A Year Since 89 People Were Murdered at the Bataclan, the Rock'n'roll Wastrel Pete Doherty Took to the Stage to Declare

Date 11 December 2016 Page 37,38,39,41

The Libertine

finds liberté

t’s the side street that gets you. a tribute gig for victim’s families and the A narrow, nondescript road in the world’s media. It was a sombre and tasteful A year since 89 people were murdered at the 1 1th arrondissement of Paris. With a air — a physical reopening, rather than a stomach punch, you realise you a spiritual one. That honour has been left to Bataclan, the rock’n’roll already know it intimately — from tonight’s headliner: the pie-eyed rock star, wastrel Pete Doherty took Ithe pictures, the shaky video footage, the wastrel and bohemian idol Peter Doherty to the stage to declare survivor testimonies. There are roses now and his charming new band, the Puta in the window grates, and tealights keep Madres (translation: the Whore Mothers ). their quiet vigil. Respectful? No. Inappropriate? the triumph of love and Au music over terror. He tells Round the front of the Bataclan, the public contraire. For 150 years, the Bataclan has tributes have been cleared away. A handful stood as a totem to liberté, fraternité and Krissi Murison he’s settled of fans sit in wait for Pete Doherty, camera joyful youthful hedonism. It’s going to take down, cleaned up and is phones ready. Look hard and you can just more than a few nutters with Kalashnik ovs back on track ... Really? make out the “F*** Isis” gra ti someone has to change that. It is symbolic that Doherty scrawled on the wall. Next to it is a small — the rock’n’roll embodiment of louche plaque that reads : En mémoire des victimes western excess — should play here. His Photographs by assassinées et blessées en ces lieux le 13 Novembre presence is both two fi ngers up at fear and Andrew Whitton 2015 (In memory of the victims killed and business as usual for the Bataclan. But fi rst wounded on this site on November 13, 2015) . he’s got to get here. Today is November 16, 2016 — one year It’s 3pm and he is running late. Inside, and three days since three religious fanatics the Bataclan is silent and empty. Everything stormed a Friday-night gig here by the rock has been refurbished, of course — new band Eagles of Death Metal , murdering 89 carpets, fl oors, paint, lavatories and upstairs

people with assault weapons and explosives seating. Even so, it’s impossible to stop the during a night of co-ordinated terrorist imagination seeing the piles of bodies on attacks across Paris. Most of those killed and the danceﬂ oor; people slipping over in maimed were in their twenties and thirties. blood and body parts as they tried to escape; The Bataclan was o cially reopened by the unimaginable atrocities in the balcony Sting , who ﬂ ew in to launch his album with circle. “Something from Dante’s hell ” is

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THE STAGE IS SET Doherty and his new band, the Puta Madres, headline at the Bataclan theatre in Paris a year after the terror attacks

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how one police officer described it. Will finger-shaped trinket, lights a mysterious people really be drinking, singing and substance within and takes a few puffs. laughing here again in six hours? The Puta Madres are waiting for him on Doherty eventually bowls up, a little stage, ready to sound-check. He jumps up disorientated and overwhelmed. I mention to join them and they play through songs that it is going to be an emotional night. from his new solo album, Hamburg “They’re all emotional at the moment,” he Demonstrations, including one that was says. He lives 40 minutes away on the written in the wake of the Bataclan attacks. suburban outskirts of Paris, with his It sounds a bit like the Pogues and is called French girlfriend, Katia de Vidas, the Hell to Pay at the Gates of Heaven. It’s keyboardist in the Puta Madres. Katia had about how teenage boys are so desperate friends who were killed by terrorists in to find something to fight for that they’re a cafe around the corner from here. often caught off balance. “Come on, boys, Doherty’s been living in and around choose your weapons: J-45 or AK-47?” Paris since 2008, after his relationship goes the chorus. A J-45 is a type of acoustic with Kate Moss broke down and he wanted guitar. What if the young men who stormed an easier life. It’s unclear which was more the Bataclan had channelled all that belief of an inconvenience: the paparazzi or the and dedication into rock’n’roll music police. The last time somebody bothered instead? It’s a poignant question, but, still, to count these things, there had been at is he really going to stand up and sing a least 15 court appearances, 26 drugs jaunty song about AK-47s in this place? charges, one conviction for burglary and “I don’t know,” he says quietly, once three stints in prison. the sound check is over and he’s been I used to work at the music magazine herded up to his dressing room. “I don’t NME and spent the best part of the past think there will be anyone here who was decade within Doherty’s orbit. I know his there that night. Hopefully it will many faces well: the electrifying showman connect, though.” who incites devotion and chaos wherever He tells me why it is important for him he performs; the charismatic intellect, to play here — and it is for Katia. “The girl brimming with poetic wit and drunken who I’m in love with, who I live with, she’s clarity; the unreliable drug addict who from Paris. She lost a lot of people that breaks promises and squanders his talents; night. People who were shot in the cafe. and his ugly alter ego — the paranoid They were having a birthday party that she bully, convinced the world is out to get was supposed to go to, but she was in Berlin him and lashing out at anyone within at her friend’s funeral. So she came back to reach. I just didn’t realise that I could meet all of that anxiety. It was just horrible. They them all on the same day. made the mistake of attacking everything I ... well, the only thing I’m willing to be he first thing I notice is that shot in the head for is love and music, and

his designer suits are tighter they come together — sometimes — when than they used to be. It’s a we play live. I want them to know that we positive sign: heroin addicts believe as much in this life as they believe in aren’t known for piling on the theirs.” He sighs. “They’d probably be much pounds. Sure enough, seconds into the T better off believing in rock’n’roll, you know?” photoshoot he breaks off to greet a passing Does he think it’s going to be a hard acquaintance. “Guess what!” he calls after show to perform? her loudly. “I’m clean!” “I wish it would be. I wish it would be But old habits die hard. Returning to the such a hard, dramatic, upsetting photographer, he produces what appears to experience, but I think I’m going to be be an antique opium pipe and poses with it quite, er ... hopefully not robotic. What’s for the camera. Next he fishes out a hollow, the word? It begins with ‘s’...”

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Stoic? down and becoming a family man with “Stoic! Because I got clean from heroin Katia. “Somewhere with a little house in recently in Buenos Aires — because you the middle of nowhere, with a little family. can’t get it there for love nor money. It I think Katia might be the one. Only ’cos wasn’t like getting clean in Thailand or she’s been the girl I always wanted. I want rehab [the scenes of Doherty’s other a girl to be with, not someone to see you well-documented attempts to detox]. I’ve here, see you there. Whatever we do, we never sat in a hotel room and just sweated do together. Sometimes it’s too much, but it out before. I did it on my own and five minutes after she leaves I miss her.” something’s just clicked in my head. All of He goes quiet, lost, I assume, in adoring a sudden, like never before, the words from reverie — though apparently not. “I kind the songs, I feel them a little bit too much. of miss the English girls a bit. But maybe all So I am just going to be lost in the songs. the English girls are gone,” he adds. I’ve remembered what it was I was trying Having interviewed him before, I am to do, which was get in people’s heads with prepared for his short attention span; his dark words or happy words.” sudden compulsion to stand up and walk Is it true? Can he really be heroin-free? around, break into song or simply meander He knows people are unlikely to believe off into inchoate poetry. Today, at least, him — including his own mother, whom his stories all seem to have a beginning, he hasn’t yet told. “I want to go and see her. I want her to be able to see me, because a middle and an end, and for the most part she’s heard it before about me being clean.” to make sense. The renewed mental focus He and Katia have been together for suggests he is telling the truth about “three or four years”. What is her relationship giving up heroin, though I would be harder with drugs? pressed to say whether his new-found “She doesn’t take them.” sobriety extends to all drug use (heroin is far from his only vice). How on earth does she put up with him, then? He is 37 and looking pretty haggard, “I have absolutely no idea. It’s not like though not for nothing have some of the she’s ever seen a tabloid photo of me with world’s most beautiful women lost all one eye on my forehead and one eye down sense around him. He was gorgeous back here. She’s just not aware of it. That’s the in the day as the little boy lost — all puppy whole thing — she’s on a different trip. eyes, vulnerability and 100-watt charisma. He burnt through his boyish good She sees me as a functioning adult. Her only concern is that she once read, ‘It zays ’ere: looks long ago; they have been replaced by ’eroin — you won’t be able to ’ave sex.’ And a Byronesque magnetism, which he knows I said, ‘No, I’ll give up when that happens.’ ” exactly how to turn on when he wants to. He seems very taken with her. Partly “What’s that?” I ask, as he pulls the because she reminds him of the 1930s film antique pipe from the photoshoot back out of his pocket. star Myrna Loy, and partly because her “This? Gladys.” great-great-great-grandmother stabbed the politician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat What does Gladys do? to death in the bath during the French “Not much — she’s blocked. Have you Revolution, which impresses him greatly. got a safety pin?” (No Doherty proclamation is complete No, but you can have this hairgrip, I say. without a historical literary allusion.) He sets to work with expert dexterity. “This is what I mean about not having He already has two children from two English girls ... You’re the sort of English other relationships — a 13-year-old son, Astile, whose name he has tattooed on his neck, and a five-year-old daughter — but business as usual The show goes on for says he can finally see himself settling Doherty and his old mucker Carl barât, far left, the Puta Madres and the bataclan crowd

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girl I’d probably propose to — don’t put called Flags from the Old Regime, written that on the tape.” about Amy Winehouse, whom he became Why? Because I’m helping you clean close to during the height of her drug your pipe? addictions. He wrote most of the song “No, your voice, man. You’re a dying after she died, though he did play her an breed. The English intellectual female. early version of the chord sequence. It is Where are they all?” notable as the only piece of his music she Oh, here we go. actually liked. His most famous English girl was Kate “She was a very, very critical person of Moss, whom he dated for a few years from my music,” he says. “It was very hard to 2005; a love affair that almost cost the bear. We used to get on and maybe have supermodel her career when she was a meal together or talk about music, but photographed allegedly taking cocaine whenever she said, ‘Come on, then, what with him and his friends. have you got? Let’s write a tune’, I’d play He says he last saw her “two weeks ago ... her my chord progression and she’d go, on an advertising hoarding in Chile. No, ‘Oh, Pete, is that the best you’ve got?’ ” she phoned me a little while ago when she I have a hunch they were once lovers, so was drunk, and said, ‘Why haven’t you done I ask him outright. any work recently? Come on! Put some “Well, yeah ... we were, but I think I fancied

her more than she fancied me,” he says, “The only thing momentarily coy, before swiftly recovering himself: “One time, we were on the bus I’m willing to be and we were making love and her security came on. They took her by one arm each shot in the head for and pulled her off. Darkness descends! That’s not very romantic, is it?” is love and music” He says that he didn’t see much of her in the years leading up to her death. “The way music out.’ Which I thought was quite I was and the way her [drug] using went, I just nice. I heard she got divorced ... I don’t had to say no to her, because I felt so guilty. know, I don’t know who she is any more.” “She wasn’t some naive little girl,” he Kate launched her Topshop line around continues. “She was a mouthy, confident, the time they were together and I am talented woman who had the world by the hoping Doherty can indulge me in some balls. I was walking down the street with her tales of hanging out with Philip Green, once and some kid said, ‘Pete, will you sign but alas not. “It was part of Kate’s contract this?’ and she said, ‘F*** off and leave him that I was not to be present at any of her alone.’ I said, ‘Woaah! He only wants an official engagements,” he sniffs. “And autograph,’ and she head-butted him!” Burberry said that to her, too.” He tells of another night when she came They got respective “K” and “P” tattoos back to his house looking to score, and “I said, on each other while they were together ‘I can’t do it, Amy.’ She started throwing stuff and, during their recent phone call, Pete around my room, spitting on me, pissed on was happy to hear that she hadn’t got rid the bed and then left. But, actually, I think of hers yet. “She said, ‘Of course I’ve got she was quite happy because she hadn’t been my f****** P, you dick’ — which is how doing heroin for a while at that point and, she talks.” He still has his, too. “But K is secretly, I think she was quite proud of me also for Katia. It’s a different world for me that I hadn’t [given it to her]. With Amy ... now. I don’t think I can ever go back to a she wasn’t a junkie — no, not really. Blake world of having shitloads of geezers stood [Winehouse’s husband] will tell you that outside my house with cameras.” when him and her were at the height of There is another song on his new album their using, he suddenly got the heebie-

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andrew whitton for the sunday times magazine times the sunday for andrew whitton

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jeebies and realised that if he stopped, she’d that’s my motto.” stop, and she did.” He is the son of a Doherty’s own relationship with hard commited Catholic, a drugs began when he moved to London military man. His father, after ﬁ nishing his A-levels. Even before he John Doherty , was from started using heroin, he was romantically a council estate in addicted to it, calling it “opium” and reading Paddington before joining up on Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey . the army, serving in the I expect he thought that taking it would Parachute Regiment and help unlock his creative muse — or, at working his way up to least, make him more interesting. Via his sergeant-major. When bands the Libertines and Babyshambles Doherty was young, he became the Noughties’ foremost the whole family countercultural anti hero: part Sid Vicious, part Morrissey , a glamorous, literate were constantly packing up and relocating screw-up, beloved by sensitive teens, to a new garrison: Düsseldorf , Cyprus, fashion designers and an insu erable army Northern Ireland, Bedworth, Dorset, of wannabe-junkie misﬁ ts in trilby hats . It is Romford, Colchester ... impossible to overstate his impact on the Earlier, he had told me that he and Katia culture of that time: the clothes, the music, spend a lot of time touring Europe in a 1980s the lifestyle — and not all of it larks. camper van. I foolishly try to intellectualise There have been drug-related deaths it by suggesting his wanderlust is a hangover among friends and acquaintances. And his from his nomadic childhood. But no — reputation has never fully recovered from the turns out it’s just the easiest way to smuggle case of Mark Blanco, a struggling actor who drugs across borders. “When I was using, at died after a mysterious fall from a balcony at my height, airports were just a no-no. a party Doherty was attending. Earlier in the Ferries were always better. The things you evening, Blanco had had an altercation with can do in camper vans ...” a member of Doherty’s entourage, and there Doherty remembers his childhood as is video footage of Doherty running away “just waiting on the next bulletin to hear from the scene — “legging it”, he has said where we were going. We were a little team — before the police could turn up and do in those days. It expanded my imagination him again for drugs. because, whenever we were in a new school, I have a theory, I tell him, that the reason I got to lie about my name and where I was today’s abste mious youth are so obsessed from, till people got to the bottom of it.” by Fitbits and clean eating is a direct What lies would he tell? reaction to the era of him and Winehouse. “I always used to pretend I was from They grew up watching their older Paddington because I wanted to be my dad.” siblings mess around with guitars He says his family never supported his and hard drugs and su er the musical ambitions, and it is tempting to see consequences — and decided to Doherty going o the rails as a direct get a cross-trainer instead. reaction to his father’s strict rule. Certainly, He shakes his head: theirs is a fractured relationship, but “Listen, I’m still well alive whether the daddy issues are the cause or and kicking and I had result of Doherty’s drug-taking is unclear. green tea this morning — so, combinations,

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“I have to go and see him as soon as possible,” he says brightly. “ I have to go and The band bring out a giant French fl ag show him [I’m clean] ... When I went there and wave it around. Doherty is wearing the last time, he took me in after eight years a white vest, suit and trilby. His new, of not speaking to me.” wide-eyed guitarist, Jack Jones , is shirtless Downstairs, the doors to the Bataclan — across his chest is scrawled “Nick Alexander ”, the name of the 35 -year-old have opened and crowds of people are slowly fi ltering in merchandise seller for Eagles of Death through security. Some are Metal who lost his life here. silent, some are crying, others Like all things Doherty is involved with, head straight to the bar. the show walks the line between magnifi cent Gradually, the chatter levels rise. and meandering chaos. But when Carl Barât At 9pm a female member of of the Libertines — Doherty’s long-su ering Doherty’s entourage comes creative ally and sparring partner — is brought on stage, the mood fi nally switches on stage and asks for a from trepidation to exhilaration. In that minute’s silence in honour moment, the Bataclan is reborn. of the 89 victims. Thirty Backstage afterwards, Doherty’s seconds later she stoicism is slipping. He seems strangely welcomes “Peter” irritated — hurling ugly accusations at Doherty — as he Barât one minute, taking them back the now calls himself next. The dressing room is a riot of band as a solo artist members, bottles, strange powders and — and the mystery potions. I pick through them to Puta Madres join Doherty on the sofa. He is trying to to the stage. open a jar of what looks like white bath The band’s salts. “Bicarbonate of soda”, for his violinist drummer’s “bad stomach”, I am told. comes I am sent out of the room for fi ve minutes on fi rst, while Doherty fi nishes whatever he is playing La doing. When I return, it is just me, Barât Marseillaise . and Doherty — now behaving even more For a erratically. Towards the end of our pre-show beautiful, interview, he had become similarly agitated, heart-soaring ranting about his treatment in the press: moment, the whole “One day, I’m going to put it all together room is united in in a collage and I’m going to sue you all for loud chanting and billions because what you did w as sick.” foot-st amping . He was particularly upset about a headline he claimed once appeared in The Sunday Times, calling him “one lucky crackhead”. (It didn’t.)

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I am about to be subjected to another tirade, but this time it’s personal. He tells me o for leaving the NME, then o ers me a job “editing [his] notes”. I mutter something about there not being enough money in the world. He can see he’s on to a losing game, so changes tack: “If I wasn’t going out with someone, would you marry me?” The conversation deteriorates. Marriage is quickly forgotten again as he becomes more aggressive. Barât tries to arbitrate, but there is no stopping this train. Doherty stands up, still ranting and raving and making very little sense. It goes on and on. At one point, Barât pours a glass of champagne and tries to give it to me as a peace o ering. But Doherty knocks it out of my hand in fury, and bubbles ﬂ y across the room. I seize my moment to leave. Sex? Check. Drugs? Check. Almighty rock-star tantrum? Check. It’s o cial: the

Bataclan is back in business n Hamburg Demonstrations, Peter Doherty’s new album, is out now on BMG/Clouds Hill

To listen to selected tracks from the album, go to Magazine at thesundaytimes.co.uk

HIT WITH THE LADIES From top: Doherty with Amy Winehouse in 2008; Kate Moss in 2005; and Katia

WENN SPLASH; de Vidas last year