Movistar has just posted an interesting and above all, Emotional documentary about British musician Pete (now Peter) Doherty (Hexham, Northumberland, 1979), directed by his wife, Katia de Vidas. It is not a canonical documentary about the leader of the Libertines and the Babyshambles nor does it pretend to be: it is just (and it seems like a lot to me) a personal approach from someone who has been loving him (and putting up with him) for many years in the best and, frequently, at worst. We are facing a love story with a happy ending, of course, although it may not seem like it on the surface. Peter Doherty. Stranger in my own skin, made mostly of domestic recordings in which neither the camerawoman nor the immortalized person hide nothing of the lamentable states to which this could reach with his propensity for alcohol and drugs. What appears on the screen is, frankly, a waste, but also a sensitive and cultured guy who, both in a group and alone, has given us some of the best pages in the history of contemporary pop (more rocker leading the Libertines with his compadre Carl Baratmore lyrical, melancholic and even folkie in his solo recordings). We are not, therefore, facing a typical biography (anyone looking for something similar can turn to the book Peter Doherty. A promising kid, co-written with Simon Spence), but rather an intimate portrait that shamelessly shows the evolution of the disastrous boy who dated Kate Moss and got involved in everything until he became the happy, chubby guy he is now (thanks, in part, to his the filmmaker’s girlfriend, I sense), when he admits that it has been very good for him to change heroin for toast with melted goat cheese.
Singer Peter Doherty / EP
Like others before him, Pete Doherty was the typical self-destructive idol loaded with talent who kept tripping himself up. The son of a military man (from whom he distanced himself until they met at Pete and Katia’s wedding in France and the man ended up singing a song with the Libertines), he grew up in different places that all seemed the same to him (that’s what barracks have) . The main fun when Dad was posted to Belfast was looking under the car in case the IRA had planted a bomb on them. Arriving in London and starting to fool around (or experiencing freedom, if you prefer) was quite something. He went to university (briefly), met Carl Barat, the Libertines were born and, as they say in these cases, the rest is history: expulsion from the group for drug issues and for robbing Carl’s house, creation of the Babyshambles, solo albums, frequent unpleasant encounters with the police, repeated visits to the rehab shift…
Pete Doherty became tabloid fodder during his unmarked days. People were more interested in his or her blunders. his carousing with Kate Moss than his creative talent. In addition to being a drug addict, he gained a reputation as a fool, as he was always caught and sent to the trullo or rehabilitation center. He had recorded a splendid first album with The Libertines, Up the bracket (2002), he had gotten involved a bit with the Babyshambles, but he shined (without any irony) with his first solo album, Grace/Wastelands (2009): None of that seemed to affect the image of the drunken drug addict. and nonsense that the British popular press had given him, which didn’t give a damn what hell the boy might be going through: as the famous saying of Anglo-Saxon sensationalist journalism goes, If it bleeds it leads (Si hay sangre, on the cover).
History of improvement
All that horrible time, fortunately, is behind us and our man has not only survived himself, but he looks healthy as an apple. A little fat, okay, he no longer fits the prototype of the beau tenebreux, What the French say. But he is alive and retains his talent, as can be seen by listening to recent albums like Pete Doherty & The Puta Madres (2019, their drummer was Spanish) or The fantasy life of poetry and crime (2022, made jointly with French musician Frederic Lo). Or even more recent, like All quiet on the Eastern esplanade (approximate translation: No news on the eastern esplanade), his third release with the Libertines, which has helped me confirm the Doherty and Barat group like the last one (along with Pulp) that has touched my soul from the British Isles. Pete and Carl have divided the work very effectively, taking charge of the first of the, let’s say, slow songs and the second of the, let’s say, fast ones, managing to create a gem of timeless pop rock that, in this era of rappers and reggaeton addicts , may sound downright old-fashioned to some.
Singer Pete Doherty, leader of the band Libertines / EFE
Peter Doherty’s is a peculiar story of overcoming. She could have burst before she was thirty and no one would have been in the least surprised. Saved by love and cheese? Could be. And also for luck and lucidity. Stranger in my own skin It would be a painful film to watch if we didn’t know that everything it tells us has happily been left behind. And let’s see if now, seeing him sober, with a mustache and a bit of bushels, the British press please start taking Mr Doherty a little seriously.
