Right, I’ve never done this before so now is my chance. I grab the shoulders of a punter jumping around next to me and say with a slight quiver of trepidation, ‘Lift me up?!’ He looks at me through wild eyes and graciously turns himself into a human launching pad. I place my foot into his cradled hands and with a forceful thrust I’m projected above the chaotic, smashing, cacophony of bodies.
Gravity stubbornly pulls my 6ft 2 inch frame downwards but countless hands keep me above the volatile energy boiling beneath. I had seen other people being tossed like rag dolls to the front of the stage but the experience is surprisingly comfortable; almost like riding on a cloud, albeit more a bolshy cumulo-nimbus than an ethereal cirrus. I stare at the garish lights exploding from the expansive ceiling and shout, ‘Look ma, I’m crowd surfing.’
I’d never crowd surfed before but something made me do it. It could have been that my housemate did it and wanted in on the action. It could have been a desperate desire to do ‘mad stuff’ before I’m old and boring. These probably contributed to my act of impulse but in retrospect I realise it was because I was at a Baby Shambles gig and Pete Doherty, the new wild man of Rock and Roll, had, like some powerful force of nature, passed on his reckless abandon to every soul in the venue.
A drop of blood
Doherty, ex Libertines front man and now anarchist musician for the newly formed Baby Shambles, is a perfect illustration of the paradoxical nature of creativity: beautiful things have a tendency to be born from pain and torment.
Take his latest contribution to a free magazine called ‘Full Moon Empty Sports Bag’. Doherty, a regular contributor to the magazine which encourages young, intelligent writers, painted a figure with his own blood. He signs the image with a quote from Goethe, “any scrap of paper’s good, for signature a drop of blood” - where Mephistopheles proposes the bargain that leads to the sale of Faust’s soul to the devil.
The theme that Doherty suggests is ‘the self destructiveness of fame.’ It couldn’t be more fitting, for Doherty’s rock and roll resume reads like a Hunter S. Thompson-Irvine Welsh car crash.
Eleven days
Recently Doherty has been winning column inches in both the tabloids and broadsheets with an almost unbelievable swathe of savage hedonism. Q magazine chronicled what it titled ’11 days of madness.’
The chain of events begins with pictures of him smoking heroin in a major tabloid. The pictures, sold to the paper by a documentary maker Max Carlish, bring both the police and the paparazzi to his doorstep.
Concurrently, Pete’s relationship with supermodel Kate Moss is under scrutiny. There are whispers of the relationship being over since Moss, a mother, shouldn’t be keeping company with a nefarious drug fiend.
Three nights later a fight breaks out between Max Carlish and Doherty in an East London hotel. Carlish is taken to University College Hospital with a broken nose and black eyes. Allegedly, his cash, credit card and mobile phone have been stolen. Doherty is arrested and tests positive for opiates.
On a positive note Doherty and Moss are apparently back on, however, he is charged with blackmail and robbery. He is reprimanded for yawning in court but granted a $150,000 bail and ordered to observe a 10pm to 7am curfew. Doherty’s label, Rough Trade, fail to come up with the bail money and he is transferred to Pentonville Prison. After two more failed attempts at coming up with the bail cash and six nights in jail, Doherty is finally released into a rehab clinic. He promises to come off the crack, ‘for Kate.’ A few days later the judge allows Doherty to play for a two hour gig. The gig ends in chaos with Doherty punching his guitarist.
11 days so impressive that it makes Courtney Love look like Sandra Bullock. But the river runs deeper than this. Besides assault, his other accolades include burglary, another 6 month jail sentence, selling poetry for drug money and spending time in the world toughest rehab clinic – a Thai monastery where he faced beatings with a bamboo cane.
But let’s not dwell on the negative shall we?
Saviours of British rock
Doherty’s gift for song writing was recognized early on. At the age of 16, he won a poetry competition and was sent by the British Council on a tour of Russia. He achieved top grades at school and was accepted into an English literature course at the University of London. Music however, took precedence. He dropped out and moved into a flat with his Libertines songwriting partner, Carl Barat. This partnership began a band which where hailed as the saviours of British rock. The band went on to produce two critically acclaimed albums and won countless awards.
Expelled from the Libertines for drug and heroine addiction (that old chestnut) Doherty went on to release a single and form the Baby Shambles who have toured erratically in the UK. In December 2004, they failed to take the stage as scheduled at the London Astoria, leading the audience to riot.
Liberty
It’s exciting to have someone with such charisma and dark excessiveness on the music scene. At only 25, who knows what scandal or phenomenal music output he will achieve in the future. But now, as I stand amongst the marauding crowd and watch him leap off the speakers stage (about 5 meters from the ground) I think of a verse from the Richard Lovelace poem, ‘To Althea, From Prison’:
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
iafrica.com | http://entertainment.iafrica.com/features/428716.htm
