Barfly on Monday.
He confesses that one reason for the acoustic shows is to raise some money for his one-year old son, Estile, whose mother, Lisa Moorish, is a singer and former girlfriend of Liam Gallagher. “Estile’s amazing. It has been reported that I haven’t seen him for six months – which isn’t true. It’s difficult because I’ve never lived with Lisa. My nan, my sister, and my mum have really opened their arms to her, and have given her something I can’t. But there’s nothing like holding him and singing to him.”
The early signs are that Babyshambles will be every bit as vital and exciting a band as The Libertines – that is, if Doherty can do what his fellow Babyshambles members and loved ones want him to do, and kick the crack and smack. Reactions to the first shows, with the settled Babyshambles line up (which is completed by bassist Drew McConnell) have been ecstatic – the talented Walden and Doherty provide a ragged and raging guitar interplay similar to the best of The Libertines.
However, no one can blame fans for wanting Doherty and Barât to reconcile and perform songs from the second album, including the single Can’t Stand Me Now, which lays bare the breakdown between the former brothers-in-arms with moving honesty.
Does Doherty believe a reunion is possible? “I can’t live the rest of my life having too much concern for things that really aren’t that important. The crucial thing is that we stay creative, don’t harbour too much ill will, and when we meet, we are able to look each other in the eye. I’m not gonna be part of a pantomime of only talking to someone onstage and being part of an act.
“Yeah, we were amazing. But believe me, I’m not the sort of person who’ll take a sub-standard alternative. I’ve chosen this path because it’s me. And this is the first time in three or four years that I’ve listened to me heart, as opposed to listening to my wallet, my gullet, or my vanity.”
In short, it sounds as if The Libertines, in their original form, are dead and buried. But they are a band who write a new story every day. Whether with The Libertines or Babyshambles, the fans of Pete Doherty simply hope that he, and his unique talents, will be with us for a long time to come.
Someone owes me a drink now surely.
xx
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i was thinking the same thing. i was hoping he gave the interview before he posted yesterday. otherwise i feel discouraged and disappointed. and a bit melancholy...
drinks in london next june then??
x
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