Why Doherty Matters

Pete Doherty prowls around his suite at London's K West hotel as if scouting for potential escape routes. But while anxiety may bounce off him like static electricity, he is actually in good spirits today and looks comparatively healthy, the junkie's sallow death mask having given way of late to jowls, baby fat, and blood flow. He is tall and seemingly elastic beneath his porkpie hat, the ability to sit still clearly an elusive one. His bassist. Drew McConnell, reaches up to offer a light, which Doherty stoops to take before crossing the room to boot up a battered laptop. He then picks up an acoustic guitar, rests on the arm of a sofa, and falls into guitarist Mick Whitnall's lap.

"You how what?" he says, unfolding himself from the tangle of limbs. "Something good has happened to us. We are, dare I say it, a professional unit these days. When people get us in a room together now, they actually treat us like musicians. Before, they would treat us as anything but: pigeon fanciers, candles, dry humpers..."

The reason for the change, he continues, is rehab, twice a week, regular as clockwork. It is keeping him off the drugs, specifically the heroin and crack and helping rein in some of his more prosecutable behavior patterns. I'm only just now starting to enjoy making music," he says. I'm only just starting to be allowed to."

... Despite [Pete Doherty] having more column inches written about him than any other British male rock star today, he isn't selling a huge amount of records. In contrast the Kooks, an English indie outfit also in thrall to the Libertines legacy, shifted nearly two million copies of their debut album, Inside, Inside Out, in the U.K. last year. It's very distracting, Nigel Coxon, Babyshambles' British A&R rep laments.

According to Dr. Mike McPhillips, an addiction specialist and medical director of the Causeway Retreat, a rehabilitation center in Essex, England, Doherty's faltering progress is not quite as bad as it looks, but rather entirely typical.

"There is nothing unusual in lapsing and relapsing- sometimes for years,"says McPhillips, who has not treated Doherty. "It's simply part of the process. Anyone who just stops [using] the minute they go into a clinic is an exceptional case. One can only feel compassion for someone in the public eye with these problems, and [Doherty] has essentially become cannon fodder. With Pete, it's always going to be a bumpy ride.

On November 22 Babvshambles begin their most high profile tour to date, a nationwide jaunt to England's biggest arenas (and the largest the band have ever played) in just eight days: their U.K. label Parlophone's objective is to get Doherty in front of his fans as possible, “if we mounted a bigger tour of smaller venues, Coxon explains, it could very probably come off the rails. It's safer this way."

One could argue that it would be even safer for Doherty not to tour at all, given his tenuous grasp on the sobriety he seems to genuinely covet. McPhillips suggests otherwise, though. Clearly, a tour is an incredibly stressful thing to undertake, he says. "But then, it is also stressful for an artist not to live up to his professional obligations. It can be a hard thing for someone to feel their career is spiraling downward."

And so the show goes on...

- Spin, February 2008