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Excerpt from the interview
Pete Doherty: Man Out of Time
By: Nick Duerden
January 22, 2008
Is Pete Doherty a uniquely gifted musician with an underappreciated body of work or just a reckless junkie tabloid magnet looking for his next fix? Or both?
Photographed for Spin by Hedi Slimane
Screwing a cigarette into his mouth, which he clamps between his teeth like a cowboy Clint Eastwood, Pete Doherty prowls around his suite at London's K West hotel as if scouting for potential escape routes. But while anxiety may bounce off him like static electricity, he is actually in good spirits today and looks comparatively healthy, the junkie's sallow death mask having given way of late to jowls, baby fat, and blood flow. He is tall and seemingly elastic beneath his porkpie hat, the ability to sit still clearly an elusive one. His bassist, Drew McConnell, reaches up to offer a light, which Doherty stoops to take before crossing the room to boot up a battered laptop. He then picks up an acoustic guitar, rests on the arm of a sofa, and falls into guitarist Mick Whitnall's lap.
"You know what?" he says, unfolding himself from the tangle of limbs. "Something good has happened to us. We are, dare I say it, a professional unit these days. When people get us in a room together now, they actually treat us like musicians. Before, they would treat us as anything but: pigeon fanciers, candles, dry humpers..."
The reason for the change, he continues, is rehab, twice a week, regular as clockwork. It is keeping him off the drugs -- specifically, the heroin and crack -- and helping rein in some of his more prosecutable behavior patterns. "I'm only just now starting to enjoy making music," he says. "I'm only just starting to be allowed to." Previously, Doherty might have felt it necessary to trash any hotel room he entered if only as part of his pursuit of canonization, tempting mortality to achieve a perhaps outmoded idea of rock'n'roll immortality and testing the patience of friends and strangers alike in the process. (He takes a certain pride in having outlived lifestyle role models Hendrix and Cobain: "I'm 28. Ha!")
This is a man who enjoys painting walls with blood, and not always his own: On at least one occasion, he has been accused of injecting an impressionable fan, and if he wasn't introducing drugs, then he was withdrawing blood in the name of art. But that was the Doherty of old, he insists. Today he is the model of relative restraint and keeps his rampant creativity within the bounds of normalcy. To this end, he finds some hotel stationery, sketches a crude portrait of himself in a suit and porkpie, signs it, and presents it to me as a gift.
"Obviously, I've given up the drugs now, but there are pages and pages on this," he says, reaching for the laptop and tapping the screen. He explains that he has been writing fiction of late, "a sizzling Gypsy tale, a rambling, shambling melody of a novel that came about when I was still on the old fighting juice." He peers at this typed evidence of his former self through a cloud of nicotine smoke and beams. "Fascinating stuff."
It's taken awhile, but Pete Doherty finally seems to have realized that there's more value in being a living rock star than a dead one.
It is early November 2007 and Babyshambles, fronted by the most self-destructive British singer of his generation (sorry, Amy Winehouse, you've only been at this for a year), have been so buoyed by the reception to their recently released second album, Shotters Nation -- 100,000 already sold in the U.K., on its way to eclipsing 2005's debut, Down in Albion -- that Doherty is now convinced they have a tangible future. If Albion was the sound of a band unravelling, then Shotters Nation (featuring four songs cowritten by and credited to Kate Moss, whom Doherty very publicly dated for two years) is freewheeling and whip-smart. It still rattles with Doherty's many ghosts, of course, and in the margins of tracks like "Crumb Begging Baghead" and "UnBiloTitled," one can hear what life must be like when you are confronting vampiric drug dealers one moment and splitting from your supermodel girlfriend the next. The regret is palpable. "It's a lousy life for the washed-up wife / Of a permanently plastered, pissed-up bastard," he wails on "Baddie's Boogie."
Pete Doherty / Photographed for Spin by Hedi Slimane
But Shotters Nation also reveals a singer sounding more focused than he has been in years, due in no small part to influential Britpop producer Stephen Street, who's overseen albums by the Smiths and Blur. A fan of Doherty's former band, the Libertines, he only accepted the job on the proviso that the singer would be in a healthy state.
"I love his ramshackle style," Street says. "I even loved a lot of Down in Albion. But despite assurances to the contrary, it became evident in our very first week that he wasn't well at all. I made him go home and work on lyrics, which was difficult, because he has a horrible group hanging around him, trying to make money off him."
The recording sessions lasted six weeks and were punctuated by arguments, recriminations, and tears. Street was so continually exasperated by Doherty's addled state that he often threatened to walk, endeavoring to capture the singer's creative bursts as and when they occurred, later relying on the rest of the band to give these ramblings shape and context. Consequently, the album offers a better image of the man than he perhaps deserves.
"Pete is incredibly frustrating, yet you can't help but like him. The trouble is, he knows it," Street says. "He was challenging, but so was Morrissey, and sometimes you get the best out of people in difficult situations."
For all the struggle, Shotters Nation is a critical success in England, the Daily Telegraph newspaper calling it "probably the best English rock album anyone is going to make [in 2007]." Even his detractors might allow that Doherty is an uncommonly gifted songwriter, capable of penning the kind of songs whose firework momentum can spawn entire movements, romanticizing working-class England in a way that inspired like-minded, hyperverbal young bands like Arctic Monkeys, the View, Razorlight, the Fratellis, and the Cribs. "[The Libertines] galvanized the DIY mind-set," says the Cribs' Ryan Jarman. "It's a shame -- he'll never shed that public-enemy-number-one image and his music winds up being a shadow of the fact."
Certainly, in America, where Shotters Nation had at press time sold just 5,000 copies since its October release, he is still little more than the junkie ****up who almost destroyed Kate Moss's career -- hence the urgency to turn things around. Videos for the singles "You Talk" and "French Dog Blues" impressed even the most cynical of bloginistas, but without the ability to tour the U.S., thanks to no fewer than 18 arrests in the past five years, Doherty is not likely to gain entry anytime soon. As a result, he still seems an imaginary figure, like some nihilist Easter Bunny. His American label, though, is poised with a contingency plan.
"This is an area where the Internet can lessen how severe a situation like this is," says Glenn Mendlinger, general manager at Astralwerks. "People can see live footage of a band in real time after a gig now. It might not be ideal, but we want to build Doherty's profile here in any way we can. I was always a big fan of the Libertines, and this new record is a bold step forward. With Pete, you really have to separate the tabloid sensationalism from his music."
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Pete Doherty: Man Out of Time
By: Nick Duerden
January 22, 2008
Is Pete Doherty a uniquely gifted musician with an underappreciated body of work or just a reckless junkie tabloid magnet looking for his next fix? Or both?
Screwing a cigarette into his mouth, which he clamps between his teeth like a cowboy Clint Eastwood, Pete Doherty prowls around his suite at London's K West hotel as if scouting for potential escape routes. But while anxiety may bounce off him like static electricity, he is actually in good spirits today and looks comparatively healthy, the junkie's sallow death mask having given way of late to jowls, baby fat, and blood flow. He is tall and seemingly elastic beneath his porkpie hat, the ability to sit still clearly an elusive one. His bassist, Drew McConnell, reaches up to offer a light, which Doherty stoops to take before crossing the room to boot up a battered laptop. He then picks up an acoustic guitar, rests on the arm of a sofa, and falls into guitarist Mick Whitnall's lap.
"You know what?" he says, unfolding himself from the tangle of limbs. "Something good has happened to us. We are, dare I say it, a professional unit these days. When people get us in a room together now, they actually treat us like musicians. Before, they would treat us as anything but: pigeon fanciers, candles, dry humpers..."
The reason for the change, he continues, is rehab, twice a week, regular as clockwork. It is keeping him off the drugs -- specifically, the heroin and crack -- and helping rein in some of his more prosecutable behavior patterns. "I'm only just now starting to enjoy making music," he says. "I'm only just starting to be allowed to." Previously, Doherty might have felt it necessary to trash any hotel room he entered if only as part of his pursuit of canonization, tempting mortality to achieve a perhaps outmoded idea of rock'n'roll immortality and testing the patience of friends and strangers alike in the process. (He takes a certain pride in having outlived lifestyle role models Hendrix and Cobain: "I'm 28. Ha!")
This is a man who enjoys painting walls with blood, and not always his own: On at least one occasion, he has been accused of injecting an impressionable fan, and if he wasn't introducing drugs, then he was withdrawing blood in the name of art. But that was the Doherty of old, he insists. Today he is the model of relative restraint and keeps his rampant creativity within the bounds of normalcy. To this end, he finds some hotel stationery, sketches a crude portrait of himself in a suit and porkpie, signs it, and presents it to me as a gift.
"Obviously, I've given up the drugs now, but there are pages and pages on this," he says, reaching for the laptop and tapping the screen. He explains that he has been writing fiction of late, "a sizzling Gypsy tale, a rambling, shambling melody of a novel that came about when I was still on the old fighting juice." He peers at this typed evidence of his former self through a cloud of nicotine smoke and beams. "Fascinating stuff."
It's taken awhile, but Pete Doherty finally seems to have realized that there's more value in being a living rock star than a dead one.
It is early November 2007 and Babyshambles, fronted by the most self-destructive British singer of his generation (sorry, Amy Winehouse, you've only been at this for a year), have been so buoyed by the reception to their recently released second album, Shotters Nation -- 100,000 already sold in the U.K., on its way to eclipsing 2005's debut, Down in Albion -- that Doherty is now convinced they have a tangible future. If Albion was the sound of a band unravelling, then Shotters Nation (featuring four songs cowritten by and credited to Kate Moss, whom Doherty very publicly dated for two years) is freewheeling and whip-smart. It still rattles with Doherty's many ghosts, of course, and in the margins of tracks like "Crumb Begging Baghead" and "UnBiloTitled," one can hear what life must be like when you are confronting vampiric drug dealers one moment and splitting from your supermodel girlfriend the next. The regret is palpable. "It's a lousy life for the washed-up wife / Of a permanently plastered, pissed-up bastard," he wails on "Baddie's Boogie."
But Shotters Nation also reveals a singer sounding more focused than he has been in years, due in no small part to influential Britpop producer Stephen Street, who's overseen albums by the Smiths and Blur. A fan of Doherty's former band, the Libertines, he only accepted the job on the proviso that the singer would be in a healthy state.
"I love his ramshackle style," Street says. "I even loved a lot of Down in Albion. But despite assurances to the contrary, it became evident in our very first week that he wasn't well at all. I made him go home and work on lyrics, which was difficult, because he has a horrible group hanging around him, trying to make money off him."
The recording sessions lasted six weeks and were punctuated by arguments, recriminations, and tears. Street was so continually exasperated by Doherty's addled state that he often threatened to walk, endeavoring to capture the singer's creative bursts as and when they occurred, later relying on the rest of the band to give these ramblings shape and context. Consequently, the album offers a better image of the man than he perhaps deserves.
"Pete is incredibly frustrating, yet you can't help but like him. The trouble is, he knows it," Street says. "He was challenging, but so was Morrissey, and sometimes you get the best out of people in difficult situations."
For all the struggle, Shotters Nation is a critical success in England, the Daily Telegraph newspaper calling it "probably the best English rock album anyone is going to make [in 2007]." Even his detractors might allow that Doherty is an uncommonly gifted songwriter, capable of penning the kind of songs whose firework momentum can spawn entire movements, romanticizing working-class England in a way that inspired like-minded, hyperverbal young bands like Arctic Monkeys, the View, Razorlight, the Fratellis, and the Cribs. "[The Libertines] galvanized the DIY mind-set," says the Cribs' Ryan Jarman. "It's a shame -- he'll never shed that public-enemy-number-one image and his music winds up being a shadow of the fact."
Certainly, in America, where Shotters Nation had at press time sold just 5,000 copies since its October release, he is still little more than the junkie ****up who almost destroyed Kate Moss's career -- hence the urgency to turn things around. Videos for the singles "You Talk" and "French Dog Blues" impressed even the most cynical of bloginistas, but without the ability to tour the U.S., thanks to no fewer than 18 arrests in the past five years, Doherty is not likely to gain entry anytime soon. As a result, he still seems an imaginary figure, like some nihilist Easter Bunny. His American label, though, is poised with a contingency plan.
"This is an area where the Internet can lessen how severe a situation like this is," says Glenn Mendlinger, general manager at Astralwerks. "People can see live footage of a band in real time after a gig now. It might not be ideal, but we want to build Doherty's profile here in any way we can. I was always a big fan of the Libertines, and this new record is a bold step forward. With Pete, you really have to separate the tabloid sensationalism from his music."
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