Oh for Pete's sake

Pete Doherty has just been arrested. It’s Thursday December 1st, and this morning, as Hot Press begins to pick through his tumultuous year, news has filtered through of yet another destructive chapter in the life of the Babyshambles frontman.
Whilst driving “in an erratic manner” through west London, the 26-year-old was stopped, and subsequently arrested for alleged possession of crack cocaine. It means that, for Doherty, 2006 is set to begin with another court appearance, a stint in prison being the most likely outcome. Worse, the arrest occurred just two days after his return from yet another failed rehab attempt, this time in Arizona. Inevitably, the mood around Camp Doherty has taken a significant turn for the worse
“It’s a big disappointment, but with Peter you can’t say it’s a surprise,” says Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, Doherty’s label boss. “Obviously we were very optimistic when we actually got him to go to Arizona. We thought that it was a real chance for Peter. The fact that he’s only stayed there for such a short period of time (nine days) is disappointing. But that’s Peter.”
Doherty’s 2005 began with a similar bang. I met Pete at the brilliantly anarchic Babyshambles gig in Dublin in the middle of December 2004. The scenes on the band's tourbus afterwards had to be seen to be believed, with drugs in abundant evidence and squalor rampant. But Pete was curiously impressive when I did get to speak to him, the wear and tear of the heroin use notwithstanding. And the fans loved him, suggesting that if he could just keep it together, Babyshambles would become one of the bands of the era.
The first Hot Press front cover of the year, a high profile relationship, failed recording sessions, arrest, prison, rehab, a 10pm curfew and the biggest gig of Babyshambles’ career all followed before the end of February 2005. Since then, Pete has left a continuous trail of non-appearances, shambolic shows and sporadic moments of genius in his wake.
“It really has been a chaotic year for him, no question,” continues Travis. “He thinks it’s been fantastic though. But for us it’s been a really horrible emotional ride. The worst period was when we thought we were going to be told that he’s dead, which went on for a few black months."
Early in the year, Travis had a "horrible feeling" that he couldn't ever fully shake, that he would arrive into work to learn that Doherty was dead. "It seems to have passed recently, but there’s a sense it’s returning now," he says. "This has been his fourth (rehab) attempt. You would have thought that the Kate factor would have made a difference to him but, on the latest evidence, it hasn’t really seemed to.”
In truth, the ‘Kate factor’ has been both the blessing and burden in Doherty’s life over the past year. Difficult though it may be to see, he has made real attempts to tackle his addictions, and most of the credit for this development has correctly been given to Moss. In February, at the behest of the supermodel, Doherty had a naltrexone implant, which blocks opiates and the effects of heroin, inserted in his abdomen. Since then, he is said to have remained off the drug, and his rapid weight-gain certainly supports that assertion. The trip to Arizona too came at the request of Moss, after she herself spent a much-publicised stint at the complex during October.
Yet the complexities of their relationship have played havoc with Doherty’s personal life and with his band. Kate Moss has long been a target for the attentions of the lowlier hacks, and as her partner, the singer has been demonised and vilified by tabloid media, depicted as th beast to her beauty. His vulnerability to paparazzi attention has been intensified by Babyshambles’ chaotic and unorthodox set up.
In one of the year's biggest tabloid scandals, in September, the Daily Mirror went to press with a six-page exposé of Kate Moss' cocaine use – with pictures of both Moss and Doherty indulging in nose candy that had been taken at a Babyshambles' recording session. Subsequently the band fell out with their manager James Mullard and there is now a stand-off, with all manner of rumours and innuendo as to how the photographic evidence of the Moss drug escapade came into the possession of the Mirror. Right now the band simply doesn't have a manager.
“There is no proper structure to the group, and no one fighting their corner,” says renowned music photo-journalist Danny Clifford, who spent 2005 following the band across the UK and Europe as their official photographer. “It’s just pure chaos. No one in the camp really knows what they’re supposed to be doing. I’ve never ever seen anything like it before.”
Clifford is well used to working with fast-living rock stars. A firm friend of Shane MacGowan and the late Keith Moon, he has snapped everyone from The Who to Oasis to The Rolling Stones. Amongst a litany of high profile jobs, he spent 1978 on tour with Bob Dylan as official tour photographer.
“I don’t mind bringing Pete into the same sentence as Dylan because, with his poetry, he’s an insanely talented bloke,” Clifford ventures. “But the difference is that he’s got nobody around him. With someone like Dylan, the attention on him was very intense but he had serious management structure and security to deal with things for him. And that’s pretty much the norm with any high profile band. There’s a machine there to deal with the growing interest from the public and the media.
“With Babyshambles that isn’t there. They’ve currently got no management, so it’s all being handled spontaneously by Pete and anyone around them. On tour, he gets all kinds of people trying to grab a part of him, from crack dealers to hangers-on, to paparazzi journalists quizzing him about Kate. With nobody to fight that off, the media hounding is consequently much more personal. It really is quite bizarre how alone they are out there – and how exposed they are.”
Doherty and Babyshambles were always going to be big news during 2005. Without Moss by his side, though, Doherty would most certainly have enjoyed a quieter time of it. The previous year – a chaotic blur of heroin overdoses, studio punch-ups, crack addiction, ejection from The Libertines, failed rehab attempts, arrests, no-shows and riots (and those were just the highlights) – may have demonstrated newsworthiness within the rock community, but crucially, the tabloids weren't biting. Which meant that he retained some focus as a musician. A year ago, there was a mounting sense of anticipation about Babyshambles’ debut album.
The unprecedented honour, for a pop star, of a half hour interview on BBC’s Newsnight programme was followed on New Year’s Eve by a page-long profile in the main section of The Guardian, in which Doherty’s previous songwriting partnership with Carl Barat was referred to as: “the most important since Morrissey and Marr.” Babyshambles’ debut, the paper said, would be “the biggest album of the year, if it gets made.”
The way things went, it nearly didn't. Originally due in spring, Down In Albion finally arrived in November to lukewarm response. Some were astonished it wasn’t the complete car crash they had expected. Most were shocked that Doherty had managed to record it at all. Peter Murphy in HotPress liked it a lot.
“The fact that he actually got the record made was miraculous,” proffers Travis. “There were long periods where it looked like he wasn’t going to be in a fit enough state to actually make a decent piece of work. We were happy with the result. We really like it, but maybe that's just because we're so connected to it. To us it seems like a fantastic chronicle of his life – like ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. It just seems like this broadcast from the frontline of Peter’s existence. Maybe we appreciate it on that level more than others, though I do think the fans see that as well.”
Babyshambles had been meant to record in January, but the chaos surrounding the band halted proceedings first until April and then September. On the evening of January 25, Doherty was arrested. On January 26, day one of recording, drummer Gemma Clarke quit the group.
Clarke had been with the band for seven months. A long time friend of the star, she had first met Pete when he formed The Libertines at her father’s rehearsal studios in central London. With no interest in drugs however, the time she spent on the road with her friend had been testing.
“When it was good, it was really good, but when it was bad it was horrid,” says Clarke, now of The Suffrajets. “There was a separation on tour between me and the rest of the band, in that I made a choice not to be around the drugs that were going on. So I used to hang out with the crew and sleep on the bottom floor of the tour bus. I’d only really see the three boys for the first time on any given day about 10 minutes before we went on stage.”
Chaos was never far away. “Some nights were great but then you had others, like in Liverpool on the Christmas tour, where Pete was completely out of it and fell asleep on stage. That really upset me. One song in and he’s gone asleep. I mean, he’s gone to sleep! I just couldn’t get my head around it. After the riot (when a no-show by Doherty in London resulted in the crowd smashing and stealing the band’s equipment), I’d begun to have enough really.”
By the turn of the year, drug use amongst the band and their entourage had also escalated.
“The pink elephant in the room was obviously the drugs,” she says. “It was glaringly obvious. As much as it upset me though, I put it out of my mind. I just thought that if I kept nagging Peter and saying ‘please don’t do it’ I'd be just another voice in a thousand saying the exact same thing. He knows the dangers. It’s like people who smoke. They know it can kill you, but they choose to do it and that’s their choice. One day, on my birthday, I got him to stop. He came up to me and said, ‘Oh I didn’t get you a present; I’ll do anything you want'. And I got a cheeky little grin and said to him 'no more drugs until after the gig', and he said 'OK'. Now it was only about ten minutes before we went on but, still, that was my birthday present!”
Like Clifford and Travis, Clarke finds the picture the tabloids paint of Doherty virtually unrecognisable.
“Peter is a diamond, he really is,” she says. “He’s just got the most amazing heart. The person that the papers write about is Pete Doherty. I feel like Peter and Pete Doherty are two completely different people. The Peter I know is a real charmer, has such a quiet little voice, and is just amazingly intelligent. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Geoff Travis adds: “Peter’s a good soul but the drugs destroy that. Drugs distort what people are, and that’s definitely taking its toll on him. It’s sad really. He can be absolutely lovely. You can spend time with Peter and it’s actually quite exhilarating because he’s just such a lunatic in the sense of the intensity in which he lives his life. He works hard as well, and when he’s working we’ve found him to be less destructive."
It’s when he stops working that things go really awry, says Travis.
“In terms of where he stands amongst the artists I’ve signed, that’s a difficult question. I really do think that he’s a good one. He’s a great songwriter, though I do wish he’d write a lot more. The jury is out at the moment.”
Clifford too is a resolute fan.
“I’m addicted to their music because I’ve not seen anything like this before,” he enthuses. “It’s just bizarre. It’s so unpredictable. We had a night in Leeds where the band were half an hour late on stage and nobody knew where Pete was. Then without any warning at all, he came flying through the crowd, jumped on stage and began playing. The other members of the band heard what was going on, and I watched Drew (bassist) fly through the crowd and jump up on stage too. He was really panicking. Someone then ran around to the tour bus to grab Adam (drummer) while this was going on, to tell them the gig had started! I was stood there thinking, ‘Fucking hell, this is completely mad!’ The only thing predictable about Pete Doherty is his total unpredictability.”
The recent return from rehab was no surprise to Clifford, nor was Doherty’s arrest.
“About the drugs, I once asked him, ‘Are you ever going to stop this?’ And he just said, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I like it'. What can you say to that?”
Geoff Travis too is resigned to things getting worse before they get better.
“Tragically, I think he enjoys the drugs more than the music. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be taking the drugs. It’s hard to understand how someone as intelligent as Peter just doesn’t seem to get it. He needs to clean up. That’s the bottom line. It’s time he wised up. The other day when he was stopped, he was driving around in a car with no tax or insurance. I mean, what’s he playing at, driving up and down the country like public enemy number one? He’s not a victim, that boy. Not a victim of anything but his own confusion. The thing that I’m really worried about now is that he’s backing himself into a really terrible corner. I don’t know what's going to happen next that will be good for him. You’d hate to think he’ll end up back in prison. It would be a terrible waste of his time and his talent, because he's wildly talented. The boy’s got it, but he seems to be doing his best to throw it all away. Then again, he himself summed it up best on his first record didn’t he? ‘What A Waster’ – it’s so prophetic it’s unbelievable.”
He could end up like Shane MacGowan, I suggest.
“Shane’s still going, that’s what Peter would say.”
Photos: Danny Clifford