Pete Doherty interview copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005.
What I wanted to know about Pete. What makes him tick? What makes him the way he is? Would I go out with him? Would I advise a friend to stay with him?
Pete Doherty is wearing a Christian Dior cape and we are having tea at Claridges.
This is the story of a beautiful boy. A child-like, mystical minstrel, beset by demons and like all great heroes, possibly doomed to die unless he can be rescued by a fairytale princess. Like all the rock gods in the pantheon, Pete Doherty is partly a fantasy, a rock and roll myth, a creation of the media. A young man who has everything. Youth and beauty, talent and charisma, charm and genius. Not to mention Kate, his supermodel girlfriend. He is envied, he is desired, he is devoured daily in the tabloids, by a public with an appetite for life on the edge, people with ordinary lives who want to read about what it might be like to burn brighter than the average star, to not think about mortgages or bald patches or varicose veins. Perhaps even like James Dean to live too fast and die young and still beautiful.
A young London-Irish musician, Pete had been in rehab for heroin addiction, been in prison, been back in rehab, been kicked out of his band, been back in prison before I had even heard his music. There is a tradition in rock for this kind of thing. Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, all were edgy and all were dead by the age of twenty seven. Pete is now twenty six. It must be tempting, I figured, if you are starting a musical career, to get the attention of the tabloids by trying to compete with the bad boys. It certainly worked for Kurt, who blew his own brains out in the ultimate act of self destruction. I suspected that Pete might be an attention seeker, uncertain, perhaps, that his talent would be enough to earn him a place in history.
I came across Pete because two people that I love both fell in love with him. Shane Mac Gowan (who is himself a hell-raiser, but who has a finely honed bullshit-radar) had fallen for Pete, and had taken to playing with him. The other person was Kate Moss who being a supermodel, is all kinds of things, to all kinds of people, myself included. She is a fantasy, a natural beauty more stunning in the flesh than in her photographs, but Kate is essentially a great spirit, the spirit of a mischievous, playful twelve year old combined with the spirit of an ancient Chinese sage. Unusually, for a model she is grounded, pragmatic and most unpretentious. And if she had fallen for Pete, was dating him, was even expressing a desire to marry him, there had to be something good about him.
The three of them had got together at Kate’s thirty- first birthday party. Shane had heard the stories, as everyone in the music business had, of Pete Doherty, the hopeless junkie. And had been expecting ‘another young wanker who thinks he’s it,’ he said. But at the party, he had ended up in a room with Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, playing guitars and messing around, and there, too, was the famous Pete.
‘Me and Bobby were singing awful duets, but Pete looked like he was crashed out in the corner,’ Shane says. ‘We handed him the guitar, anyway, and instantly he came alive. He played some of his own songs and he blew us away!’
In February, ‘The Sun’ ran the headline ‘Potty Pete’s in Pentonville’. Pete had been arrested, following an alleged assault and burglary. By St Patrick’s Day, he was out on bail. He was due to reappear in court on April 15, and had been given a curfew by the judge, which was enforced by security guards who tailed him everywhere. At the Boogaloo, in North London where Pete and Shane were due to perform with Pete’s band ‘Babyshambles’, the paparazzi had surrounded the building by five in the afternoon. Upstairs, the sitting-room curtains were drawn, because photographers with long lenses had occupied the building across the road. Here, I was first introduced to Pete.
Tall, maybe six foot four, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, and a black pork-pie hat, he stood up and kissed me. With pale, pale skin and eyes that were chocolatey- black and round like saucers. His manner was polite, old fashioned. Having been prepared to be dismissive, for an arrogant upstart, I was alarmed to find my prejudices were melting away, as I found myself looking into eyes that appeared to trust me implicitly. Most disconcerting.
There were two meals on the table for us, but only one fork. Pete offered it to me, and ate his own dinner with his hands, which impressed me as unnecessarily chivalrous, seeing as we could have got another one. By the time he had finished his meal, I was a third of the way through mine, and I found myself feeding him potatoes with the fork, trying to feed him up and nurture him. With his black suit and his gaffa-taped shoes, with his eyes full of sadness, and innocence and wonder, he reminded me of Shane, at the same age. And it occurred to me that Kate could be in danger of finding a similar soul mate. When she arrived, she kissed him, and knocked his hat right off, but he didn’t even notice.
The charges against Pete were dropped, and the next time we met, he was a free man, but his house was still surrounded by papparazzi. He joked that he had borrowed the cab fare from one of them, to get to the pub, for an interview with ‘Vanity Fair’. I had listened to his music and some of his songs were going round and round in my head. Particularly ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ one about losing the magic with a lover. There was obvious musical talent. But there was something more. There was an acute, almost frightening grasp of the complexities of human relationships. I was in awe. I offered to read his tarot cards. And as he shuffled the cards, tears welled up in his eyes and spilled gently down his face. I didn’t ask why. We had arranged to have tea at the Ritz, the following afternoon. He had never been to the Ritz. ‘I might not know which fork to use,’ he whispered.
And so here I find myself, having afternoon tea with the wildest man in rock, at this very moment. The Ritz, as it turns out, can’t accommodate us, but Kate says Claridges do a better tea, so that’s where we are. Kate wears the Claridges interior nonchalantly, the way she wears everything. Pete is elegant in a black Christian Dior cape and stack-heel boots, elegant, but seems nervous. I ask him if he likes the surroundings. ‘Yes, but I’m not sure if they like me,’ he whispers. His voice, when he speaks, is difficult to hear, so that you must lean in close to catch it. After we sample the sandwiches, Pete takes a couple of photos of me and Kate. Which is somewhat surreal, given the amount of money that is currently being offered for pictures of Kate and Pete. One friend of theirs swore that he had been offered a million pounds for a suitably sleazy snap.
When Kate leaves us alone with the tape recorder, I ask him what possesses him to do these interviews. He looks at me very carefully, as if to assess whether it is a serious question.
‘I like reading other people’s interpretations of me. And then running into them again….’
This, I could interpret as a threat, I conclude.
‘Or maybe I’m just vain, and I like reading about myself in the papers’.
In the ‘News of the World’ this week, there have been sensational stories of Pete selling drugs and sex. ‘You knew he was wild, you knew he was a junkie. But today we uncover the sordid secret past of rocker Pete Doherty and even his supermodel lover Kate Moss will be astounded by our revelations…’ the paper teases. The stories about him portray a train-wreck thug, some kind of a monster. So far, with his charming manners, and considered approach, the truth about Pete seems to differ from the image.
‘Thank God!’ he laughs.
‘Some of your pictures are pretty hideous,’ I tell him.
‘Absolutely disgraceful. Kate photographs good, though’. He muses, for a moment. As sex bombs go, Pete and Kate are incendiary, both equipped with the innate ability to seduce on sight. But what I am interested in is the truth beneath the hype. And I wonder how much of the hype is deliberate. The News of the World article was, he says, nothing to do with him.
‘About a year and a half ago I sat down with someone I had known for a long time and told him the story of The Libertines. But I’m sure there are a few embellishments. I couldn’t actually bring myself to read all of it, to be honest. Pete was a twenty pound rent boy!’
‘But you actually did that stuff?’ I ask.
He scrutinises me, before responding. I get the sense that he finds it difficult not to answer questions, even uncomfortable ones.
‘ There was no shame, because I kind of knew that they were just lonely pissed up old queens. And twenty quid was a lot of money!’
I suggest that maybe he should learn not to tell people so much.
‘ If I lie to you, or I mislead you, that will make me feel guilty,’ he says. ‘Not what you do with what I tell you.’
He does admit that his candour means Kate gets the hump sometimes.
‘The only thing I have a problem with is anything that mentions my lass. I get it in the eye. She was reading something out the other day and she ripped it up and said ‘You’re so vain! You just want to read about yourself!’”
It is only natural that if you take a wild and edgy rock star and combine him with one of the world’s most beautiful women, the couple are going to get written about. But whereas Kate has always maintained an enigmatic silence about her personal life and says she fully intends to keep it that way, Pete has been notoriously vociferous. But the idea that he might be using Kate fills him with rage, he says.
‘For some reason, no matter how hard I punch a wall, it doesn’t hurt. But the idea that I might be using her, or fucking her over, that sets me off. I will run a million miles from her if there is the slightest indication that I am doing that. And I know I’m not.’
For one so young, he has accumulated a lot of press. There are four hundred and fifty thousand mentions of his name on the internet. He seems pleased.
‘Yeah, it’s building up. But there’s so much more to come out!’
‘Because you are very talented, don’t you kind of owe it to other people to…’ He interrupts me.
‘What? To put all my songs on the internet for free?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘To preserve yourself.’
‘I am preserving myself.’
When I go to the loo, Pete make’s friends with the waiter, who gives him free champagne. And he speaks into my dictaphone, giving a running commentary of events. When I play back the tape, later on, there’s also poem on it.
‘I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grew through life with empty joy
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark
Whistled early with the lark
And in winter trenches, cowed and glum
With cramps and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain
And no one spoke of him again
As smug faced crowds of kindling eye
Who cheer as soldier boys march by
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.’
I tell Pete that I was quite sceptical about him. Thought he was playing it up to get noticed.
‘I believe that at the core of everything I do there is an innocence,’ he says. ‘I don’t care how soppy that sounds. There is a belief in dancing and unity through music and fuck everything else. Everything else just upsets my nan.’
He explains about how he first came to London, from Liverpool in search of an Arcadian vision, which he had invented.
‘I come from a loneliness, I think. Reaching out for another world.’
A world which he finds and loses.
‘ I always stumble back into it sooner or later, even if it’s for half and hour a day.’
We talk about the emptiness within. And about angels. Angels exist, as a force, he believes. It was an angelic force that allowed him to meet his ex band-mate Carl Barat, the other night and to hug him and behave as if the pair had never fallen out, having not spoken to him for nearly a year. Pete spent two months in prison for burgling Carl’s flat, after Carl had kicked him out of his old band, The Libertines.
‘We had the ultimate togetherness, me and Carl,’ he whispers. ‘I’m talking about Carl a lot, aren’t I? That’s because I seen him the other night. I didn’t think anything would ever come between us. I believed in him and he was the one person who never laughed when I told him about Arcadia. He could genuinely see that I believed in it.’
Pete was born into a London Irish family. Unusually, his grandfather and grandmother split up, when his father was a boy.
‘ I think the rest of my Dad’s life has been based on that moment of looking out the window and seeing his mum leave with his sisters. In the end he just had to get out of London, so he joined the army. A few years later he met my mum, a girl called Jackie from Liverpool, she was an army nurse. We lived in Belfast for three years, and in Dusseldorf, and Coventry . Wherever we lived I just knew I had to get to London as quickly as possible and that’s what I did.’
As soon as he left school, Pete got a job in Willesden Green cemetery digging graves and lived on his nan’s sofa in Kilburn. But when he became a bar man at London’s legendary Filthy Mac Nasty’s, he moved in there, instead. It was a dark environment, he says, but ultimately a fortuitous one.
‘ You could buy crack behind the bar, and I fell into doing that. But then ‘The Strokes’ turned up one day and wanted to score, so I sorted them out with some speed and some acid and they invited me to a gig. And I thought this is it! Seize the moment.’
Pete and his best mate Carl formed The Libertines. And they got signed and they were away with it.
‘ All our dreams came true. We played every night for about a year and a half. Started getting press. And then some of the reasons that I had needed him and he had needed me disappeared. Suddenly he was the sexiest man in rock, so he didn’t need me to tell him he was good anymore. And I didn’t need him to pull girls, so we lost each other. They said it was the drugs but it wasn’t, because it wasn’t that he ever took less drugs than me.’
After several aborted spells in rehab, including one in a monastery in Thailand, Pete and The Libertines parted ways.
‘I heard on the radio that I had been kicked out of the band. It was a complete breakdown, complete exile.’
A spell in Wandsworth prison followed.
‘I still don’t really know how that happened. I am supposed to have burgled Carl’s flat. I turned up at Carl’s flat to speak to him and I saw that all the flight cases were outside the flat, which I thought was a bit strange. I heard a noise inside the flat and I knocked on the door and said ‘let me in’, but got no answer. So I kicked the door down and found out that they had all gone to Japan without me. So I put his telly in the boot of my car. And the flying squad came and caught me.’
‘How,’ I enquire, ‘Did they know you had done it?”
‘Because Lisa Moorish, who had just had a baby by me that week called me and asked me where I was. I said ‘I’m having a little problem I’ll have to phone you later’. She said ‘No you come here right now.’ So I said ‘I’m in a bit of trouble and it might involve the police.’ She said ‘I’m from South London, I would never grass you up.’ So I said ‘Basically I’ve robbed Carl’s flat and it’s all in the boot of my car outside.’ She said ‘You’ve got twenty four hours to put it back,’ I said all right, but three hours later the flying squad arrived and I ended up in Wandsworth.’
‘Isn’t that a bit extreme for a first offence?’ I ask.
‘First major offence. A few years ago I was done for theft, drugs. But I’ve never spent more than a week on remand.’
Wandsworth was horrible, he says.
‘ I was completely green and out of my depth, and you are banged up twenty three hours a day. You only get a telly if you are a paedophile. But there is a library, which was great. I wrote a diary. And I read ‘Crime and Punishment’ which is an unbelievable book.’
His nan wrote to the prison chaplain to ask him to keep an eye on Pete.
‘I phone her when I am drunk, very late at night, that’s the only time I can pluck up the courage,’ he says. ‘She’s seventy four and she still works. She still goes cleaning. She won’t take any money. She says ‘when you’ve got a million you can buy me a house in the country.’
I ask about his parents.
‘My Dad’s disowned me, really. It’s quite heart breaking. Maybe its because he’s in the army. My mum will always love me, whatever. They have been good to my boy, though. I don’t see him as much as I would like to, but my family have been there for him.’
There is silence, for a while. And then he turns to me.
‘I’m not even hard. I’m not. But they’ve made me hard. I never started any of the fighting. My Dad will revel in stories about scraps and how hard he was, but if ever there was a slight whiff of trouble about me as a kid, I would get disciplined like you wouldn’t believe and I never even knew what the hell was going on. When I was twelve years old I was coming home from a school disco, a real innocent school disco, drinking lemonade. And when I get in, he followed me into the kitchen and I was drinking water really fast because I was so thirsty. And he said ‘You’ve been drinking.’ And I literally didn’t even know what he meant. I said yeah, I’m drinking water. And he said you’ve been drinking, haven’t you? And I was completely paralysed, completely in awe, and I started crying. And he stands me in the middle of the room and tells me to walk in a straight line. And I cant.’
At this point, he starts to cry and I feel an urge to hug him, to try to make it better, but all I do is nod, sympathetically. To me it suddenly seems blindingly obvious why Pete has gotten into so much trouble. He’s trying to get the attention of his old man, just like so many of us are. It occurs to me that things could turn out all right, if only he can reconcile himself with his father. Before I can suggest this, our cab pulls up at our destination, and the cab driver leans over.
‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘And I just want to tell you that I sympathise. I have a son your age, and he had problems, just like yours. But I’m there for him and I tell him that I love him. And I want you to hang in there. There’s a lot of love for you, young man.’
And having met the notorious Pete, that is exactly what I want to say.
|
