Pete Doherty: Man Out of Time

Photo by Hedi Slimane

It's now early December, and the rain is pouring down on Doherty's country home in Marlborough, an hour west of London. Doherty tells me he's moved here to be closer to his rehab facility. The house is huge -- nine bedrooms, several lounges, a stone floor kitchen, and, beyond the garden, rolling hills upon which gray sheep graze. When he rented the place, it was unfurnished. It still is. Walk from room to room, and you have to be careful where you step amid all the filthy flotsam of torn books and discarded clothes and shoes. In one room, there are piles of half-finished canvases, some in charcoal, others apparently in blood. Hanging in the hall is a gold disc commemorating 100,000 U.K. sales for Down in Albion, the glass frame smashed. There are kittens everywhere, seven of them, the stench of their shit overwhelming. (One of them may well be the cat he allegedly fed crack to in September.) He has christened the newest one Jimmy McShambles. Upstairs there are no beds, just floorboards and stained sheets. And out front sit Doherty's three Jaguars, each in various states of disrepair.

Since Manchester, the man has been infuriatingly elusive. I did call him in Brighton, but he never picked up, and further appointments in Birmingham, Nottingham, London, and Glasgow were also canceled, due to what the singer's camp referred to as "illness." But at four in the afternoon, the Spin photo shoot just wrapped, he finally agrees to talk with me here at the house he likes to call Albion Towers. He approaches me through the calamity of the main corridor like a ghost, dressed in Dickensian pipe-cleaner trousers and a military-style jacket. With a midnight croak to his voice, he tells me we're going for a drive. Not fit to get behind the wheel himself, he instead commandeers the chauffered record-company car that sits expectantly in the driveway.

As we travel down dark, rain-lashed country lanes, I ask him where we are going. But he has grown suddenly catatonic and can barely keep his eyes open.

"Meeting friends," he wheezes. "Train station."

Then, cell phone in one hand, lighter in the other, he falls asleep.