Pete Doherty
He almost lost his feet because of his drug addiction
Pete Doherty describes his drug addiction as “a descent into hell”.
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Pete Doherty’s drug addiction almost cost him both feet, he admits in an interview. “It was a hell of a ride,” says the rocker.
Rock musician Pete Doherty (43) almost lost both of his feet because of his drug addiction. The former frontman of the bands The Libertines and Babyshambles is now telling this in an interview with the British “Mirror”. “I really pushed my limits,” said the musician. In some moments it was “very close”. “I almost lost my feet and other terrible things,” admits the 43-year-old.
The drug injections were to blame. “That’s what happens when you run out of veins.” It was a “descent from hell”. According to Pete Doherty, he has been clean for more than two years. There was “no moment of enlightenment”. Nevertheless, in November 2019 he decided to stop using drugs. “It was tough,” says Doherty. “It’s been so many years of trying rehab and trying different ideas” – from a Thai monastery to clinics.
A song helped him get back on the right track
At the beginning of 2020, the musician went through a particularly difficult time, in which he almost suffered a relapse. “I felt really shitty,” he describes his situation at the time. At the time, the French musician Frédéric Lo (57) played the song “Inutile et hors d’usage” to him, which means “useless and discarded” in German. Doherty had become “really emotional”. He felt like he had been “run over by a bus”. Lo freed him from the darkness that might otherwise have swallowed him up again. In mid-March 2022, the two released the joint album “The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime”.
Getting off drugs is still a bit difficult for Doherty, but the obsession wears off and it gets easier. The rock musician now lives in Normandy with his wife Katia de Vidas, who plays keyboards in his band The Puta Madres. “It’s a quiet, simple life,” says the 43-year-old. His everyday life consists, among other things, of walking his dogs, buying the local newspaper and drinking coffee.
Doherty and de Vidas have been playing together in the band The Puta Madres since 2016. It is the rocker’s third musical project after The Libertines and Babyshambles. The wedding of the two musicians followed at the end of September 2021, before they had been in a relationship for several years.