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With a purposeful stride, Johnny Headlock approaches the black metal security gate and quickly pulls himself up and over, dropping into the parking lot of a shabby-looking apartment complex. We're in Hackney, an East London borough that is far from posh. For the past ten hours, we have been looking for Pete Doherty. Johnny pauses at a door with a broken window. The window has been boarded over with an uneven square of wood, and someone has scrawled a message on the white border: "Hello faye and lo here we came round to see you we love you not in an obsessive way good fucking job xo."
"Pete!" Johnny shouts. "Pete!" It might be appropriate to note, here, that it is 3:30 in the morning. The only lights in the area come from Doherty's flat. The windows are covered with bedsheets.
"He's only got three real hide-outs," Johnny murmurs. They call Johnny "Johnny Headlock" because he is not a person it would be advisable to fuck with. In Johnny's thick East End accent, "three" comes out as "free." The accent, coupled with the ever-present, unnervingly intense gleam in his eyes, bring to mind Ben Kingsley's psychotic gangster character from Sexy Beast. Johnny has worked for Doherty for several years, in a capacity somewhere between wrangler and personal assistant. Finally, one of the sheets is yanked aside and Doherty thrusts his head from a second-story window, bleary-eyed and confused. "Johnny," he croaks, "you can't --" Nothing else is intelligible. Then he disappears.
At that moment, the door bursts open and a young woman races past us. She is crying hysterically and not wearing enough clothes for this frigid night. Johnny frowns, then shepherds me inside. "Take off your shoes," he orders. Upstairs, a long, graffiti-covered hallway leads to a door. Someone has spray painted "Toilet," in enormous letters, above the entrance to the bathroom. Someone else has written "All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Someone else has written, "I love you pete love brooke (the blonde one)." A mountain of garbage bags has accumulated near the stairs, and the rest of the floor is littered with discarded objects: amplifier cables, an empty guitar case, loose coins, a container of Johnson's Baby Powder, a torn copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Droning, atonal music seeps from beneath the main door.
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The room, even more trashed than the hall, looks like a homeless person's squat. The lights are dim, with an orange glow, like a muted campfire. A man in a peacoat, his fingertips blackened -- the indelible ink of a crack pipe -- crouches on an old couch and shoots us a startled, feral look. The only sign of celebrity sits atop a crowded mantel: a trophy from a music-awards show, picked up the week prior. The award was for "Sexiest Male."
And there he is -- Pete Doherty, singer of Babyshambles, ex-boyfriend of Kate Moss and the most famous junkie in Great Britain. He stands in the center of the room, tall and rangy, his hair tousled, his eyes sunken, a cross dangling from his neck on a white, beaded chain. He's holding a laptop computer in one hand and a tiny round laptop camera in the other. He is using the camera to film something in front of him -- though there is nothing in front of him -- and he is staring hard at whatever he is filming as it appears on the laptop's screen. Without looking at us, he says, softly, "Johnny, this is not a good time." Johnny begins to speak, but Doherty, without raising his voice or taking his eyes from the screen, interrupts: "Are you not listening to me, Johnny? This is not a good time."
Johnny turns to me and says, "Maybe you'd better wait in the hall."
With Babyshambles and his first band, the Libertines, Pete Doherty has made some of the most exciting music to come out of Britain in the past five years. His best work is smart, scrappy punk rock that draws on both the energy and eclecticism of the Clash -- Mick Jones produced both Libertines albums and Babyshambles' debut, Down in Albion -- and on the hyperliterate English lyrical tradition of songwriters like Ray Davies, Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker. But his legend -- comically at times, tragically at others -- has shined most brightly in epic tabloid tales, where he embodies nearly every aspect, good and bad, of what we think about when we think about rock stars: drugs, alcohol, brushes with the law, drugs, fashion models, onstage fistfights, onstage collapse, fan riots, drugs, jail, poor driving, gratuitous Rimbaud quoting and, hey, did we mention drugs? Over the course of Doherty's short career, the twenty-seven-year-old has been jailed a half-dozen times -- once for two months, for robbing his own bandmate's flat. Most of these arrests have been a direct result of Doherty's long-standing drug abuse, which, in a spirit both theatrical and self-destructive -- and, perhaps, of protest -- the singer has never made any effort to hide. "Normally, someone who smokes crack will deny it and say, 'Don't do it, kids!'" says Babyshambles bassist Drew McConnell. "Peter never lies to anyone." Such honesty has made the singer an irresistible target for British authorities. Over the years, Doherty has also bested several rehabs, including a Thai monastery known as the most intense clinic in the world, which boasts, "Once someone starts his program, the only way he can quit is when he's dead." Doherty split for Bangkok after three days.
By late January, in the course of three months, Doherty -- his name is pronounced Dockerty -- had been confronted by police or arrested at least ten times. The latest two arrests, both for possession, were, rather incredibly, on the same day -- the day before I was scheduled to fly to London for an interview. I would spend the next six weeks attempting to track Doherty down, enlisting his friends and bandmates and making two separate trips to the U.K. "Does he even know I'm trying to interview him?" I finally ask McConnell, after several close encounters. A tall, soft-spoken Irishman who does not use hard drugs, McConnell is silent for a moment. "We've definitely made him aware of it," he finally says. "But with Pete, you're not always quite sure what he's retaining."
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The next evening, McConnell sends me a text message, telling me to come to Koko, a cavernous rock club in Camden. When I arrive, the Paddingtons, a punk band from Hull, are in the middle of a raucous set, with McConnell watching from the side of the stage. I ask where Doherty is. McConnell jabs a thumb at the rafters above the stage. We climb a spiral staircase leading up to a catwalk. Doherty, wearing a striped button-down shirt beneath a light-blue sweater, is watching the band, drinking whiskey from a bottle and taking the occasional hit from a crack pipe. With his wide, circled eyes, he looks a bit like Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, only he's not wearing mascara. He says hello and introduces me to his friend the General, a middle-aged Rastafarian he met in prison, and who subsequently cut a reggae track for Down in Albion. The General gives me a fist-bop handshake and says, "Respect." After a few moments of bobbing his head excitedly, Doherty begins to climb onto the railing to get a better view. McConnell quickly rushes over and grabs him by the waist.
Downstairs in the dressing room, Doherty is greeted by friends, models and a guy who used to work with Oasis, who collars him and says, "I'm telling you, with my rock sound and your talent, your next album could be huge." I ask Doherty when he wants to talk. He looks at me, seeming confused, and says, "What do you want to talk about?" Then he says, "Oh, you wanted to do a piece?" I say yes. His cell phone rings. He says, "Wait right here, I'll be back in a minute." He leaves the building and never returns.
Two weeks later, in Manchester, I make another attempt. It is the final date of a mini Babyshambles tour. The band, whose debut is scheduled to be released in April in the United States, remains a notoriously erratic live act. Matt Bates, Babyshambles' booking agent, recalls a show in which Doherty, playing bass, fell asleep midway through the first song. ("His head just kind of slumped over," Bates says, "and then half of the band just walked offstage.") But on this night, at least, though Doherty arrives nearly two hours late for the show -- greeting the crowd by slurring, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you" -- the band turns in a thrilling performance, covering most of Albion and, rather mischievously, the Libertines song "What Katie Did," written long before Doherty met Moss but playing like a weird divination of the singer's recent past.
"Oh, what you gonna do, Katie?/You're a sweet, sweet girl/But it's a cruel, cruel world . . ." Doherty sang, clamping his fedora to his head with one hand and affecting a sort of damaged croon. "Since you said goodbye, polka dots filled my eyes . . ./ And I don't know why."
The mood on the tour bus after the show is celebratory, to put it mildly. Several young-looking fans inhale lines of cocaine from a table, and a pretty blonde wearing too much makeup smokes heroin off a square of aluminum foil. Assuming she's a groupie, I ask how she knows the band. "Oh," she chirps brightly, "I'm Peter's new publicity manager!"
Moments later, Doherty boards the bus, squints at me and says, "You always manage to turn up at the best times, don't you?" His voice is gentle, its timbre vaguely bruised. After a moment, he flips open the view screen of a camcorder -- as he works the play button, I notice his fingertips are split and blackened from crack use -- and begins to watch his own performance from this very evening. On the screen, a miniature Doherty bobs and sways across the stage, seeming less like he's dancing than dodging invisible punches. The real-life Doherty, smiling delightedly, begins to sing along with his recorded counterpart. After duetting with himself on a couple of songs, he retreats, without a word, to a private section of the bus to prepare for a second, solo gig, at a tiny venue down the street. "It's a way for him to get a little extra money," cryptically notes Babyshambles drummer Adam Ficek.
At the afterparty, Doherty is nowhere to be found, but it's here where I first meet Johnny Headlock, a former drug dealer who works with the group, and a man Doherty trusts like few others. Wiry and belligerent -- one of the first things he says to me is "I know you're from New York, but the Strokes are a bunch of New York City faggots" -- yet extraordinarily charming, Johnny does not touch crack or heroin. I listen as, in the middle of the party, he menaces the young promoter of the show, who has apparently failed to comp the band enough drinks.
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"How long you been promoting?" Johnny asks. The promoter, looking nervous, says three months. "Three days?" Johnny barks, giving the kid a dead stare. "Well, you got a lot to fucking learn. And you can kiss my black ass if you fucking think I believe you didn't make money on this gig." At this point, Johnny turns to me and grins, flashing his gold tooth. He says when we get back to London, he will take me to Pete.
The next day, Doherty is arrested in Birmingham for driving a stolen vehicle.
* * * *
The British press delights in comparing Doherty to Sid Vicious. But though both men have become romanticized figures of rock & roll dissolution, they actually have little in common outside of a love for heroin. Vicious, who could barely play his bass, was a musician only in the loosest sense of the word. The frustrating thing about Doherty's addiction is the amount of potential he seems to be squandering. Sharp and articulate when he's not nodding off, Doherty fell in love with language at an early age. By sixteen, he'd won a prestigious poetry competition, earning a trip to Russia, and even his rambling "prison diaries," published by The Guardian, reveal the ability to turn a pleasing phrase. A sample entry:
Another unthrilling day and my tooth aches like fuckery . . . Oh well, small mercies, small mercies. First time I've had a telly in me cell, watching prime minister's question time. A lot of hot air if ever there was any . . . Stone me what a life. Hear, hear . . . Still waiting for the jingle jangle of the gaoler's bangle . . . Even life without drugs has gotta be betta than this malarkey. Babyshambles all set to take over as well. Won't do it again honest guv . . . Oh yes you will Doherty and you know it.
People expected Down in Albion to be a modern-day equivalent of Sid Sings, the infamous solo album on which Vicious, at times sounding near-catatonic, butchered songs like "My Way." But though much of Albion is certainly messy and underproduced, often sounding like more of a demo, there are terrific moments throughout, from the anthemic single "Fuck Forever" to hung-over ballads like the lovely "Albion," an ironic, melancholic ode to Doherty's beloved England. Other songs make ramshackle stabs at punk, reggae and Brit pop, with an emphasis on ramshackle. (The clattering sound at the end of "Merry Go Round"? That would be Doherty, falling down in the studio.)
Doherty grew up in a relatively stable environment. His father is a British army officer who most recently served in Iraq. A precocious teenager, Doherty aced his A-levels at school and started a fanzine dedicated to his favorite soccer team. But he dropped out of Oxford University, where he was studying English, after his first year and began hanging out with Carl Barat, a friend of his sister's who knew how to play guitar. Soon the pair formed the Libertines. The title of the band's 2002 debut, Up the Bracket, was slang for snorting cocaine, and the appropriately tweaked-out music made coke-bingeing sound like its own genre. Jittery, verbose and ever on the verge of collapse, the album's punk spirit sounded especially fresh at a time when mellow bands like Travis and Coldplay had a stranglehold on the U.K. charts.
But by 2003, the Libertines were forced to tour without Doherty, whose drug use had become intolerable. In London, he began making music on his own, at first staging impromptu shows to raise drug money. He also managed to record one of the best singles of the year, the ballad "For Lovers," with a shady local character -- decidedly not a professional musician -- known as the Wolfman. The song made the U.K. Top Ten. (Unfortunately, Doherty and Wolfman had already sold the publishing rights in a pub for a paltry sum.) Soon after, Doherty formed Babyshambles, also composed, initially, of druggy hangers-on. "They were people . . . who move in certain circles," McConnell says, giving me a wink.
By 2004, the Libertines had broken up, and Doherty had begun dating Moss, whom he'd met at her thirty-first birthday party. The sheer unlikeliness of this pairing would be cleverly satirized by Doherty himself on the Babyshambles song "La Belle et La Bete," the chorus of which featured a cooing Moss -- sounding like a non-English speaker, pronouncing her lines phonetically -- asking, "Is she more beautiful than me?" Their courtship flamed out in spectacular fashion last fall, when grainy cell-phone footage of Moss inhaling line after line of cocaine at a Babyshambles recording session was leaked to a British tabloid.
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All the while, trouble continued to follow Doherty everywhere. He overdosed before a concert in Aberdeen, remaining unconscious as angry fans rocked the tour bus. At the Brixton Academy in London, Doherty and guitarist Patrick Walden brawled onstage after Doherty taunted Walden, then cut his power in the middle of a solo. In Wales, while recording Down in Albion, a smashed Doherty jumped into his car -- "Whenever he gets behind the wheel of a car," says McConnell, "it's like, 'vwwwwmp!' and the car will be immediately empty, except for him" -- determined to shake the security guards hired by the label. "I said, 'Pete, if you get into that car, you're going to crash,'" recalls Ficek. While backing out of the driveway, he careened into a ditch.
"A lot of the stuff he does is very planned," insists Jonny Rhythm, who booked some of the Libertines' early, legendary gigs at his East London club, the Rhythm Factory. "The night before one show, he said, 'I'm going to do something tomorrow.' And sure enough, right in the middle of the set, he storms off the stage. The band didn't know what was happening. Everyone was like, 'Did he just quit?!' And then he comes running back out with this incredible flair. I was like, 'James Brown! You fucker.'"
* ** *
When I meet up with Johnny Headlock in London, he assures me the car-stealing charge is "bollocks"; the car was a friend's, and it had been reported stolen months earlier. Apparently, Doherty, after spending a few hours in jail, is back home, and planning to drive to Norwich to catch Barat's new band, Dirty Pretty Things. "He says he'll pick us up in a half-hour," Johnny says. "Of course, his half-hours can be four days."
But then a friend of Doherty's calls back and says there's been a change of plans, that Doherty is recording some music, and that we should wait a few hours before coming by. By 3 a.m., we are in my hotel room doing shots of Sambuca with a small group of Johnny's friends, including Naomi, a professional pole dancer, whom we met at a lesbian strip club in Soho. (Long story.)
A half-hour later, we're hopping Doherty's gate in Hackney, with Naomi and me eventually sitting on the floor of the graffiti-covered hallway, waiting for word from Johnny. After about ten minutes, the door opens and the crouching man, a friend of Doherty's named Mick, stalks out. "I wouldn't stick around if I were you," he says, glaring down at us. "We've been up for four days. It's all fucked up in there."
The crying girl, turns out, is Doherty's ex. They have been fighting, and Mick has been assigned to escort her home. A few moments after their departure, Johnny opens the door and waves us into the room. Doherty sits on a small amplifier, sipping red wine from a champagne flute. The floor of the room is littered with music and computer equipment, books, papers and empty butane cans. Up close, Doherty looks very young, his hairless face and moony eyes appearing exaggerated and doll-like; as in most photographs, it looks as if a yank of a hidden string could make him cry. He is wearing a mauve V-neck sweater, black pants and striped brown socks. The dimness of the lights, and Doherty's own near-whisper of a voice, blankets the room with a sort of hush. "Sorry to drop by so late," I begin awkwardly.
Doherty leans forward and says, "I don't mind doing an interview, but could you not write anything down?" I say that's fine. But after a few questions, it becomes clear that Doherty does not, in fact, want to be interviewed, and that questions about anything too sensitive, like his relationship with Moss, would only spook him further and get me ejected.
"Can we just pretend you're a mate of Johnny's, and you've just stopped by to hang out?" he asks. Shortly after he says this, Doherty taps a bit of heroin onto a sheet of aluminum foil. Rolling up a second square of foil into a long tube, he peers through it, briefly, as if it's a sailor's scope, then cooks the heroin with a lighter and, using the tube as a straw, inhales.
Over the next three hours, Doherty will also smoke crack, shoot heroin and take an Ecstasy pill. He does all of this casually, and openly, except for the shooting up, which he performs near the kitchenette, with his back to us. He offers me heroin and Ecstasy but not crack. I decline. The more drugs Doherty does, the more he seems to relax. He never becomes incoherent, though occasionally he seems confused. At one point, while we're talking, he stares at my feet and says, "Could you take your shoes off, please?" I tell him that I already have.
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"Just take your shoes off, please," he repeats, glaring at me angrily.
"Pete," Naomi says, "his shoes are off."
Doherty stares at me for another beat, then cracks a faint smile and says, unconvincingly, "Just kidding."
But at other moments, he reveals a disarming intellect. For instance, he mentions his possible casting in a film version of Crime and Punishment. "Raskolnikov?" I ask. He brightens up and says, "I'd love to play Raskolnikov. But no, another part. You know who I've always thought would make a great Raskolnikov, though? Carl. He skulks about so well, and has those dark Russian features."
One thing Doherty seems incapable of doing is maintaining any degree of focus. He paces around the cluttered room, absently strumming a guitar and singing. He says a French girl is sleeping in his bedroom. He says she showed up one day and asked if she could wait inside, because it was raining. He says, "That was three months ago!" He shakes up a can of spray paint and fills in a blue circle on the wall. He offers to make me a cup of tea. He says all he's been doing lately is writing new songs. He says he'd love to tour the States. He says, "Wouldn't that be a riot, Johnny?"
I ask Doherty if he's scared of going back to prison. In the past, he's couched his drug use as part of a philosophy of personal freedom, though he's also admitted to being an addict, telling the BBC last year, "History has shown there's only one conclusion [to such sustained drug use], and that's the blackout. The great void. I'm not a nihilist, and I don't want to die."
Tonight, though, Doherty resists such introspection. He shrugs off the question at first, insisting that, even if he tests positive, he'll only be fined. Really? I ask. He looks down, then says, "If I honestly think about it? Absolute terror is what I feel." Then he says, "That's why we're not talking about it," and begins to hum a song.
Sitting back on the amplifier, he picks up a Smiths fake book lying on the floor, flips it open to "Cemetry Gates," from The Queen Is Dead, and begins to play. He sings:
A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now ?
After Doherty finishes the song, he says, "People think I'm rich, but I only have twenty Scottish pounds." Later, rather pointedly, he asks, "So, when you interview someone like 50 Cent, do you ever pay them?" I say no.
A few minutes later, he says, "Who wants to go on a mission?"
The mission is a relatively simple one. Doherty has just bought a classic Jaguar, but it is parked at his friend's house. His friend's car is parked outside. We must swap cars. There is one problem: Johnny's license has been revoked, Naomi can't drive, and I can't drive a stick.
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And so here we are, hurtling through East London in a blue economy sedan, Doherty chain-smoking and punching the gas at the mere sight of a speed bump. Eventually, we arrive at Doherty's friend's place, where he promptly backs into a parked car. "Fuck!" he says, and quickly drives the car in reverse half a block away, stashing it behind a van.
The Jaguar is quite slick. We head in the direction of Johnny's
place. The sun is coming up now, and the streets of London, still
mostly deserted in the washed-out morning light, feel at peace in a
romantic, tenuous way. Rush hour will begin shortly. Doherty seems
more awake than the rest of us, and in high spirits. He begins to
point out various old haunts, singling out, in particular, a squat
where he and Bar?t once lived, back in the early days of the
Libertines. "Fuck it, I should show you," he says, making an abrupt
U-turn. Johnny, who has been dozing, jolts awake. "Where we going?"
he asks.
Doherty says, "To a hidden Albion glade."
Turning sharply into a narrow alley, we leave the main
thoroughfare and, sure enough, on the far side, we emerge into a
little cul-de-sac lined with a dozen single-story cottages. It
suddenly feels as if we're hundreds of miles from London, somewhere
in the English countryside of an old Kinks song. "It's beautiful,"
Naomi says. Doherty nods and parks the Jaguar in front of his old
squat, now seemingly inhabited. There are cars parked in the
cul-de-sac, but there's no apparent movement in any of the houses.
Everyone seems to be asleep.
Doherty grabs the owner's manual of the Jaguar and flips it open. Inside, he's hidden a sheet of foil and more heroin, which he hunches over and smokes. The foil makes a pleasant crackling sound while the heroin cooks. We sit quietly for a few moments. Doherty eventually points out that his Jaguar has a special feature that allows him to maintain a consistent speed on the highway, with just a press of a button. I realize he's talking about cruise control. "I don't know much about cars," he acknowledges, staring wistfully at the cottage. He talks about the good old days. He says he doesn't remember much but that he kept a diary. He says they were all taking lots of psychedelics at the time. "No heroin or crack," he adds quietly.
By the time we drop off Johnny, it's seven. Doherty has to meet with his parole officer at nine, for his weekly drug test. Before the meeting, he wants to swing by Naomi's: She says she has a bunch of Ecstasy pills.
I have a flight to catch, so en route, Doherty flags down a taxi from his car. I jump out, grab his hand and wish him luck with everything. Then I climb into the cab and tell the driver, a stocky man in his early fifties, the name of my hotel. He squints at me in the rearview mirror for a moment, finally asking, "Didn't he nick a car the other night?"
The future of Babyshambles remains, to state the obvious, on the uncertain side. "It's really upsetting, what he's doing," says McConnell. "There are just a lot of people buzzing around who don't have the same interests as us, which is making music. There are moments when no one else is around, when Adam and I say, 'You know, Peter, you're breaking our hearts.' But he is a libertine. He has this philosophy of personal freedom. With his last band, they tried to force him into rehab, to have interventions. And it didn't work."
In 2004, before the Libertines' official breakup, Bar?t was wrestling with the same issues. "It's very hard to know what to do," he told me at the time. "The first thing you think is, 'Well, he's got the constitution of a fucking mammoth, so he'll be fine.' Then you say it's becoming too much of a problem, and so he tries to hide it. And everything we tried, everything -- threats, promises, embargos . . . what do you call it? Sanctions. Nothing worked."
In this age of American Idol, Doherty certainly comes off like the last rock star. And he's still capable of pulling off amazing performances -- performance art, really -- in a way that messily blends his music with his troubled life. A recent example: On New Year's Eve, he played a gig in his own apartment for a select group of fans. After the set, he retreated into his bedroom and had the kids line up outside, entering one by one, at which point they were allowed to request a single song for a private performance. What kind of popular artist, big or small, does this kind of thing? Well, yes: an artist looking for quick cash to buy drugs. But there's more at work than a need for a fix.
For now, touring remains difficult, travel visas and insurance being tough sells. When I ask Doherty if he's had any offers from labels, he chuckles. "Nobody wants to touch me, man," he says, mussing his hair in agitation. "They're afraid. They think it would be a car crash." He laughs again, more harshly this time, and without smiling. Gesturing at his trashed surroundings, he continues, "They don't realize, the car's already crashed. And there's been a nuclear explosion. And we're the last people alive on Earth."