Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. The last post for The Libertines? Fri, Aug 20, , More from The Irish Times Music. TV, Radio, Web. Home energy upgrades are now more important than ever. Sign In. You're sat in a cell for 23 hours. Supposedly there's education and facilities, but in reality there's overcrowding and understaffing.
You're sat in a cell and it's as boring as fuck. But alliances were forged, new worlds opened up, I did a lot of writing. There's a lot of unhappiness in prison, and I had some really unhappy moments. But there were people who reached out to me and helped me, and hopefully I helped a few people as well, in simple ways, like friendship. I think I'll be really unlucky if I go back to prison, or stupid, but there are a lot of people who are in and out, in and out.
Prison can make people hopeless, make them lose any sense of self value. Many of your songs refer to a notion of 'Englishness'. What does 'Englishness' mean to you? It's always a contradiction. I don't feel myself to be representative of a general feeling of Englishness. I'm interested in William Blake, but there are less spiritual, more practical people like Galton and Simpson, and Joe Orton, who were interested in the fineries of everyday dialogue and puns.
In the same way that I immersed myself in The Smiths, I did the same with a lot of aspects of English culture. I was obsessed with certain writers, certain styles of film. Those kitchen sink films, like Billy Liar, hit me right in the heart.
I suppose I did live inside those films for want of a better place to be. The films I watched were about a pride, a dignity and a respect for people who you feel you belong with - a community and a mutual respect. The cover of the album Up The Bracket has lines of riot police, and 'Time for Heroes' talks about 'the stylish kids in the riot' and 'truncheons and shields'. Where did those ideas come from? I wrote 'Time for Heroes' after May Day in At the time it was one of the most exciting days of my life.
Everyone said, 'Oh, it was rubbish, we got penned in at Oxford Circus,' but we didn't. Coldplay's Chris Martin is widely ridiculed and will never be seen as 'cool' in the way Doherty is by such tastemakers as the NME , but he has written far superior songs.
Just listen to Trouble and The Scientist. And one of his most celebrated songs, the Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now , is little more than punk-lite navel gazing. So too is The Saga , another so-called classic from his former band that his defenders hold up as holding the key to his tortured mind. Yeah right.
Over the course of the past year, he has managed to secure far more coverage than the Arctic Monkeys, for instance. Too much of Doherty's music is the sound of a band riffing demos around in the studio without taking them anywhere near consummation. There's very little endearing about his shambolic, scatter-gun approach to music.
Get ahead of the day with the morning headlines at 7. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. Sadly, some who should know better confuse sloppy songwriting and erratic live performances for profundity. Hence, we get such cringeworthy moments as the obsequious BBC Newsnight 'special' on him, and that pathetic Jonathan Ross interview where he appeared wearing Ziggy-era-Bowie facepaint.
What next, the Melvyn Bragg treatment? Whatever about the impressionable kids worshipping the ground he walks on, it's the fawning of ageing rock hacks that really grates. When I was 16, 17, I started drifting away from everything else and picking up a guitar, and it was like, 'What are you doing? You can't sing and you can't play a guitar,' right up to the day we got signed by Rough Trade.
And then it was like, 'Go on play us a song,' whereas before it was, 'Shut up, fucking racket. He sings about romance and travelling blind, and London parks and old guitars, whisky and rum, walks and raves, and knights and knaves. I don't know whether he's quoting or has just made it up, but it's a classic Doherty line. He's sitting on his bike, revving up for real, and telling me that Carl Barat was part of his dream. I'm desperately trying to catch his attention.
I ask him how Kate is. Moss is currently in rehab, having been filmed taking cocaine by one of his friends, who then sold it to the tabloids. There were even rumours that Doherty himself might have been in on the deal.
Certainly, in the past, he has sold pictures and stories of himself for drug money. I shouldn't say really. She wants me to go to this place in Arizona straight after her and do it. Does he worry for her more than he worries for himself? She says she just wants to be with me. She says she doesn't know why I love her, I don't know why she loves me, but that's just the way it is. Yeah, but no, but yeah How long has she been away? It's the only time I'll have fucking voluntarily gone into rehab.
I've got a little K tattoo on my arse, she's just got a little P there. And it doesn't stand for Pirelli. He tells me a story about Kate apropos of nothing. Is it true that he and Moss are hoping to have children together? Two, I say, baffled - I knew that he had one. He repeats that he has two children, and that he sees one of them.
My sister sees him all the time, so there's affection as a family for him. I don't really want to go into that because it's not fair on the kids or the mother. It's enough for me to say I love them and would do anything for them. Could he imagine a drug-free life? I've done it. Sporadically, always, for the last couple of years. When I hit it I hit it hard, but I'm not like this drugs monster that people make me out to be. I ask him if I can ask him some specific drug questions for a magazine my partner edits for an organisation called Mainliners.
His face lights up. If I mainline in a conversation about Mainliners, you're not to put it in. Why not stick to fags for the interview, I say. He nods, and just then he seems to be hit by tides of self-pity and self-loathing. What's the worst situation he's woken up in after a heavy night? Under a taxi with no clothes on, and I ended up knocking a cyclist out and nicking his bike. Course it is. Perhaps he's incapable of doing so. I think some people's lives would be ruined with drugs and some would be dramatically improved with drugs.
Anything that's going to move them from the fucking middling state they're in, whether it's a cup of coffee or a snowball up your jacksy, I don't know.
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