Lhe relationship between Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, the singers and guitarists of the English post-punk band The Libertines, is so intense that it can quickly become explosive. Their ex-manager Alan McGee could never forget the stay that the two musicians spent in 2003 in his cottage in Wales to work on their second album. A bucolic place, perfect for writing songs. “I went to bed, leaving them together listening to Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ on the stereo, finishing a bottle of whisky,” Alan wrote in his wacky autobiography, Creation Stories.
“The next morning at 9:45 a.m. I was sitting in the living room on the phone with my desk when Carl came in. For five seconds, I thought he was wearing a Halloween mask to prank me. And then, suddenly, I realized that it was not a mask, but his face! When we meet McGee nearly fifteen years later in London and remind him of this episode, he shudders with dread. He can’t forget the guitarist’s face, covered in dried blood, and above all, in horror, one of his eyes is hanging out of his socket.
Two bodyguards
What happened ? The day before, Pete and Carl argued over a girl. They said horrible things to each other: after years of friendship, each knows exactly what words to hurt the other with. Before going back to his bedroom to go to bed, Carl banged his head against the marble sink, twenty or thirty times. “I just didn’t want to be in my body anymore,” he told the newspaper. The Independent. He was then 25 years old.
Alan decides to go to the emergency room with Carl, leaving Pete at home. The latter is released from prison, it is better to remain discreet about his presence in the house that evening. But, at the hospital, nobody believes that Barât could have injured himself and the doctors try to make him admit that it was Alan who hit him! In any case, that day, the rocker really almost lost his eye. So, to avoid further drama when they finally hit the studio a few weeks later, Alan hired two huge bodyguards to keep them from killing each other. “Whenever an argument broke out, each of the bodyguards would grab their Libertine and carry it across the room. Pete’s and Carl’s feet were bouncing in the air, trying to hit each other,” he recalled.
READ ALSOVIDEO. Carl Barat & The Jackals
Glamor and kleptomania
Pete Doherty is famous for his delays, his overdoses, his rehabs, his stays in prison, his destructive love affairs with androgynous models (he counts among his illustrious conquests Kate Moss and Irina Lazareanu). However, few people know about this other vice that the rocker has long hidden behind a thick cloud of crack: kleptomania. Alan McGee was the first to notice this. “At my house, Pete was walking around the living room and putting my rare books in his bag while Carl followed him slowly, taking them out of his bag and putting them back on the shelves,” he says.
A merciful witness confirms: “It’s fetishism of memories…” “Rather a disease! reacts McGee. “One day we were together in a taxi. Suddenly he had the car stopped, said, “Wait for me a moment”, he went into a nursery, took a huge cactus, took it away without paying, put it between us and asked the driver to restart. I was stunned, I didn’t know what to say,” he recalls. “It wasn’t even a pretty plant: it was a cactus! he is still surprised.
In September 2003, his little sin completely derailed him. Pete is squarely condemned for having robbed the apartment of Carl Barât in London. At 24, he had just been fired from the Libertines, who could no longer bear the excessive consumption of crack and heroin by their singer. On July 25, while the group was on tour in Japan – without him – he forced the guitarist’s door and took away a laptop, a collectible guitar, a CD player, a VCR, a harmonica and some books. He gets six months in prison. He will serve two, his lawyer having convinced the judges to send him to rehab. Not resentful, Carl will wait for him at the exit. In front of the gate of his jail, they fell into each other’s arms and were reconciled.
Back and forth in rehab
“Pete is totally klepto when he’s on heroin,” says Alan McGee. The problem is that it is rarely clean. Alan even had to have him constantly watched to know where he was. Thus, on the eve of their departure on tour in March 2004, he extirpates Pete from a crack den by rolling him in a carpet. Dressed in a sock and without pants, the young man could no longer walk. The whole tour will go like this. Every night, Alan wonders if Pete will be able to play. In the end, Pete is so skinny and on drugs… It’s a matter of life and death, he has to be detoxified. “I got him from a bed with a girl from another crack den. He burned a whole lot of heroin, sucked it up, and spat it out, right in my face. For fifteen minutes I was unable to move. And then I came down to earth, and we took him straight to the Priory, a rehab facility,” McGee told Mirror. There, Pete lasts a week before Alan finds him again in a hotel smoking crack. Back at the Priory, he escapes again eight days later… It’s endless.
In 2004, Carl and Pete moved to the Hotel Albion, rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in Paris, to write songs (both are fascinated by the mythology of Albion, the old name of England ). Alan recalls: “Carl came to see me, and he looked very anxious. He himself was on the verge of serious drug addiction and he was afraid of falling over to the other side from hanging out with Pete in Paris. So I offered to be their chaperone. » Pete doesn’t seem particularly delighted with his new one-night stand… The night will end all the same in a memorable party, at Pete’s girlfriends, a band of top models. “There was a tray going around with absolutely every drug possible,” McGee recalled. The next day, a silent atmosphere in the Eurostar which takes them back to London… “When we entered the tunnel, I noticed a funny smell. I turned around and saw Pete, with his crack pipe lit. I said to myself that it was not won… ”
Several corpses
Pete ends up settling in Paris. He rents an apartment in Pigalle, above the tobacconist at the corner of Le Mansart, shared with two dancers. He sells his shoes, his guitars, and whatever his fans are willing to buy him, to be able to pay for his doses of heroin. Its interior is disgusting. When he is not at Le Bergerac bar (where he will end up giving a concert to pay his bill), he draws on the walls with his blood. In 2005, Doherty financed his drugs by organizing “guerrilla concerts” in apartments. The principle: post the address and time of the meeting on a forum, play the songs, take the money and the drugs. Even if it was not the goal, this closeness helped to weld his community of fans… But it makes Carl hysterical. To make these “guerrilla concerts” at home impossible, Alan puts Pete in a tiny, filthy apartment, with poetry written in blood on the walls and dirty syringes lying on the floor. “There was only room for a bed, and almost nothing else. And yet, he managed to get up to fifty people inside. By doing two concerts a night, he earned 1,000 pounds sterling, and spent it all on crack, ”despairs Alan.
If Pete still miraculously makes it out alive, there are several corpses in his wake. In December 2006, Mark Blanco, 30, a Cambridge philosophy student, partied with Doherty, only to be found dying on the sidewalk. According to investigators, he was carried and then thrown from the balcony on the first floor, after arguing with the singer. When Pete Doherty and his friends leave the crime scene and pass him twelve minutes later, they watch him, then run away. Mark Blanco died the next day in hospital. Three years later, in January 2010, it was Robin Whitehead, the eldest daughter of heiress Dido Goldsmith and filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who died aged 27 of an overdose in an east London apartment, while that she was filming Doherty for a documentary.
A new life in Étretat
“One of the greatest challenges of my life was managing the Libertines,” admits Alan, who has seen others. “Pete has it all. The songs, the lyrics, the attitude. He is so sharp, fast. It could be monumental. But he’s the most nihilistic man I’ve ever met. The Libertines did not survive the escapades of rock’s most terrible offspring. Although they are still officially together and toured in 2019, they remained separated between 2004 and 2014 (apart from a brief reunion in 2010), and have not released an album since 2015.
But never bury Peter Doherty! It always pops up where you least expect it! The cantor of the “perfidious Albion”, actor alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in Confession of a child of the century, lives today in Étretat, where he composed with Frédéric Lo (Daniel Darc, Alex Beaupain…) an album nourished by the adventures of Arsène Lupin, the character of Maurice Leblanc, a dandy known for his crimes and his ability to extract from the most improbable situations…. Remind you of someone?
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