It was never going to be smooth sailing. Day one of Babyshambles' Irish tour and the good ship Albion has rolled into town minus its star attraction. What the fuck is going on? No one seems to know.
By half past nine, a sold-out Temple Bar Music Centre has grown tired, emotional and impatient. Downstairs, Babyshambles duo Adam Ficek (drums) and Drew McConnell (bass) are doing what they always do, waiting and hoping that their unpredictable frontman will pleasantly surprise them and arrive even if only in the nick of time.
But tonight Pete Doherty – libertine, poet, drug addict and troubled genius – is nowhere to be seen. Apparently he’s holed up in London, Paris, Oxford – no one’s sure where, except that it sure as hell ain’t Dublin.
It’s not that surprising, really. Hardly a week goes by without news of a Doherty drug bust or court appearance. In the four days preceding their five scheduled Irish dates, Doherty skipped a show in Paris, allegedly had a run-in with staff on the Eurostar, failed to make a court appearance and was reportedly holed up in a known drug den while his bandmates and fans gathered in Dublin.
As Danny Clifford – music photographer and Babyshambles official snapper – once said, “The only thing predictable about Pete Doherty is his complete unpredictability.”
Long a Doherty admirer, I had hoped to document five days in the working life of the most exciting new British artist of the last three to four years while they were in Ireland. My plan was to bypass all the villainous tabloid portrayals, the distractions of the Kate Moss exposé and the squalid stories of crack cocaine and heroin abuse. If I’m digging for any story, it’s the potentially sensational news that Pete Doherty still has the energy and the vision – that despite anything you might read in the morning papers, at the heart of it, Doherty has the heart of a romantic, poetic, songwriting genius on a mission to produce great music. In order to do this, I want to spend time on the Babyshambles tour bus – so I call Danny Clifford to see what the lie of the land is.
“I wouldn’t advise it, mate,” he says in his east London brogue, “even I’d never travel on the tour bus. Sometimes things can turn quite nasty. You just never know with Babyshambles .”
Danny, who has worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to Sugababes, has been taking photographs of the group for just over a year now. He is, as he says himself, “as close to a manager as they have.” I’m hoping he’ll be able to sort things for me. “It should be cool mate,” he reassures me. “I’ll talk to Adam and see what I can do. Should be kosher.”
Right now, Babyshambles aren’t an easy band to get hold of. Doherty’s deal with Rough Trade has expired, and the group currently have no record company or PR contact. They also have no management and much of their day-to-day decision-making is made by drummer and defacto tour manager Adam Ficek.
As day one of the tour arrives, Danny assures me that all is go, pending an okay from Pete. Online reports say he’s still in Paris. Things are looking ropey. From another contact I secure Ficek’s mobile and send him a text message.
“No problem,” he replies, “come down and we’ll chat about it after.” An hour later I get another text. “Can you ring me?”
I do. It’s not Adam on the other line.
“This is Johnny – you’re the journalist ain’t ya?”
Johnny Headlock is a trusted Doherty confidante and associate – and a man, according to a recent Rolling Stone article, “you wouldn’t want to mess with.” A reasonably new face to the Babyshambles set up, he spits down the phone at me.
“You want to cover the band? Well, what’s in for them? How much money you gonna give us,” he asks .
I explain that’s not how I operate.
“Okay, okay, well your name will be on the door and we’ll have a chat afterwards ah’right. You gonna bring some birds for us?”
As I pack a small bag and head for the venue, I’m feeling increasingly apprehensive. I don’t think Johnny is my kind of guy.
Down at the Music Centre, my name’s not on the door. I’ve no ticket and so I call Adam.
“I’ll send someone out in a minute to get you.”
Nothing happens.
I ring again.
Five minutes later, Johnny appears.
He’s small and stocky but not as fierce looking as I’d expected. Dark skinned, he sports a pair of tracksuit bottoms with buttons down the side of each leg – the kind of thing that was wildly in fashion about five years ago. Up top, he’s wearing a sleeveless lagging jacket over a hooded top that’s draped over his head like a boxer.
“You Steve Cummins?”
“Yeah,” I reply.
“You’ve been a naughty boy ain’t ya?”
I’m taken aback. I presume this is some sort of East London piss take. I smile. Wrong move.
“What you fackin’ smilin’ at? Eh? You fackin’ upset Drew with some shit you said last time you talked to him, you fackin’ naughty bastard. You’re not fackin’ comin’ in. I ought to fackin’ knock your head off.”
Somehow, I still think he’s taking the piss. I say something conciliatory about Drew.
He’s right in my face now, his finger pointed about a centimetre from my nose. I’m trying to remember my last meeting with the band clearly. I reported seeing Doherty shoot up heroin – but that was hardly a revelation. It’s odd. I thought I’d got on particularly well with Drew.
“Right, that’s it. I’m going to fackin’ kill you,” snarls Johnny. “Get the fack out of here. Stay away. If I see you near the band while they’re in Ireland you’re a fackin’ dead man.”
I walk away. There’s not much else to do. Two minutes with Johnny Headlock has woken me to the reality of the shit that surrounds Doherty. He’s a poet alright and Babyshambles debut album Down In Albion is a fiercely under-rated record. But the people Doherty consorts with are not very pleasant at all.
The next morning I decide not to travel to Belfast. This decision is based less on the possibility of sparking Johnny’s ire, than on a desire to avoid a wasted journey. Doherty’s no show in Dublin inspired a mini riot and Belfast is not looking good. A contact in Paris tells me he’s still in the city. But the singer does, in the end, make it in time for the gig.
Hot Press’ Francis Jones is on hand to cover the show at the Spring & Airbrake. “It was a very disjointed performance,” he tells me afterwards. “I’d seen them twice before and I really enjoyed them. This one was strange though. Previously people genuinely seemed to be there for the music. This time, a lot of the crowd were there just to see a tabloid spectacle. As it happens, he was prompt and punctual, but there was no energy about them as a band. In all, it was a frustrating performance, infrequent oases of inspiration smothered in a desert of mediocrity. And you can quote me on that (laughs).”
I have a ticket for the Derry show, so I head northwards with diminished expectations.
In that regard, I’m alone. When I arrive, there’s an overwhelming feeling of anticipation across the city ahead of the gig.
In shops and bars in the centre of Derry, people can be overheard talking about Doherty and whether he’ll show up. He will and he does. Late in the afternoon, I hear from someone who’s working closely with the band on the gig that he’s been in the Nerve Centre since lunchtime, running through new material. I’m also told that the lack of heroin in Derry has prompted one of his entourage to jump a taxi to the airport and fly to London to score some.
The Nerve Centre, a fine old school-hall like venue, is intimate enough to bring the best out of the band. It does. The gig is a triumph, the best Babyshambles show I’ve ever seen. Again Doherty is punctual and arrives on stage with a two litre bottle of orange clasped in his hands. This, I later learn, is a local soft drink called ‘Smak’, handed to an amused Doherty by one of the venue’s staff.
Looking healthier than he has in a while, he delivers a performance which, though lacking the unpredictable urgency of before, is almost professional – and never less than hugely intense.
Amongst four new songs, ‘The Blinding’ stands out. However, it’s ‘A’Rebours’ and ‘Time For Heroes’ which rip the roof off. When the Shambles are on this sort of form, few bands can match them.
It’s unlikely to get better then this and I decide to call it quits. Not a good decision! It transpires that the Derry show is no one off – as I hear for myself on a live bootleg of the group’s visit to The Savoy in Cork. They’re in cracking form.
“They blew the crowd away,” says promoter Tom Keating. “They were amazing.”
Posters advertising the Cork gig said something about how the band are currently viewed. The show was billed as ‘Babyshambles featuring Pete Doherty’.
“It didn’t sell out,” Keating says. “I guess they’re maybe not really that popular for the music. But I’d no problems with them. I mean, they did things differently to most bands. They’d no tour manager or any professional set-up. People like Johnny seemed like hangers-on. I ignored him. Pete seemed like a nice guy, but from what I saw he needs to change the people he has around him. They wanted to come back – but I don’t know if someone would take them on again unless the set-up changed.”
Their next gig was at Carlow’s Music Factory, and co-manager of the venue Mick Lennox was in no doubt about what he thought: he’d welcome them back with open arms. Indeed plans are already afoot for a Carlow return.
Lennox was given a pleasant surprise when the band’s tour bus pulled in at 9am on the day of the gig, a full 12 hours before they were due on stage.
“They were A-One,” he says. “Peter was an absolute gentleman. I’d no problems whatsoever. He was in here having breakfast with the cleaning staff and sitting in the pub talking with fans and just being generally friendly. There are a lot of hangers-on in the crew – but the band themselves are lovely guys, very easy to deal with. As for the gig, it was amazing. I’ve never seen anybody so absolutely fucking adored by a crowd.”
Carlow was to be the last show on Babyshambles’ Irish adventure. Having missed the first Dublin gig, the rescheduled show was also cancelled at short notice. The reason given was that Doherty had to attend court in London.
“I was with them when they found out,” says Lennox, “and they were genuinely really, really pissed off they couldn’t make Dublin. They don’t want to let people down, but there was no way they could get out of it.”
Lennox mentions a possible Irish return as early as next month. As anyone who has listened to Babyshambles carefully – and picked up on the echoes of the equally brilliant and similarly troubled Shane McGowan – will appreciate, Doherty loves Ireland and he is eager to come back. Hopefully Dublin will get some of that love next time around.
That, of course, is assuming that Doherty still has a career to come back to. Upon returning to Britain, he stepped into another firestorm, when a red top newspaper splashed pictures of the singer allegedly injecting heroin into a young fan. He may be one of the great rock’n’roll talents of the era, but increasingly, Pete Doherty has the air of someone trapped in a tabloid drug hell, with no way out.
I, for one, hope that he makes it through. More than anything else, I want to see him realise his extraordinary talents.