My Boy...There's A Price To Pay
Pete talks to the Sunday Mirror:
MY DRUGS HELL BY TRAGIC LIBERTINES STAR
Jul 4 2004
Exclusive By Danielle Lawler
HE is only 24 and should have the world of rock and roll at his feet. Until last week Pete Doherty was lead singer and guitarist in the Libertines, the group once tipped to eclipse Oasis and make millions. Yet instead of holding court in a five-star hotel suite, the man hailed as Britain's brightest musical talent for years is sleeping on the couch in a friend's down-at-heel flat sipping tea from a chipped cup. Doherty can't - or won't - give up a crippling addiction to heroin and crack cocaine that is costing him up to £1,000 a day...
His mother Jacqueline resorted to emotional blackmail to try to make him stop. She refused to have treatment after finding a lump in her breast unless he booked into Thailand's Thamkrabok Monastery - last refuge of drug addicts that other clinics cannot help...Many now fear he is heading down the same road to oblivion as Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain who committed suicide after battling chronic heroin addiction...
A loose page falls from a leather-bound diary he is flicking through as he chain-smokes his way through a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He picks it up and starts reading a poem he's written:
I feel death - dull misty death - it is pestering me like a well-meaning friend,
Death is blinding me, with slow-burning horror flame flickers.
I feel death - thrashing, certain death - banging me about a reet gud clobbering. Waves then...
I feel death, mournful dreary death, clogging up myself.'
Doherty believes that it is his inner demons, rather than drugs, that could kill him. "There are three things I know a bit about in my life and that's QPR, my guitar and drugs," he says. "I know QPR are the best football team in the world, my guitar is the most beautiful thing I own and that I don't take enough drugs to kill me. It isn't drugs I need to get rid of, it's the demons that fill my head. Once I have come to terms with my demons, maybe I'll be able to get clean."
It was after a second and failed spell at the exclusive Priory Clinic that his mother begged her son to go to the Thamkrabok Monastery. "She just turned up on the doorstep one day and was really distressed and worried about me," says Doherty. "She'd found a lump in her breast but refused to have a scan unless I agreed to go into rehab. I think that was unfair to put so much pressure on me, but I went anyway to prove I would do it for her. I went for three days without drugs and it was hell. But she still wasn't satisfied. I'd gone to Thailand like she asked. I couldn't have done much more"...
Doherty had a breakdown, writing in a statement before he fled: "Thamkrabok Monastery have done everything they could to help me, but I am not strong enough for this treatment." He says it was three days of hell. "I'd only come out of the Priory a couple of days earlier so I'd been through all the shakes, vomiting and sleepiness nights with cold turkey. Foolishly I didn't do any research about Thailand before I went, and it was hardcore."
"On the third day I left and went to Bangkok. I booked into a hotel where they offered room service of heroin with my bacon and eggs. I told them I had no money but they said I could have it on tab. I notched up a £280 bill in three days. If I'd done the same amount of brown in England it would have cost me thousands"...
Doherty adds: "The first time I had heroin I was 21, walking round the streets of Whitechapel on a Sunday, smoking brown my dealer gave me and thinking I was cool. I've no idea how much I took that first time or how much it cost. He gave it to me for free. "As it got into my bloodstream I noticed it exaggerated parts of me that were already there... solitude and loneliness. "Then I started getting all these creative thoughts for the first album. So I kept taking it. I didn't get hooked straight away - it was a gradual thing. It was six months to a year later before I started taking it every day. "Drugs have never been the driving wheel - they are just part of creating music. I just want to play so I take it to enhance my creativity. A lot of my lyrics are heroin related - but they're never a celebration of it."
Just before Christmas 2001 they were signed by record label Rough Trade. "We could never afford coke - that was too expensive - it was always heroin," says Doherty. "Someone laid out a line of coke on the table for me and Carl to congratulate us. It was our first proper line...
He was sacked for the first time in July last year. While the band were abroad he even took some of Carl's property to feed his addiction. Doherty was welcomed back - but his continuing addiction finally forced the band to part with him again last week after his latest battle to beat his addiction failed.
"I tried to calm down when they told me with a smoke," he says. "But as I was cooking up I looked at the brown and screwed it up. There was not a drug in the world that could make me feel better. It made me feel dirty and I realised, 'This is why I can't play'. I've got to start getting clean straight away. But I can't do it in the Priory or places like that. I have to do it in the environment I live in because I am always going to be surrounded by drugs while I'm making music. I've just got to find the inner strength to control it"...
Doherty has had a series of relationships with a leggy American model known only as Jack and has a two-year-old son Estile with Lisa Moorish, who has a baby daughter Molly by Liam Gallagher. His latest love was a girl called Irene. Once he dreamt of running away to Paris with her. "Irene was my girlfriend but it's over," he sighs. "I had to choose between her or drugs. I suppose I chose drugs."
MY DRUGS HELL BY TRAGIC LIBERTINES STAR
Jul 4 2004
Exclusive By Danielle Lawler
HE is only 24 and should have the world of rock and roll at his feet. Until last week Pete Doherty was lead singer and guitarist in the Libertines, the group once tipped to eclipse Oasis and make millions. Yet instead of holding court in a five-star hotel suite, the man hailed as Britain's brightest musical talent for years is sleeping on the couch in a friend's down-at-heel flat sipping tea from a chipped cup. Doherty can't - or won't - give up a crippling addiction to heroin and crack cocaine that is costing him up to £1,000 a day...
His mother Jacqueline resorted to emotional blackmail to try to make him stop. She refused to have treatment after finding a lump in her breast unless he booked into Thailand's Thamkrabok Monastery - last refuge of drug addicts that other clinics cannot help...Many now fear he is heading down the same road to oblivion as Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain who committed suicide after battling chronic heroin addiction...
A loose page falls from a leather-bound diary he is flicking through as he chain-smokes his way through a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He picks it up and starts reading a poem he's written:
I feel death - dull misty death - it is pestering me like a well-meaning friend,
Death is blinding me, with slow-burning horror flame flickers.
I feel death - thrashing, certain death - banging me about a reet gud clobbering. Waves then...
I feel death, mournful dreary death, clogging up myself.'
Doherty believes that it is his inner demons, rather than drugs, that could kill him. "There are three things I know a bit about in my life and that's QPR, my guitar and drugs," he says. "I know QPR are the best football team in the world, my guitar is the most beautiful thing I own and that I don't take enough drugs to kill me. It isn't drugs I need to get rid of, it's the demons that fill my head. Once I have come to terms with my demons, maybe I'll be able to get clean."
It was after a second and failed spell at the exclusive Priory Clinic that his mother begged her son to go to the Thamkrabok Monastery. "She just turned up on the doorstep one day and was really distressed and worried about me," says Doherty. "She'd found a lump in her breast but refused to have a scan unless I agreed to go into rehab. I think that was unfair to put so much pressure on me, but I went anyway to prove I would do it for her. I went for three days without drugs and it was hell. But she still wasn't satisfied. I'd gone to Thailand like she asked. I couldn't have done much more"...
Doherty had a breakdown, writing in a statement before he fled: "Thamkrabok Monastery have done everything they could to help me, but I am not strong enough for this treatment." He says it was three days of hell. "I'd only come out of the Priory a couple of days earlier so I'd been through all the shakes, vomiting and sleepiness nights with cold turkey. Foolishly I didn't do any research about Thailand before I went, and it was hardcore."
"On the third day I left and went to Bangkok. I booked into a hotel where they offered room service of heroin with my bacon and eggs. I told them I had no money but they said I could have it on tab. I notched up a £280 bill in three days. If I'd done the same amount of brown in England it would have cost me thousands"...
Doherty adds: "The first time I had heroin I was 21, walking round the streets of Whitechapel on a Sunday, smoking brown my dealer gave me and thinking I was cool. I've no idea how much I took that first time or how much it cost. He gave it to me for free. "As it got into my bloodstream I noticed it exaggerated parts of me that were already there... solitude and loneliness. "Then I started getting all these creative thoughts for the first album. So I kept taking it. I didn't get hooked straight away - it was a gradual thing. It was six months to a year later before I started taking it every day. "Drugs have never been the driving wheel - they are just part of creating music. I just want to play so I take it to enhance my creativity. A lot of my lyrics are heroin related - but they're never a celebration of it."
Just before Christmas 2001 they were signed by record label Rough Trade. "We could never afford coke - that was too expensive - it was always heroin," says Doherty. "Someone laid out a line of coke on the table for me and Carl to congratulate us. It was our first proper line...
He was sacked for the first time in July last year. While the band were abroad he even took some of Carl's property to feed his addiction. Doherty was welcomed back - but his continuing addiction finally forced the band to part with him again last week after his latest battle to beat his addiction failed.
"I tried to calm down when they told me with a smoke," he says. "But as I was cooking up I looked at the brown and screwed it up. There was not a drug in the world that could make me feel better. It made me feel dirty and I realised, 'This is why I can't play'. I've got to start getting clean straight away. But I can't do it in the Priory or places like that. I have to do it in the environment I live in because I am always going to be surrounded by drugs while I'm making music. I've just got to find the inner strength to control it"...
Doherty has had a series of relationships with a leggy American model known only as Jack and has a two-year-old son Estile with Lisa Moorish, who has a baby daughter Molly by Liam Gallagher. His latest love was a girl called Irene. Once he dreamt of running away to Paris with her. "Irene was my girlfriend but it's over," he sighs. "I had to choose between her or drugs. I suppose I chose drugs."
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