TO make the list of what Pete Doherty, 45 on March 12, has not lived you risk stopping at the second line. Military education, early success – first with the group of Libertinesfounded in 1997, then with i Babyshambles in 2004 – addiction to alcohol and almost all drugs on the market, prison (for having robbed his friend and fellow artist, Carl Barât and for punching another), a troubled love story with one of the most desired women at the time, Kate Mossseveral failed detox attempts, an escaped suicide, and two childrenAstile Louis, with singer Lisa Moorish, now twenty years old, and Aisling, with model Lindi Hingston, 12 years old.
Today, however, Pete Doherty is “clean”, he is no longer a boy and he is not even cursed, he looks like a kind accountant (and luckily, he has sent more than one journalist to hell in the past), but still very rock ‘n’roll. Black cowboy hat he’ll never take off, long graying hair, 7-Eleven logo T-shirtcan’t wait to go on tour, he tells us. The new Libertines album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanadewill be released on March 8. With him his French wife, Katia deVidasto whom he has been linked for over a decade and whom he married in 2021 in Normandy, where they now live together.
Pete Doherty’s life in a documentary
Katia, who is a musician, is also the author of documentary Pete Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin, a raw and candid story of Doherty’s parable, a lot of music, a lot of excesses, until salvation. No censorship, just – predictably – no Kate Moss.
Pete Doherty in one of the Stranger in My Own Skin archives.
Katia, when did you realize that Pete’s life was movie material, and that you were the one who could give it shape?
Katia: The moment I came across, between footage and archives, 3, 4 moments out of the ordinary. I tried to edit them and they looked beautiful, at least in my eyes they were, and at that point I said: «Wow, this stuff can become a film!».
What moments? Maybe the scene where Pete’s father comes on stage during a concert and surprises him by singing with him What a Waster, song he thought she hated?
Pete: Mmmmm, I wouldn’t say so. I would have preferred my father not to go on that stage actually. I don’t mean to be rude to him, but he had never come to hear me play before and then he decides to make that gesture. What if, let’s assume, I had shown up at his work without notifying him? I’m not sure he would have appreciated it.
The difficult relationship with his father
It would have been difficult, his father was in the army…
P: In fact, if I had entered a British army barracks like this and tried to have my say on tactics or ammunition, how would it have ended? And he joins in my “grand finale” (in Italian, ed)… no no no, that wasn’t cool.
K: In the film you can see that you try not to appear annoyed, but…
P: Horrible, it was horrible. If I watch that footage I see the child in me saying, “Great, thanks dad,” but the adult in me instead blurting out, “Oh no, now what?”. And then, at the end of the concert, my father was walking around the stage excitedly saying, “This band needs me.” Well .. (he gets up and goes to smoke at the window, we are in a no-smoking room in a Parisian hotel, ed).
Pete Doherty in Stranger in My Own Skin.
Pete’s story was told in great detail by the tabloids. Did you feel the need to provide your version? It’s not that different, on addiction, on excesses, from what we already knew.
K: If you live in England as a foreigner, as I did, it’s a real shock to see the impact tabloid culture has on society. I don’t think there is anything like it in the world. In France it would be unthinkable. As a friend of Pete, I saw the huge gap between what I read about him and who he really was. Even in my family we have experienced tragedies due to drug addiction, I am convinced that there is a sensational misunderstanding on the issue, with this film I wanted to try to explain. When you watch the movie you can either love Pete or hate him, but at least you understand what we’re talking about. It’s not like seeing him photographed while he goes to buy bread on the cover of a magazine.
Peter Doherty and Katia deVidas at the Award Night Ceremony & After Party of the 19th Zurich Film Festival on October 7, 2023 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Photo by Ferda Demir/Getty Images for ZFF)
The war against the tabloids
P: Tabloids have a reason to exist. They are good for talking about sports and TV programs, not for talking about people’s lives. When they talk about people they perform pantomimes, and they do damage. But I made a big mistake. Since I’m a control freak I tried to put a foot in that world and propose my truth. Well, that’s not possible, you can’t communicate with those people. They have their own agenda: if you’re a TV celebrity or a member of the royal family the tabloids are fabulous, but if you’re an artist or a poet it’s a disaster. So I never took them to court, except for the wiretapping issue…
What’s the biggest lie they’ve told about you?
P: I don’t want to think about it. They wrote such obscene things about me…
Speaking of poets, there is a scene in which a fan compares her to Oscar Wilde…
P: He must have been drunk…
K: Your fans are like brothers and sisters to you.
What do you feel when you watch the film?
P: Honestly, sometimes I’m embarrassed. If I look at it just as a film I find it beautiful, but since there is so much personal stuff in there, all my emotions are there, good and bad… You see the finished film, but I also saw everything, even what wasn’t edited: so many friends, and some of them died… I love all the concert scenes, however. In short, a kaleidoscope of emotions: there is joy and there is sadness.
She speaks candidly about wanting to be famous. But there is a high cost to fulfilling it. A bit like making a deal with the devil.
P: Maybe in 10, 15 years I will be able to analyze all this, for now I’ll let it settle. How did you define it? Deal with the devil… Ok, that’s fine with me. Does this make sense.
Is there a song that you particularly love?
I’m not saying this because they’re on promotion, but in the next Libertines album there is a song, Songs They Never Play on the Radio, which is the slowest, most melancholy and powerful song I’ve ever written. You get to the end and you feel like a child diagnosed with ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ed), a child who had to leave school, had a thousand problems and finally found his way in life. I I can’t listen to it without being overwhelmed by emotionbut maybe it’s me…
Are you able to concentrate on your creativity and detach yourself from current events, from what is happening in the world?
P: These days rI often think about when I was in Tel Aviv. I remember that I felt a bit like in Moscow, there was something that escaped me in society, something extreme, usually I just play my music and connect with those who listen to me, but there was something that didn’t add up, that was crushing me down. Then the police or the army, I don’t know, arrived at the concert venue and without asking anyone anything, they went up to the stage during the concert. A symbolic act of that pressure.
K: I loved Tel Aviv. They have the best hummus in the world…
P: I don’t want to talk about it too much. There’s too much blood around there now.
K: Could it be that the police arrived because in that period you were addicted to heroin and not having any there, you were in withdrawal?
P: No no, I brought some with me.
K: Really?
P: Yes, someone had told me, don’t try to buy stuff in Tel Aviv. But there is another thing that struck me in Israel. They tell you it’s the Jewish state, but there are a lot of Arabs, I think 20 percent of society is Arab. The people selling fruit in the markets were all Arabs. Being there completely confused the idea I had of Israel before visiting it: I thought it was 100% Jewish and instead everything was mixed.
Peter Doherty and Katia deVidas (Photo by Ferda Demir/Getty Images for ZFF)
The percentage is 70-30, but if you also include the occupied territories and Gaza the percentage is 50-50.
P: But aren’t Gaza and the West Bank part of Israel?
No, however there are 600 thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
P: I believe we have our own responsibilities in this. Starting from the British Mandate in Palestine…
Leaving for the tour together
With the release of the album he will resume touring. Does he feel ready to get back on the road?
P: (hesitating) Yes.
You will be on tour together. It seems you are inseparable. Katia, would you say that you saved Pete’s life, as the film somehow concludes?
K: It would be easy to conclude that he owes everything to the woman he later married, but it took everyone’s cooperation to save Pete. Like when they say it takes a village to raise a child. His family, his friends, his manager, we all helped convince him to get clean. There were times when Pete wasn’t receptive at all and it was very frustrating for us, others when we all concentrated on pushing him in the right direction.
P: I didn’t hear anything you said, but it’s probably all true.
Where did you decide to set the limit, what you wanted and didn’t want to film?
K: At first I didn’t want to film the drugs, the addiction, but Pete told me: “You have to film this, it’s incredible”. At first it was recreational drugs, and I didn’t judge, but then we started talking about hard drugs. And I told myself we couldn’t talk about Pete’s life without talking about this. It would have been hypocrisy. So drugs entered the film. We couldn’t not show the hard and raw part of the story, or keep quiet that there were moments when Pete seemed doomed. There is an image that I don’t forget, Pete is on stage and his gaze is lost, he no longer knows where he is. It’s a moment that he explains a lot.
His disillusionment with trying to romanticize the heroine, seeing her as a key to creativity, is evident.
K: There’s a moment where Pete pleads guilty to this in the film.
P: It depends on whether you are a romantic type or not, how you decide to discipline yourself and what your instincts are. But it wasn’t the drugs that kept us together, it was the music, I’ve never been in a band where we were all high, it was always very mixed situations. Carl, for example, never wanted to know about heroin or crack, but he always drank a lot. Carl drew a line, an insurmountable boundary, because he was afraid for himself, he was afraid of ending up badly. His choice was probably better than mine. But I’ve never been good with boundaries.
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