Pete Doherty: lost in the stories we tell about artists
Two or three years back, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty were—is “courting” the word? Anyway, there was this story run in one of the red-top newspapers. The headline—or at any rate, the theme—of the piece was “Beauty and the Beast.” Juxtaposed were two photographs.
One was of Kate, stepping out of a club where she’d been “partying,” as newspaper code goes. It was 5am. She was smoking a fag. She looked immaculate, elegant, composed—like she always does. She looked, in fact, like the world was amusing her in a way she didn’t care to share.
Beside it was a photograph of Doherty singing at a gig the same night. He was hanging onto the mic as if it were the only thing standing between him and horizontal—which it was. His face looked like Spam in a sauna. His mouth was open; his eyes were rolled back in his head so far you couldn’t see even an arc of the iris; his hair was matted with sweat.
The gist of the article was that nice Kate was in danger of being led astray by this scummy little junkie. But I looked at these photographs, at the relative youth of Doherty and at his condition, and I drew the opposite conclusion.
I thought: here is a woman who can clearly handle herself, and here is a man who clearly can’t. Kate Moss makes most professional rugby players look like neurasthenic 19th-century poets. Doherty, bless his heart, was far, far out of his depth.
This has informed my reading of Doherty ever since—a reading not altered by his diffident and charming appearances on Jonathan Ross’s chat show; nor by my getting a taxi to the airport from a bloke who claimed to have driven Pete (“Peter,” he called him unfailingly) around London in the middle of the night for months and struck up a friendship.
What Doherty made me think of, mostly, was Syd Barrett, of Pink Floyd: fey, whimsical, and discombobulated. Doherty fitted himself into the traditional image of the addict/artist as child/victim, and cultivated that image to the far side of cliché: publicly self-harming, painting in his own blood and allowing himself to be photographed cast in plaster in a crucifixional pose.
This self-presentation has, however, come under attack thanks to a stream of stories that are together reshaping Doherty’s myth. Their common theme is not one man’s tortured vulnerability, but the injury and death of those around him.
Most recently, this January, was the death of the filmmaker Robyn Whitehead, who had been making a documentary about the singer. Four months before that there was the case of Chris Corder, badly injured by Doherty’s manager in a hit-and-run incident. And before that there was the death of Mark Blanco, a fan who fell from a balcony at a block of flats having been thrown out of a party where Doherty was a fellow guest.
The connections—the available evidence suggests—are not strong. Doherty had reportedly seen Whitehead the day before she died. Doherty had been at the same party as Mark Blanco. Doherty was understood to have lent Andrew Boyd the car he was driving. But then comes the gravity-warp of Doherty’s celebrity—the effect of which is to mark him as responsible in some occult way. With his Blakean mumblings about “Albion,” his pork-pie hats and thigh-length peacoats, Doherty is cast as the fatal Englishman.
The suggestion appears to be that death is contagious: specifically, you can catch it from celebrities of whose lifestyles we take a special thrill in disapproving. It’s an assumption whose tentacles reach beyond the tabloids. An Observer article in January investigated “the gifted artists who pay a fatal price after entering [Doherty’s] orbit.” Mark the impertinent tense of that verb—what you might call the “present habitual.” This is in bad taste. If you move in—or accidentally wander into—a circle filled with hard drugs, it seems almost needless to point out that the fatality rate is likely to be higher than if you don’t. You can expect dangerous driving, overdoses and accidents.
But Doherty isn’t controlling this. What we see in him, rather, are the twinned tales that public opinion likes to tell about addiction in artists, just as it has done ever since Coleridge and De Quincey: the tragic martyr, the manipulative Mephistopheles. The truth is more banal. Doherty isn’t Christ-like, as he thinks, and he isn’t some fatal Pied Piper, as the tabloids think. He is someone living in an environment that kills people. And neither his songwriting gifts nor his celebrity status make him responsible for that environment. Or immune to it.
Two or three years back, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty were—is “courting” the word? Anyway, there was this story run in one of the red-top newspapers. The headline—or at any rate, the theme—of the piece was “Beauty and the Beast.” Juxtaposed were two photographs.
One was of Kate, stepping out of a club where she’d been “partying,” as newspaper code goes. It was 5am. She was smoking a fag. She looked immaculate, elegant, composed—like she always does. She looked, in fact, like the world was amusing her in a way she didn’t care to share.
Beside it was a photograph of Doherty singing at a gig the same night. He was hanging onto the mic as if it were the only thing standing between him and horizontal—which it was. His face looked like Spam in a sauna. His mouth was open; his eyes were rolled back in his head so far you couldn’t see even an arc of the iris; his hair was matted with sweat.
The gist of the article was that nice Kate was in danger of being led astray by this scummy little junkie. But I looked at these photographs, at the relative youth of Doherty and at his condition, and I drew the opposite conclusion.
I thought: here is a woman who can clearly handle herself, and here is a man who clearly can’t. Kate Moss makes most professional rugby players look like neurasthenic 19th-century poets. Doherty, bless his heart, was far, far out of his depth.
This has informed my reading of Doherty ever since—a reading not altered by his diffident and charming appearances on Jonathan Ross’s chat show; nor by my getting a taxi to the airport from a bloke who claimed to have driven Pete (“Peter,” he called him unfailingly) around London in the middle of the night for months and struck up a friendship.
What Doherty made me think of, mostly, was Syd Barrett, of Pink Floyd: fey, whimsical, and discombobulated. Doherty fitted himself into the traditional image of the addict/artist as child/victim, and cultivated that image to the far side of cliché: publicly self-harming, painting in his own blood and allowing himself to be photographed cast in plaster in a crucifixional pose.
This self-presentation has, however, come under attack thanks to a stream of stories that are together reshaping Doherty’s myth. Their common theme is not one man’s tortured vulnerability, but the injury and death of those around him.
Most recently, this January, was the death of the filmmaker Robyn Whitehead, who had been making a documentary about the singer. Four months before that there was the case of Chris Corder, badly injured by Doherty’s manager in a hit-and-run incident. And before that there was the death of Mark Blanco, a fan who fell from a balcony at a block of flats having been thrown out of a party where Doherty was a fellow guest.
The connections—the available evidence suggests—are not strong. Doherty had reportedly seen Whitehead the day before she died. Doherty had been at the same party as Mark Blanco. Doherty was understood to have lent Andrew Boyd the car he was driving. But then comes the gravity-warp of Doherty’s celebrity—the effect of which is to mark him as responsible in some occult way. With his Blakean mumblings about “Albion,” his pork-pie hats and thigh-length peacoats, Doherty is cast as the fatal Englishman.
The suggestion appears to be that death is contagious: specifically, you can catch it from celebrities of whose lifestyles we take a special thrill in disapproving. It’s an assumption whose tentacles reach beyond the tabloids. An Observer article in January investigated “the gifted artists who pay a fatal price after entering [Doherty’s] orbit.” Mark the impertinent tense of that verb—what you might call the “present habitual.” This is in bad taste. If you move in—or accidentally wander into—a circle filled with hard drugs, it seems almost needless to point out that the fatality rate is likely to be higher than if you don’t. You can expect dangerous driving, overdoses and accidents.
But Doherty isn’t controlling this. What we see in him, rather, are the twinned tales that public opinion likes to tell about addiction in artists, just as it has done ever since Coleridge and De Quincey: the tragic martyr, the manipulative Mephistopheles. The truth is more banal. Doherty isn’t Christ-like, as he thinks, and he isn’t some fatal Pied Piper, as the tabloids think. He is someone living in an environment that kills people. And neither his songwriting gifts nor his celebrity status make him responsible for that environment. Or immune to it.
