Instead, it confuses our expectations and reappears within 30 seconds, dressed in a black T-shirt, shorts and slides, with a hat on its head, showing if not fresh then at least awake. I tell him the plan: I will interview him here, then Laura will take his picture in the garden and then I will take my train. “No, that’s not going to work,” he says, already on the move. “I want to take you somewhere, let’s go.” He opens the door of his car and Zeus flies inside. As it turns out, the last thing my publisher said to me before I left for Normandy was, “Whatever you do, don’t let it get you anywhere!” I enter the car. “Um, what time are you coming back?” Laura shouts, still standing in front of the house. But Doherty does not answer. And we leave. “It’s been three years now since the end – or at least a long pause – of this mission of constantly getting rid of crack, heroin and ketamine.” Photo: Laura Stevens / The Guardian So many men and women of my generation were in love with Doherty. Never before has a musician seemed so charismatic, so romantic and yet so approachable. We watched the pubs he was in, we joined in message boards to find out when the next concert will be, we copied his style. He and Carl Barât’s old best friend founded their band, the Libertines, based on their vision of Arcadia as a community, a world built on art and creativity. This dream shattered when Doherty decided that it should mean hanging out with herds of fellow drug addicts, much to the disappointment of Bar πιοt’s most entrepreneurial orientation, which led Doherty to be expelled from the band several times. But initially, at least, it meant treating the fans as part of the band, pulling us on stage and inviting us to an after party. And the music! No other band has better captured how you felt when you were young, stupid and glorious in Britain at the turn of the century. A billion copies sprung up like mushrooms, but none approached the Libertines. They only released two albums at their peak, Up the Bracket in 2002 and The Libertines in 2004 (Anthems for Doomed Youth followed in 2015), but it was the iconic band of the time. Now, the memory of the intensity of my feelings for Doherty makes me shudder, as if I remember a misplaced early relationship. The last few years have been particularly frustrating for Doherty fans. He was always a magnet for the tabloids, which followed him in the hope of catching him shooting or overdosing. Now 43, he is wrapped up in Normandy with gray straws and a bag. “Pete changed heroin for cheese!” I mock the titles. Before I got to Normandy, I felt as nervous as going to a high school meeting. Would it be a reminder of my youthful nonsense or a reflection of middle-aged haze, and which would be worse? “Shall we go have a coffee?” “Oh, no, this road is closed,” says Doherty as we drive to a local village. The car makes a disturbing sound. Want to see what that is? “Yeah, that’s weird, that’s it,” he says. After about 15 minutes, we realize that it is Jupiter standing on one of the latches on the back door, half-opening the door. The company with Doherty in 2022, in a way, is not much different from the meeting with Doherty in 2002. I show him a photo that a friend took of the two of us in 2005, when he lived in a horrible little hotel in The Brick Lane in east London and I lived in the next apartment. “So we were friends then? “I thought I remembered you,” he says with a smile, which is sweet to say, but extremely unlikely, given the amount of drugs he was taking at the time. Do you remember much from that period? “I try not to do it. That’s why it was a little weird with the book. “I just could not do it.” Right, the book. I came to Normandy to talk to Doherty about his memoir, A Likely Lad, which he co-wrote with Simon Spence. It’s full of jokes about the incredible chaos of London’s indie music scene in the early 2000s. (A typical example from the book: appeared was [Razorlight singer] Johnny Borrell. He appeared with a gas mask and did a folk set with these two black gospel singers. He was very good, in fact. idealism, his style) and evil (drugs, beliefs, lost talent). Who better to capture the excitement and gloom of that period than him? But nothing is simple with Doherty. Not only did he not write his memoirs – he spoke to Spence, who then had the unpaid job of putting all the stories in chronological order and checking them out – but he has not even read it. “It’s very strange to read it because it’s in the first person,” he says. Wasn’t that what he expected? “No! The initial agreement was that I would talk to him on the phone and he would be in the third person. But when the book arrived it was all ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’. It’s totally shocking.” With Carl Barât on a Libertines Tour, 2004. Photo: Andy Willher / Redferns So he’s a little upset about that? “Well, yes, you can imagine. My agent’s words to me were: “Think only about money.” “But we had already spent the money.” Worst of all, he says, “they got all the good information, because everyone’s lawyer had to read it. Carl took a good look at it, Kate [Moss]His lawyers wanted to see it. I kept saying, “You have to keep it inside, it’s funny!” But they kept saying, “No, no, no.” In addition, my wife was a little worried, but I told her, “If you do not read it and I do not read it, we can only pretend that it does not exist.” But it does not do that. “ (Later, I ask Doherty’s literary agent how the book was written and he tells me: “The Probable Boy is a ghost autobiography based on many hours of conversation between Peter and the ghost writer. Peter may have had initial reservations about with this approach, but every word in the book is his. “) De Vidas plays keyboards in his current band, Pete Doherty and the Puta Madres, and they got married last October. What did he get out of the book? “A lot of things for other girls, obviously,” he says, and it is true that several of Doherty’s girlfriends and his strange fiancée are absent. Likewise, singer Lisa Moorish, mother of his 18-year-old son Astile, and model Lindi Hingston, mother of Aisling’s 10-year-old daughter, are barely appearing. But he and Astile, an aspiring director, have a good relationship, he says. He has not seen Aisling since his relationship with Hingston broke down. An ex who appears a lot in the book is Moss. The couple have been together for more than two years and the combination of Britain’s most famous musician and the most rock’n’roll model in the world made them the ultimate celebrity couple. Things fell apart for a while in 2005 when photos of Moss apparently taking cocaine in a studio where Doherty was recording with the Babyshambles ran to the front of the Mirror. There were rumors that Doherty himself had sold these photos, which he always flatly denied, and the Lord knows he had many hangers that would sell photos of their dead grandmother for a tender. But did he know that Moss – a famous private person – would hate writing about their relationship? With Kate Moss in Glastonbury, 2005. Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty Images Kate Moss did not go to the hideouts! He was never interested in all of that, and, to be honest, that’s why we broke up “I do not think there is anything about Kate that has not been written before,” she says. Well, you left out all the stories about Kate Moss going to crack down hideouts, I say, as a joke, but she’s upset: “Kate Moss didn’t go to hideouts! He was never interested in all this and, to be honest, that’s why we broke up. “ Do you regret choosing crack instead of Kate Moss? “Did I regret breaking up?” Yes. “No, of course not. What kind of question is that? “He mocks. Despite the lawyers, the book still contains many well-known celebrity jokes, from a Strokes member denying Doherty cocaine until the moment he and Moss went on vacation with – all of them – Sarah Ferguson, which ended with he was deported: “And the next thing, I woke up in Heathrow with a Thai policeman shorts,” he writes. He is also very good at capturing the absolute chaos of Doherty’s life: in just one page, his house is flooded. goes to court for driving offenses. 13 heroin wrappers fall out of his pocket while he is in the courtroom. and a friend seriously injures a man while driving Doherty’s car, …
