Bloody hell, mates! It is Pete Doherty’s 30th birthday, and, wouldn’t you know it, he’s a bloody fucking Pisces. This is all starting to make a bit more sense now. Bygones.
Yes, we are surprised that he is still alive as well. Our Antihero is often the subject of morbid jokes that periodically run amuck, and such humour must be society’s coping mechanism for the reality that the world’s most famous junkie wastrel will likely survive the impending apocalypse. Indeed, people often wonder why the bloke hasn’t already been dead for years, and one particularly cruel joke alleges that Doherty simply is not talented enough to have lost his life at age 27 in manner of Jim Morrisson, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. And, although Doherty, on March 10th, was the subject of a Facebook death hoax, he is definitely alive and relatively well.
So, Pete “Call Me Peter” Doherty is releasing his first solo album as a “serious musician” next week, so he has been granting a crapload of interviews lately. Mostly, it’s the same rubbish regurgitated ten times over, but, from this mess, a few amusing gems have come forth, such as this “atomic wedgie” anecdote:
Pete Doherty says his biggest regret in life is visiting Dundee – because of the wedgie he received from a burly Scotsman. The Babyshambles frontman was reduced to tears when he was grabbed in his nether regions as he stage dived during a gig in the city. The singer admitted he was so put off by the unusual welcome, he fled the stage and took shelter in the tour bus until the gig finished.
He said: “I hid in the tour bus crying. The gig was going great, so I thought, ‘I’ll dive in,’ and this big Scotsman just grabbed hold of my pants and said, ‘Cop a load of this, Doherty.’ Those were his exact words.”
The embarrassed former Libertines star let it slip that he was too embarrassed to tell his bandmates the reason behind his escape from the stage and even told them he wanted to quit the group.
“When they found me on the bus I was crying my eyes out, going, ‘The band’s not working out. We should split up.’ Nobody believed that was what was wrong, and eventually I snapped, ‘All right, I got a wedgie, OK?”
Bless his little cotton underwear socks. On much brighter notes, Peter has also revealed a short-lived flurry of attempts as a stand-up comedian, confessions of selling acid to The Strokes in 2001, regret for his estranged relations with his father, and admiration for the fashion sense of Posh Spice. Doherty has also been spotted singing karaoke in Reading, England and treating fans to a double-decker bus ride (video) in Paris, France. All of this noise is geared towards promoting Doherty’s Grace/Wastelands album, which is actually getting some pretty good critical reviews, like this one from the Guardian UK:
[F]or the first time in a long time, smack and solipsism don’t seem to be the whole point. Instead there are songs like the genuinely brilliant 1939 Returning, on which the lyric shifts from an ambiguous portrait of an Englishman in Germany during the second world war – he could be a spy or traitor – to a pensioner recalling her years as an evacuee. Midway through its chorus, there’s a beautiful, unexpected chord change, subtly highlighted with strings and a single, tremolo-heavy guitar note. Like the echoing guitar that weaves eerily in and out of the vocals on New Love Grows on Trees, and the lovely, seamless segue between A Little Death Around the Eyes and Salome, it demonstrates the delicacy with which Street and Coxon add shade to Doherty’s songs, lending the album a unifying air of understated, small-hours melancholy.
The result isn’t perfect, but it’s the first album Doherty has been involved with since the Libertines’ debut not to require any special pleading. Whether it’s enough to arrest his downward slide is an interesting question: there’s a distinct possibility that it’s now too late, that he’s still doomed to see out his days in Last of the Summer Wine style, beloved of a shrinking cabal of dutiful diehard fans, ignored or mocked by virtually everyone else. Listening to Grace/Wastelands, it’s hard not to feel that would be a shame. There might still be more to Pete Doherty than an interminable, unutterably depressing comedy of errors.
Wouldn’t it be brilliant if, one day, Doherty were actually remembered for his music instead of as a successor to the toothless crown of Shane MacGowan? Never say never, mates.
Imagery: Bauer-Griffen Online
