On top of a Normandy cliff, in a house overlooking the sea, the man I once considered the most beautiful musician in the world, Pete Doherty, is asleep on a sofa in black shorts. In the 2000s, I often saw him in East London, followed by acolytes and hangers-on, but I never saw him asleep or even at rest. To his fans, he seemed to have gotten lost in his own poetic world (his critics mocked that he had gotten lost in crack and heroin). But here he is now, sleeping in the middle of the morning in the house he shares with his wife, Katia de Vidas; his Siberian husky, Zeus, at his feet. No one expects an interview with Doherty to start on time, but my train back to Paris leaves in three hours, so I give it a soft touch on the shoulder. He wakes up. “Oh hey! Okay, give me a minute, I’ll put on some clothes,” he says in his heavy, gravel voice, and disappears. Laura, the Guardian’s photographer, and I look forward to it. Will he give us the rejection? Or go back to sleep?
Instead, it confuses our expectations and reappears in 30 seconds, dressed in a black T-shirt, shorts and slides, cap on his head, similar if not cool, at least awake. I tell her the plan: I’ll interview her here, then Laura will take a picture of her in the garden, and then I’ll take the train.
“No, that won’t work,” he says, already on the move. “I want to take you somewhere, come on.”
He opens the door of his car and Zeus jumps in. By the way, the last thing my editor told me before I left for Normandy was, “Whatever you do, don’t let it get you anywhere!” I got in the car.
“Um, what time are you coming back?” Laura shouts, still standing in front of the house. But Doherty does not answer. And let’s go.
“It’s been three years since the end, or at least a long pause, of my mission to constantly erase crack, heroin and ketamine.” Photography: Laura Stevens / The Guardian
So many men and women of my generation were in love with Doherty. Never before had a musician seemed so charismatic, so romantic, and yet so accessible. We chased the pubs where he spent his time, we joined the message boards to know when the next concert would be, we copied his style. He and his best friend Carl Barât founded his band, The Libertines, with their vision of Arcadia, which was all about community, a world built on art and creativity. That dream fell apart when Doherty decided that it should mean spending time with drug-addicted peer groups, much to the displeasure of Barat, who was more enterprising, and had Doherty expelled from the band several times. But at first, it meant treating the fans as part of the band, throwing us on stage, and inviting us to later parties. And the music! Nowhere else did he better capture what it felt like to feel young, stupid, and glorious in Britain at the beginning of this century. A million imitation bands emerged in his wake, but none came close to the Libertines. They only released two albums at their peak, Up the Bracket in 2002 and The Libertines in 2004 (followed by Anthems for Doomed Youth in 2015), but they were the iconic band of the time.
Now, remembering the intensity of my feelings for Doherty makes me shudder, like remembering a wrong initial relationship. The last few years have been especially baffling for Doherty fans. He was always a magnet for the tabloids, who followed him in hopes of catching him by shooting or overdosing. Now 43, he is allowed to walk around Normandy with gray stubble and a belly. “Pete has changed heroin for cheese!” mock the headlines. Before I got to Normandy, I felt as nervous as if I was going to a high school reunion. Would it be a reminder of my youthful madness, or a reflection of my middle-aged boredom, and what would be worse?
“Shall we have a coffee? Oh no, this road is closed, “says Doherty as we drive through a local village. The car makes a worrying sound.
“Yeah, that’s weird, that,” he says. After about 15 minutes, we realize that Zeus is standing on one of the latches on the back door, half opening the door. Going out with Doherty in 2022 is not, in any way, very different from going out with Doherty in 2002. I show you a picture a friend took of us in 2005, when he was living in a horrible little hotel in Brick Lane, East London, and I lived next door.
“So that was when we were dating? I thought I remembered you,” he says with a smile, which is a sweet thing to say, but very unlikely given the amount of narcotics he was taking at the time. Do you remember much of that time?
“I try not to. That’s why it was a little weird with the book. I just couldn’t be with that.”
Well, the book. I came to Normandy to talk to Doherty about his memoirs, A Likely Lad, which he wrote with Simon Spence. It’s full of anecdotes that evoke the chaos of the London indie music scene in the early 2000’s. only person who appeared was [Razorlight singer] Johnny Borrell. He showed up with a gas mask and did a folk set with these two black gospel singers. It was pretty good, in fact. “) As the most infamous member of the Libertines, and then his second band Babyshambles, Doherty was not only at the heart of that time, but his poetry, his idealism, his styling) and bad ones (drugs, convictions, wasted talent.) Who better than him to capture the emotion but also the desolation of that period? But nothing is easy with Doherty. Not only did he not write his memoirs — he spoke to Spence, who at the time had the unenviable job of putting all the stories in chronological order and verifying them — but he didn’t even read it.
“It’s too weird to read it because it’s in the first person,” he says.
Wasn’t that what I expected?
“No! The initial agreement was that I would talk to him on the phone and it would be in the third person. But when the book came it was all ‘me,’ ‘me,’ ‘me.’ It’s completely shocking.”
With Carl Barât during a Libertines tour, 2004. Photo: Andy Willsher / Redferns
So are you a little upset about this?
“Well, yes, you can imagine. My agent’s words were, ‘Just think of the money.’
Worse, he says, “they got all the good stuff out, because everyone had to read it. Carl looked at him well, Kate [Moss]the lawyers on the scene wanted to see it. I kept saying, “You have to keep it up, it’s fun!” But they kept saying, “No, no, no.” Also, my wife was a little worried, but I told her, “If you don’t read it and I don’t read it, we can pretend it doesn’t exist.” But that’s not the way it is. “
(Later, I ask Doherty’s literary agent about how the book was written and he says, “Likely Lad is a ghostly autobiography based on many hours of conversation between Peter and the ghostwriter. Maybe Peter had reservations about this approach initially, but every word in the book is yours. ”
De Vidas plays keyboards in his current band, Pete Doherty and the Whore Mothers, and they got married last October. What did you get out of the book?
“A lot of things about other girls, obviously,” she says, and it’s true that several of Doherty’s girlfriends and the weird girlfriend are remarkably absent. Similarly, singer Lisa Moorish, mother of her 18-year-old son, Astile, and model Lindi Hingston, mother of her 10-year-old daughter Aisling, barely appear. But he and Astile, an aspiring filmmaker, have a good relationship, he says. He has not seen Aisling since his relationship with Hingston broke down.
One ex who appears a lot in the book is Moss. The couple have been together for over two years, and the combination of Britain’s most famous musician and the world’s most rock’n’roll model made them the ultimate celebrity couple. Things briefly imploded for them in 2005 when photos of Moss appearing to be taking cocaine in a studio where Doherty was recording with Babyshambles appeared in front of the mirror. There were rumors that Doherty himself had sold these photos, which he has always strongly denied, and God knows he had many hangers that would have sold photos of his grandmother who died for ten. But did you know that Moss, a famous private person, would hate to write about their relationship?
With Kate Moss in Glastonbury, 2005. Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty ImagesKate Moss didn’t go crack dense! He was never interested in all that, and to be honest, that’s why we broke up
“I don’t think there’s anything about Kate in this that hasn’t been written before,” she says.
So you put aside all the stories about Kate Moss going to dense crack, I say, as a joke, but she gets very nervous: “Kate Moss didn’t go to dense crack! She was never interested in all this and, if I’m honest, that’s why we broke up. “
Do you regret picking the crack over Kate Moss?
“Do I regret breaking up?”
Yes.
“No, of course not. What kind of question is that?” he scoffs.
Despite the lawyers, the book still contains many valuable celebrity anecdotes, from a member of the Strokes who stings Doherty’s cocaine, to the time when he and Moss went on vacation with, among all the people, Sarah Ferguson, who killed him. deported: “And next time, I woke up at Heathrow in Thai police shorts,” he writes. It’s also great for capturing the sheer chaos of Doherty’s life: on a single page, his house is flooded; goes to court for driving offenses; 13 packs of heroin fall out of his pocket while he is in the room; and a friend seriously injures a man while driving Doherty’s car, …