High on a cliff in Normandy, in a house overlooking the sea, the man I once considered the most beautiful musician in the world, Pete Doherty, sleeps on a sofa in a pair of black pants. In the 2000s, I often saw him in East London, followed by followers and followers, but I never saw him sleep or even at rest. To his fans, it seemed as if he was lost in his own poetic world (critics laughed at him for being lost in a leg and heroin). But here he is, dozing in the middle of the morning at the home he shares with his wife, Catia de Vidas; his Siberian Husky, Zeus, at his feet. No one expects the interview with Doherty to start on time, but my train to Paris leaves in three hours, so I pat him on the shoulder. He wakes up. “Oh, hey! All right, give me some time, I’ll get dressed, ‘he says in his hot, gravelly voice and disappears. Laura, the Guardian photographer, and I are waiting nervously. Will he give us the slip? Or fall asleep again?
Instead, he confuses our expectations and reappears within 30 seconds, wearing a black T-shirt, shorts and pants, a hat on his head, looks if not fresh, then at least awake. I tell him the plan: I’ll interview him here, then Laura will take a picture of him in the garden and then I’ll catch my train.
“No, it won’t work,” he says, already on the move. “I want to take you somewhere, let’s go.”
He opens the door of his car and Zeus jumps inside. As it happens, the last thing my editor told me before I left for Normandy was, “Whatever you do, don’t let him drive you anywhere!” I get in the car.
“Um, what time will you be back?” Laura calls, still standing in front of the house. But Doherty doesn’t answer. And off we go.
“It’s been three years since the end – or at least a long pause – of this mission of constantly erasing myself with foot, heroin and ketamine.” Photo: Laura Stevens / Guardian
So many men and women of my generation were in love with Doherty. Never before has a musician looked so charismatic, so romantic and yet so approachable. We chased the pubs where he hung out, joined the bulletin boards to know when the next concert would be, copied his style. He and his best friend Carl Barat founded their group Libertines, based on their vision of Arcadia, which is about a community, a world built on art and creativity. That dream fell apart when Doherty decided it must mean hanging out with packs of other drug addicts, much to the chagrin of Barât’s more businesslike sentiments, which led to Doherty’s expulsion from the group several times. But initially, at least that meant treating the fans as part of the band, pulling us on stage and inviting us to after parties. And the music! No other group has better understood what it is like to feel young, stupid and famous in Britain at the beginning of this century. Zillion gangs of imitators followed, but none came close to the Libertines. They released only two albums at their peak, Up the Bracket from 2002 and The Libertines from 2004 (followed by Hanthems for Doomed Youth in 2015), but they were the iconic band of the era.
Now that I remember the intensity of my feelings for Doherty, it makes me shiver, as if I remember a wrong early relationship. Recent years have been particularly embarrassing for Doherty fans. He has always been a magnet for the tabloids who followed him around in hopes of catching him shooting or overdosing. Now, at the age of 43, he is being pushed around Normandy with gray stubble and a belly. “Pete Swap Heroin for Cheese!” Scoff at the headlines. Before I arrived in Normandy, I felt as nervous as if I were going to a high school date. Would it remind me of youthful stupidity or a reflection of my middle-aged stupidity, and which would be worse?
“Should we go for coffee?” “Oh, no, this road is closed,” Doherty said as we drove through a local village. The car makes an alarming beeping sound. Want to see what it is?
“Yeah, that’s weird,” he says. After about 15 minutes, we realize that Zeus is standing on one of the latches on the back door and half-opening the door. Hanging out with Doherty in 2022 is somehow not much different from going out with Doherty in 2002. I’m showing him a picture a friend of us took in 2005 when he was living in Brick’s awful little hotel. Lane in East London, and I lived in the apartment next door.
“So we were hanging out then?” I thought I remembered you, “he said with a smile, which is a sweet thing to say, but very unlikely, given the amount of drugs he was taking at the time. Does he remember much of that period?
“I try not to do it. So it was a little weird with the book. I just couldn’t handle it. “
That’s right, the book. I came to Normandy to talk to Doherty about his memoir, A Likely Lad, which he co-wrote with Simon Spence. It is full of anecdotes that caused the shiny chaos of the London indie music scene in the early 2000s. (A typical example from the book: when the Libertines stormed a pub in Clerkenwell to do an early concert, “The only person who showed up was [Razorlight singer] Johnny Borel. He appeared with a gas mask and made a folk set with these two black gospel singers. In fact, he was quite good. ”) As the most infamous member of the Libertines, and then of his second band Babyshambles, Doherty was not only at the heart of that era, he defined it in ways as good as his poetry, his idealism , his style) and bad (drugs, beliefs, wasted talent). Who better to capture the excitement, but also the gloom of this period of it? But nothing is simple with Doherty. Not only did he not write his memoirs – he talked to Spence, who then had the unenviable job of arranging all the tales in chronological order and verifying the facts – but he didn’t even read it.
“It’s too weird to read it because it’s first-person,” he says.
Wasn’t that what he expected?
“No! The initial agreement was that I would talk to him on the phone and he would be a third party. But when the book arrived, it was all ‘me,’ ‘me,’ ‘me.’
With Carl Barratt on tour at Libertines, 2004. Photo: Andy Wilshere / Redferns
So he’s a little upset about that?
“Well, yes, you can imagine. My agent’s words to me were, “Just think about the money.” But we had already spent the money. “
Worse, he says, “they took out all the good parts because everyone’s lawyer had to read it. Carl looked at him closely, Kate [Moss]The lawyers didn’t want to see him. I kept saying, “You have to keep it, it’s funny!” But they kept saying, “No, no, no.” Besides, my wife was a little worried, but I told her, “If you don’t read it and I don’t read it, we can just pretend it doesn’t exist.” But she doesn’t do things that way. “
(I later asked Doherty’s literary agent about how the book was written, and he said, “A Likely Lad is a ghostly autobiography based on a long conversation between Peter and the ghost writer. Peter may have had reservations about this approach initially, but every word in the book is his. ”)
De Vidas plays the keyboard in his current band Pete Doherty and Puta Madres and they got married last October. What did she take out of the book?
“Obviously a lot about other girls,” he says, and it’s true that several of Doherty’s girlfriends and the strange fiancée are especially absent. Similarly, singer Lisa Murish, the mother of his 18-year-old son Astille, and model Lindy Hingston, the mother of his 10-year-old daughter Eisling, are barely appearing. But he and Astil, an ambitious director, have a good relationship, he says. He hasn’t seen Eisling since his relationship with Hingston broke up.
One ex who appears very often in the book is Moss. The couple have been together for more than two years, and the combination of the most famous British musician and the most rock’n’roll model in the world made them the top celebrity couple. Things briefly exploded for them in 2005 when photos of Moss looking to be taking cocaine in a studio where Doherty was recording with Babyshambles hit the front of the Mirror. There were rumors that Doherty himself had sold these photos, which he always firmly denied, and God knows he had many followers who would sell photos of his dead grandmother for a dozen. But surely he knew that Moss – a famous private person – would hate to write about their relationship?
With Kate Moss in Glastonbury, 2005 Photo: Matt Cardi / Getty Images Kate Moss did not walk in the lairs on her feet! She was never interested in all this, and to be honest, we broke up
“I don’t think there’s anything about Kate that hasn’t been written before,” he said.
So you missed all the stories about Kate Moss cracking the dens, I’m joking, but he jumped: “Kate Moss didn’t go to crack the dens! She was never interested in all this, and to be honest, we broke up.
Is he sorry he chose crack over Kate Moss?
“Am I sorry we broke up?”
Yes.
“No, of course not. What kind of question is that? ”He laughs.
Despite the lawyers, the book still contains many lucrative anecdotes about celebrities, from a Strokes member who cuts Doherty’s cocaine to the time he and Moss went on vacation with – of all people – Sarah Ferguson, which ended with him was deported: “And the next thing, I woke up in Heathrow in a pair of Thai police shorts,” he wrote. He is also very good at capturing the absolute chaos in Doherty’s life: only one page floods his house; he goes to court for driving violations; 13 packets of heroin fall out of his pocket while he is in the courtroom; and a friend seriously injures a man while driving Doherty’s car, …
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