Wasted

In a rare interview, Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty talks to Simon Hattenstone about death, love and why he can't go a day without drugs

Friday November 4, 2005
The Guardian


Sid Vicious crossed with Oscar Wilde... Pete Doherty. Photograph: Sarah Lee.

From the very off, Peter Doherty was pure media gold. He was talented, he was bright and he was beautiful. Perhaps best of all for pop's marketing gurus, he was bent on self-destruction. Or, as he saw it, he was dedicated to the hedonism of the here and now - living for the day. The band he formed with Carl Barat was even called the Libertines. Their first album celebrated life as poetic wasters. Their second was an elegy for all that had been. By the time it came out, Doherty had been sacked by Barat because of his drug problem and had already started a new band, the aptly named Babyshambles. Now Doherty is about to release his third album, the first by Babyshambles. It reeks of decay and seems to anticipate his own death.

Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are due to meet at a shabby hotel on Brick Lane in east London. Drummer Adam Ficek and bass player Drew McConnell are here, but there is no sign of Doherty and guitarist Pat Walden. Ficek receives a call, and grimaces. »Pat can't leave the house,« he says. Why not? »He owes a lot of people a lot of money.« And Doherty? He's upstairs, cleaning his room.
McConnell and Ficek both have music degrees. Ficek does not do drugs, barely drinks and is a glowing picture of health. He joined the band in February, but already calls himself the engine room, and says he helps keep the band together. Is it hard to play in a band with such obvious drug problems? »I wouldn't say difficult. It's sometimes a challenge to pin people to commitments.« I mention that death seems to be a leitmotif of the album. He says he hadn't noticed; he just puts his head down and whacks things with sticks. Is it a concept album, like Dark Side of the Moon? »That's funny,« he says. »It was going to be called Dark Side of the Spoon.«

After 40 minutes or so, we are told that Doherty has tidied up and is ready to receive us. God knows what his room looked like before, because it's in a pretty shocking state now. Drug paraphernalia and CDs are scattered across the bed, and there are rows of blackened, broken miniature bottles of alcohol from which he has been smoking, a trunk full of junk, a motorcycle by the bed, and the words »ROUGH TRADE« daubed on the wall in fresh, dripping blood.

If you crossed Sid Vicious with Oscar Wilde, you might get something approaching Peter Doherty; a dissipated, baby-faced punk dandy. He is gangly and ghostly, and speaks quietly and camply. He is wearing his customary black suit and pork pie hat, and he is off his head - he can't stand straight and speaks as if through a fog. He doesn't seem to have the energy or concentration for full sentences. He sits down on the single bed next to the double, picks up a banjo and starts jamming with Ficek. They make a beautiful if imperfect noise. As a band, they sound not unlike the Libertines - Doherty's fragile whine is so distinctive. But listen closely and you can hear many influences. There's the Kinks and the Clash (Mick Jones, who produced the Libertines, has again been involved here); there's the Smiths and Cockney Rebel and Dylan; but more than anything, their sound is influenced by Doherty's recent experiences.

After the impromptu gig. the others leave. There is only myself, Doherty and a young woman called Nuha Razih filming us in the room. Doherty says they are filming everything that happens in the room and suggests that he has just hired her as his PA. (Last week, the News of the World alleged that while his girlfriend Kate Moss was away in rehab, he was two-timing her with Razih - something both Razih and Doherty denied.)

Despite his addled state, Doherty is immensely polite. He apologises for not having shaken hands earlier, introduces me to Razih and asks if I will introduce myself to the camera. Meanwhile, I ask about the ROUGH TRADE on the wall. Is it his blood? »Yeah. It's brand new. It's not done in a gory way,« he says, unconvinced. »Do you think it's a bit gruesome? It's about a few things. Rough Trade - like 'bum deal kid', and it's an old-fashioned expression for working-class male prostitutes. It's also the name of a record company.«

Suddenly he turns into a scared little kid. He says he's worried about getting into trouble and that he'll have to wash it off. He's had trouble with blood on the walls in hotels before. »This fuckin' assistant manager - jobsworth - shopped me and the Wolfman [his friend and occasional co-writer]. We had left blood on the walls and somehow they equated that to three grand's worth of damage.«

Doherty sits on the bike and makes a revving noise. He explains that he is living in the hotel because the band are recording an acoustic album and he has turned the bedroom into a mini-studio. But Doherty never really had a place to call home. His father was a military man, and the family often moved where his work took him: Ireland, Cyprus, Germany. Your dad sounds posh, I say. »No. Not really. He was a grafter, really. After 36 years he's managed to climb through the ranks from Private Doherty to Major Doherty. But he's still like a soldier's man.« Doherty is a romantic, and one of the many things he romanticises is the working class.

He comes to a sudden stop, as if he's just remembered something, and says that, anyway, he doesn't want to talk about his dad. »He's disowned me. He's not having any of it.« Had they been a close family? »I don't know. He was away a lot ... he was in the Gulf and Bosnia. I idolised him as a kid. I've got good memories of him taking me to football. He took me to QPR, all over the place. You know, I've got every programme from 1972 onwards.«

Despite the frequent changes in school, Doherty thrived academically - 11 GCSEs, nine grade As. Four A levels, four grade As. Was he a swot? No, he says, it came easily to him, but it meant nothing. »It was like a memory game.« McConnell later tells me that Doherty has a photographic memory for music - he would be able to play a song that he had heard only once, say, five years ago.

I had read that his mum wanted him to be an English professor. He shakes his head and says it's untrue. Because neither of his parents left school with qualifications, there was no pressure on him to achieve academically. »My mum would probably want me to be, I don't know, on a desert island wrapped up in cotton wool. She says she blames the parents.«

Even when we are not talking about drugs, the underlying subject seems to be drugs. His only real subject. Although he goes off on a thousand hazy tangents, somehow he gets back to the question. »I think my mum's ambition for me would probably have been to be someone like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. I was dressing up in Brownie uniforms when I was young. I went pretending to be my sister's cousin - I got the uniform and everything. What did your mum want you to be?« he asks in a gentle slur.

He talks about how his sister used to make up songs and they would record pretend radio shows on a little tape deck. Was he always into music? »Not into chart music and bands. Just into songs.« And poets. Like William Blake, he is obsessed with Englishness, and like Blake he refers to England as Albion. The new album is called Down in Albion. He seems embarrassed when I mention the poetry.

»I think, in the early days, there was a lot of affectation to the people I claimed to like.« Actually, he says, he prefers »idle quotation« to poems these days, and provides an instant example. »'There's ice on the sink where we bathe' ... D'you like it? D'you know what it is?« He picks up his guitar and sings the answer.

So how can you call this a home,
when you know it's a grave.
Yet you still hold that greedy grace,
as you tidy the place,
but it will never be clean.

The song is Jeane, the B-side of the first single released by the Smiths. Typical Doherty, to choose such a desperately miserable lyric.

I ask him if he's aware of how death-fixated Down in Albion is. He runs through the tracks. »Knocking on Death's Door, yeah; A'rebours; Sticks and Stones yeah; Killamangiro yeah; Eight Dead Boys yeah; Pentonville erm, Back From the Dead yeah ... I dunno. Probably less than the Libertines albums.« You seem half in love with the idea of death? »No. No. You either is or you ain't,« he answers. »I dunno. Maybe I'll look back and think, what a morbid album.«

The other main theme, not surprisingly, is drugs. One song is called Pipedown, as in put the pipe down rather than »shush«. Does he consider it to be an anti-drugs album? »Yeah.« Why? »It's just telling tales on myself, really. If a feeling is real or anything is real then the last thing I want to do is fucking shout about it. But by putting it in songs you end up shouting about it ...« Doherty has said in the past that the only reality he values is his stoned reality. A second after telling me it's an anti-drugs album, he says it's about Arcadia - his vision of paradise on earth.

Whatever, he says, he's proud of the record. »It took me a year to listen to that first Libertines album. I listen to it now, and I love it. But I couldn't listen to it like I can with this.« He clicks two lighters together to forge a flame. »I don't feel like such a fraud, you know what I mean ... like the second Libertines album was nothing to do with me at all. By the time it came out it had nothing to do with me, the artwork, nothing - I just wasn't in the band. It was quite strange.«

His friend Mick bangs on the door with three vodkas and cranberry juice for Doherty. He says something to Doherty, who responds by doing 36 press-ups. »Right, Peter, I get the point,« Mick says as he closes the door.

Doherty says he was a dreamer as a child. Did he dream of being a pop star? »Nooooooah. No, that was a big joke in the family. When I was 16, 17, I started drifting away from everything else and picking up a guitar, and it was like, 'What are you doing? You can't sing and you can't play a guitar,' right up to the day we got signed by Rough Trade. And then it was like, 'Go on play us a song,' whereas before it was, 'Shut up, fucking racket.'«

So what did he dream of? Again he picks up the guitar and sings.

The dream was to live,
And to live was a dream.

He sings about romance and travelling blind, and London parks and old guitars, whisky and rum, walks and raves, and knights and knaves. I don't know whether he's quoting or has just made it up, but it's a classic Doherty line.

He's sitting on his bike, revving up for real, and telling me that Carl Barat was part of his dream. »Everything I could ever fantasise about a boy and his guitar and a girl ... and was possible, and was becoming reality.« But it doesn't quite make sense and his eyes are closed and he seems to be falling asleep. I'm desperately trying to catch his attention. I ask him how Kate is. Moss is currently in rehab, having been filmed taking cocaine by one of his friends, who then sold it to the tabloids. (There were even rumours that Doherty himself might have been in on the deal. Certainly, in the past, he has sold pictures and stories of himself for drug money.)

»She's doing really well. I shouldn't say really. She wants me to go to this place in Arizona straight after her and do it.«

Does he worry for her more than he worries for himself? »I just miss her. She says she just wants to be with me. She says she doesn't know why I love her, I don't know why she loves me, but that's just the way it is. Yeah, but no, but yeah ... maybe she just wants me to go through it because she's been through it,« he murmurs, as if to himself. How long has she been away? »Hundreds of years. It's the only time I'll have fucking voluntarily gone into rehab. I've got a little K tattoo on my arse, she's just got a little P there. And it doesn't stand for Pirelli.«

He tells me a story about Kate apropos of nothing. »I said to Kate, 'I've run out of cigarettes,' and she said, 'Oh, we've got some rolling baccy,' so I rolled this roll-up with great care and affection - lovely rollie - and I lit it, and the smell really reminded me of prison [he spent four nights in Pentonville prison awaiting trial on charges of blackmail and robbery earlier this year], and I just turned to her and said, 'You know, I think roll-ups are really romantic,' and she went, 'I think they're disgusting.' My romantic moment destroyed.« He repeats himself in a mock cockney accent. »It's disgusting.«

»See,« he says to Razih who is still filming, »I am a romantic.«

Is it true that he and Moss are hoping to have children together? »I've got two,« he says. Two, I say, baffled - I knew that he had one. He repeats that he has two children, and that he sees one of them. »Poor little fucker. My sister sees him all the time, so there's affection as a family for him. I don't really want to go into that because it's not fair on the kids or the mother. It's enough for me to say I love them and would do anything for them.«

Could he imagine a drug-free life? »I've had it. I've done it. Sporadically, always, for the last couple of years. When I hit it I hit it hard, but I'm not like this drugs monster that people make me out to be.«

I ask him if I can ask him some specific drug questions for a magazine my partner edits for an organisation called Mainliners. His face lights up. »Yeah, I'll be more than happy with that on one condition: that I can take drugs in the interview and you won't write about it. If I mainline in a conversation about Mainliners, you're not to put it in.« I don't agree to his pact.

Why not stick to fags for the interview, I say. He nods, and just then he seems to be hit by tides of self-pity and self-loathing. »If I can't even go 24 hours without having a hit ... then I'm never in reality going into rehab voluntarily.« He has only had »shotgun« experiences of rehab. »Sometimes I've just woken up and been there, and people have been visiting me and saying, 'You're amazing, keep it up.'« But he never did. »The other time was like, 'You stay in prison or you go to rehab,' which was a bit weird if you ask me.«

What's the worst situation he's woken up in after a heavy night? »Oh God! Under a taxi with no clothes on, and I ended up knocking a cyclist out and nicking his bike.« I ask him whether he thinks life is better with or without drugs. »Yeah. yeah. Course it is.« Better without? »No, it's better with or without.« He fails to give a straight answer. Perhaps he's incapable of doing so. Both? »Yeah, course. I think some people's lives would be ruined with drugs and some would be dramatically improved with drugs. Anything that's going to move them from the fucking middling state they're in, whether it's a cup of coffee or a snowball up your jacksy, I don't know.«

Doherty once said that it wasn't the drugs that were the problem, it was the demons in his head. What did he mean? »Digits in the face. Horrible. I'm shivering now, thinking about it. It like distorts your relationship with the walls. Colours and numbers crawling up in your skin, and stretching you and crushing you.« These are the demons of life? »Yes, these are the things that were haunting me since I was a kid. Hallucinations or something. Long before I took drugs. I didn't take drugs till I was quite old. I think I took a couple of bad blows to the head, and ever since I've suffered bad hallucinations from an early age.«

He's talking quietly, but is totally focused now. »I used to get nightmares. Christmas nightmare, I used to call it. Not a nice feeling.« He sounds so sad and haunted, and looks if he's about to burst into tears.