Pete Doherty: Man Out of Time

Photo by Hedi Slimane

Would that we could. It is impossible to overstate just how much a fixture of daily tabloid life Pete Doherty has become in England the last few years. There are regular calls from newspaper columnists for his imprisonment due to his persistent flouting of the drug laws. (Doherty's attorneys regularly secure bail for their client rather than jail, judges readily accepting that he is striving to beat his problems.) He has thus become a poster boy for everything that is wrong with today's youth: louche, uncouth, and idolized for his failings.

The middle child of three, Peter Doherty (pronounced, in fact, Dock-erty) was born in Northumberland, northwest England, to an Irish father and Liverpudlian mother. He thrived in school, a studious teenager noted for his high intelligence who, at the age of 15, won a trip to Russia after winning a poetry competition. But by 17, he was itching for the seedy glamour of London and arrived to live with his grandmother in her cramped flat. By day he dug graves, by night he wrote songs. One afternoon, he managed to run into Oasis' Liam Gallagher.

"I said to him, 'I've got this little band together. Do you want to come back and have a jam?' " Doherty recalls. "But Liam said [affects a broad, convincing Mancunian accent], 'I'm the devil's dick. I don't do that, kid. But keep going.' "

He did. Little more than five years later, the Libertines signed to Rough Trade, once home to the Smiths, and released Up the Bracket, which combined both the combustible energy and high articulacy of the Clash (it was produced by that band's Mick Jones), while brandishing the authentic scuffs and scars of misspent teenhood fantasized about in music label boardrooms. Within months, they were being talked about as a potentially legendary force.

Doherty has said he avoided drugs growing up, but the band became increasingly drawn toward experimentation, though only Doherty became hooked on the hard stuff. In 2003, by then increasingly unreliable, erratic, and occasionally violent, he broke into the home of his Libertines co-conspirator, singer/guitarist Carl Barât, and was later arrested and charged with burglary. Barât kicked him out of the band. Though Barât is eager to reconcile, Doherty is less so, spitting at the mention of Barât's current band, Dirty Pretty Things, although the two have performed together as recently as last April. Doherty clearly likes his grudges: He also holds an unexplained one against Rough Trade. The news that the label has recently released a Libertines greatest-hits set called Time for Heroes -- culled from the two albums in the band's catalog—prompts a sneer Billy Idol would envy.

"How do I feel about it?" he repeats. "I feel nothing, because (a) um, and (b) well, know what I mean?"

He laughs with unnecessary vigor at this witticism, as does the rest of the band, all seated protectively around him on the hotel couch. By now, Babyshambles' members are well trained at bolstering their singer's forever fluctuating moods. Between them, McConnell, Whitnall, and drummer Adam Ficek work hard to promote a public display of unity and harmony. All is good, they insist. Honest.

And when Pete trips up?

"Then we pick him up, dust him down, and get on with it," says Ficek.

"Most of the stories," Whitnall claims, "are lies anyway."

"I'm surprised you're even asking us about them," Doherty adds, "because they have no effect on us whatsoever. My tabloid caricature is nothing more than a horrible, cartoonlike fucking monster that bears no relation to the quiet, shy and retiring, teetotal, police-loving, clean-nosed poet you see before you now."

He goes on to suggest that, due to his progress in rehab, life has become much better. His army major father has started talking to him again after three years of silence, and though he doesn't want to discuss My Prodigal Son, the book his mother, Jacqueline, recently wrote about him, Doherty insists the "family situation" is healing.

"Don't get me wrong, what drove me to drug in the first place is still there -- I'm still a bit raw, I think -- but this is the happiest and most positive time of my life."