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 Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 11 December 2016 Page 37,38,39,41 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 Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 11 December 2016 Page 37,38,39,41 Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 11 December 2016 Page 37,38,39,41 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’...” Copyright NLA Media Access. For internal use only. Not for reproduction. Date 11 December 2016 Page 37,38,39,41 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.