Thursday, November 04, 2004

Like A Rolling Stone

A fine feature is now up on Rollingstone.com:



The band has been touring without Doherty, pending his ability to clean up. The same week as the Philly show, Doherty graced the cover of NME, Britain's weekly music magazine. He has been touring the U.K. with his other band, Babyshambles. On the cover, he was shirtless and slit-eyed and covered in sweat, holding a cigarette lighter in one hand, a microphone in the other and appearing entirely wasted. "To be honest," Bar?t tells me, "the hardest thing in the world is to tell someone you love you don't want to be around them -- to tell someone you love very dearly to fuck off. That's a trial of the soul"...

"Yes, I did come out of a drug problem well before Pete got into his," Barat says. "But I stood by him the entire way. Now, he's utterly cocooned in a world I wouldn't want to have to trudge through. I doubt I could even meet him without all of his harpies around. You know what harpies are? Nasty little winged beasts. People who'll take you straight to hell"...

Doherty, sitting for an interview in the basement office of 1234 Records, the East London label that released the first Babyshambles single, rebuts the band's charges. "Of course, the official reason I'm out of the band right now is because of drugs," he says. "But part of the reason I've been made unwelcome by Carl is that I've been writing songs with other people, and doing Babyshambles with as much, if not more, passion than I was doing the Libertines. The Libertines has just become a big blow-up doll. If it's not me and Carl together, then it's not the Libertines. It's just a big con."