On being sung to by Peter Doherty
Peter Doherty has apparently made a comeback. He’s got a new album and he was on the front page of the Observer magazine, emerging from red velvet curtains. It brought back the time I sat on his sofa and he sang to me!
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve messed with rock stars before. Wynder K Frogg (Google him if you don’t believe me) once used my flat mate’s bed to satisfy a groupie. Wynder’s real name is Mick Weaver and these days he’s a respected session musician but when he came back to mine it was the mid-sixties, which explains the name. Incidentally, my flat mate Jim arrived home midway through and Mr Frogg looked up to say I’d said it would be all right.
And I saw Bruce Springsteen’s first London gig in the days I wrote about music as well as sport. But it was all a long time ago so you can imagine being serenaded by someone about to become almost as notorious as Mick Jagger in the ’60s was more than a little surprising.
The connection came about through a friend of mine, the executive producer of a TV documentary about Adolf Hitler’s British relatives which turned into our book ‘The Last of the Hitlers’. My friend knew a man called Paul Roundhill through his connections with magazines and I’d commissioned a book from Paul Ro (as he likes to be known these days) but years had passed – and presumably many pipes had been smoked by others – and I’d forgotten all about it until my friend asked me if I’d heard of Peter Doherty.
This was before he was a regular in the tabloids (and the Guardian) but of course I’d heard of him. I’d seen the Libertines on TV and while it was all very derivative they had charisma. Would it, my friend asked, be worth thinking about publishing a book of Doherty’s poetry? He gave me the urls for two websites.
A quick ten minutes on the web confirmed it would be, and with the Libertines having cult status even someone who had left that sort of world behind thirty years before could see the potential. I also checked with my distribution company who have their fingers closer to that sort of pulse than I do and they got quite excited.
And so, briefly, I had a fascinating, frequently funny, and extremely frustrating, contact with the world of Peter Doherty.
We had to set up a meeting. ‘How about the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall,’ I suggested, reasoning that this would take Doherty out of his usual territory and put him firmly in mine. The thought of Doherty and the IoD coming together was also a laugh, although I am now certain it wouldn’t have bothered him at all and he would probably have played a role perfect for the place.
I was at the IoD but nobody else was. I received a phone call from my TV producer friend. He was at Paul Ro’s flat in the East End and could I meet them at Doherty’s flat close to the Royal Mail Sorting Office in Mount Pleasant.
My first thought was to go home; knock it on the head there and then. It would have saved some expense and an awful lot of messing about. But if I had I wouldn’t have had Peter Doherty singing to me one-to-one as we sat on a sofa in his flat, him smoking heroin and me wondering if I ought to have a can of beer because I was driving later.
That, though, was the second meeting. For the first meeting Doherty was still in bed – presumably with the tall, blonde Kimberleena whose poetry I said I would consider and took home with me. Well, it might have helped me sort out a deal with Doherty and it reminded me of stuff I used to write in the early 1960s.
The flat was from that time as well, depressingly familiar ’60s bohemian. I felt instantly at home. Two sofas, both old, a large TV, a couple of laptops, a few CDs and the word ‘Babyshambles’ written large in blue and pink on one wall.
Pete made an entrance eventually, dressed in what looked like a woman’s pale blue seersucker dressing gown. He spent most of the time looking out the window although he was perfectly polite, if a little vague, when introduced to me. I did wonder when a balding 60-year-old in a suit last sat on his sofa,
He quickly disappeared and I was left explaining to the ‘literary agent’ – the short, stick-thin always-on-edge Paul Roundhill – that I needed the ‘journals’ of Pete’s writing I had been promised. ‘I’m getting them together,’ explained Paul Ro. ‘But he’ll fill one up and then sell it in the pub for a few pounds so as to buy some drugs. His friends then go and buy them back.’
I knew Paul Ro was involved in a magazine called Full Moon Empty Sports Bag for which Doherty had written but that, my putative book and a few magazine articles spread over many years were the extent of his qualifications to be Doherty’s literary agent.
I left, having extracted the promise that these books would be waiting for me when we next met. I could take them away and see, if indeed, there was a book. I had already decided there would be especially when Paul Ro showed me nude photos of Pete we could put on the cover.
Then a series of texts arrived from Paul Ro, the sort of texts you don’t get from other literary agents. Most were sent around 3 a.m. and alternated requests for money – ‘I nd to b online and I’m gng to b thrwn out of my flt.” – with odd flights of fancy – ‘Am I bng frozen out of ths deal’.
During meeting number two, my TV producer friend and I were stood in Doherty’s front room – once sat on one of the sofas it was difficult to get up and the other was covered in stuff – looking at a large poster of Tony Hancock which was stuck to a wall. I’d been told Doherty was a fan and it happens I am as well; indeed years ago I was told I looked like him. I couldn’t make up my mind whether to be flattered or not.
We were talking about the TV episode The Bedsitter in which Hancock is lying on the bed reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy with the aid of a dictionary – ‘why can’t he write English like everybody else’ – when Doherty came into the room and said: ‘I’ve got that on DVD’. So we sat watching the episode on his laptop until Hancock dispenses with Bertrand Russell and picks up a trashy paperback.
‘I’ve written a song about that,’ said Doherty, finding it on the laptop. A couple of songs later and he was up to fetch a guitar plus a small, crumbled piece of tin foil, containing a pebble sized lump of a brownish powdery substance, and a straw.
In between playing two new songs he inhaled what I assumed was ‘brown’ or heroin. My only previous experience of heroin was when it was white and powdery but times move on. It could have been crack cocaine – again cocaine used to be white and powdery – but it didn’t seem to be making him hyper. Quite the reverse.
It’s disconcerting sitting a foot away from someone singing to you. He quickly became absorbed in each song, swaying from side to side, and jiggling about. I think he is a major talent, remarkably charming and I suspect like most people who come into contact with him I felt protective. ‘Give up the drugs, Pete,’ I was thinking, although it did seem to me that he wasn’t as damaged as some of the people I knew in the 1960s.
I struggled for something so say. ‘That’s amazing. It’s like the troubadour tradition, going back years,’ was all I could come out with. ‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘But I’m not giving up rock and roll.’
By this time ‘literary agent’ Paul Ro had entered the room and decided to check my credentials. ‘Have you heard the Libertines?’ he asked. ‘I saw them once on the Jools Holland’s show,’ I replied. ‘I obviously know about them but my tastes are stuck in in the sixties and seventies. I saw Arthur Lee and Love last night.’
‘Did they play this?’ said Doherty, picking up his guitar and playing Between Clark and Hilldale. I couldn’t remember but I knew the song and said I enjoyed it when it first came out. ‘Were you into them first time round,’ he asked. ‘That must have been amazing.’
Credibility restored, we started talking about the book. Doherty and Ro had gathered some of the notebooks together.
I flicked through them before putting them in my bag. ‘This one’s got original lyrics in it,’ said Pete.
‘I can’t use those, they will be copyrighted to the Libertines,’ I said.
‘Yes you can,’ he replied. ‘They’ve thrown me out and they’re mine so I can use them however I want.’
At that time the world thought Doherty was going to rejoin the Libertines but I didn’t realise I had a scoop – Doherty splits with Carl ‘official’.
Let’s talk about the book I suggested. ‘I’m a small publisher and I don’t give advances.’
‘You said it would be quarter of a million,’ Pete said. turning to his ‘literary agent.’ Paul Ro twitched. Whether this was a normal twitch or Doherty had touched a nerve was difficult to tell. ‘That’ll come from the royalties,’ said Paul Ro.
Doherty was off again and I was left with the journals and Paul. And, not for the first time, he began to discuss things we’d already agreed. How I’d have to pay him more or he wasn’t going to facilitate any deal and on and on.
While suffering all sorts of frustration with Pete Doherty might be necessary I didn’t need to suffer anything any more with Paul Ro. I knocked on Pete’s bedroom door and told him I was off. ‘Everything, OK, man?’ he asked. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said.
After more abusive texts and phone calls from Paul Ro, intermingling threats with wheedling – ‘Jst £100… I nd to be online.’ – it was time to contact Pete again. I had his email address but no phone number so I sent him a message telling him working with Paul Ro was impossible because reinventing the wheel at every meeting was causing too much grief.
To my astonishment I got a phone call, not from Pete but from someone connected with Babyshambles. ‘Deal with me from know on,’ I was told. ‘I’ll collect the journals and get them to you.’
He sounded brisk and efficient. He wasn’t. After many phone calls I gave up on the idea.
Later it was announced that Orion had done a deal to publish the notebooks. The book came out, but it didn’t have a naked photo of Doherty on the cover.