Photo 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."