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This is the first time I've chosen rehab for myself, and got clean. Now I want to help others do the same
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/pete-doherty-to-anyone-struggling-with-addiction-just-hang-on--for-more-than-ten-years-ive-been-powerless-but-theres-a-way-out-9876331.html
I first met Peter in January or February 2003 during his first wave of success with The Libertines. He was sharing a Victorian terrace house 12a Teesdale st, off the Hackney road with Carl Barat and dubbed it The Albion Rooms. James Mullord who later managed Babyshambles or, more specifically Peter had been nagged by the diffident bard to bring him around to my Whitechapel flat where he'd heard Eleusian Mysteries were conducted on moonless nights. Its a chain, perhaps a daisy chain perhaps forged from bonds of steel that winds its way around us and I'd met James through Sarah Churchill, the singer with Cosmetique "Lady Di, Why did you die?" Too many mysteries are seldom a healthy thing and James was under orders not to appear at my front door more often than once a month. As a captain in the Royal Signals Regiment with two tours of Northern Ireland under his Sam Browne belt James was accomplished at taking orders and never bothered me much. He was nervous about introducing Peter to me and rightly so, I had sufficient experience in the dark arts to know for certain that I had no wish to be part of anybodies tragedy; James and I both recognised that Peter was a prospective rail crash - a slow train coming round the bend or rather I did, James had yet to encounter his own dark night of the soul, he had already used up his one visit of the month and Peter was yapping at his heels, figuratively fucking his leg like a randy Jack Russel for an introduction at the groves of Acadream.
I am three years old and I have been put to bed upstairs in the vicarage of st Paul's South Harrow, it is probably 1958 late in the year for it is growing dark and my two sisters are already also in their beds in the adjoining room. There is a restless air abroad, we have not settled and my father still young, bounds up the stairs to offer the first one asleep a three-penny bit. I can visualise the gilded gleam of the small octagonal coin and a similar glint from the gloaming light limning the rims of his gold framed spectacles. His almost black hair, bryll-creamed to tame crisp curls also shone, its edges yellow metal. "How will I claim the thruppenny bit if I am asleep, how will I know?" I wondered. My father the philosopher with customary humour had imparted an early lesson in the politics of theology along the lines of one's reward in heaven … after one is dead! How will I know? I wondered, then slept.
It is sometime in the noughties and I am lying supine along the couch - north / south axis in the Whitechapel flat. Perpendicular walls having been removed to allow increase space and light, there now were hardboard sheets tacked onto the remaining joists giving the space an arched shape redolent of the interior of a Nissen hut. Wrapped around me is a tartan wool travelling rug backed with dark brown sheepskin with a lighter brown border. It was once the property of local gangland boss and murderer Ronnie Kray. I knew this because Mick the Finder had brought it from outside a pub belonging to the twins' cousin and on the death of senior brother Reggie it had been removed to outside covering a stack of beer kegs. Subsequently a senior detective recognised it and confirmed its provanence. My life and metabolism are governed by biological imperatives, exterior glands, narcotic secretions from gangland. I lay in stasis, horizonkal, biding time, reptilian, conserving chemicals. I am entirely dependent on outside factors, the whims and desires and needs of a select group of others. A knock on the door. It is a life that is unlife, necrotime, hands crossed at my chest like a cold stone carved knight sleeping his sleep of ages, a corpse in its crypt, underground, beneath the churchyards soggy sod, under rich earth and bright green grass blades, my dusty cavern.
I imagine the whispering, faint despairing whining of the surrounding gossiping dead. This dread unceasing bickering and whimpering, low wretched incontinent muttering, indistinct accusatory utterances achingly and eternally vapid spite-filled jabbering. It will not stop this eternal recriminatory blizzard in which I am participant.
Starving in my garret was a key element in my career trajectory, I had read somewhere, I think Hans Christian Anderson that first one must starve and suffer sufficiently long then one will achieve greatness, that's all you have to to do. So I tried it. When I moved into my Whitechapel flat there was a mixed demographic and amongst my neighbours were the last remnants of the white East End dock-workers and their families, old villains, old villains' pubs. Silver-smithing students from the John Cass, anarchists, bright long sari lengths hung from the washing lines between the buildings. The buildings had originally been built around the beginning of the 20th century for the mainly Jewish population that occupied the area and they represented the best of late Victorian civic virtue; by todays standards they were palatial, generously proportioned rooms with plain simple cornicing and architraves, a fireplace in front and back in which stood an cast-iron stove and oven which would burn coal or wood. The brick chimneys running up at each end of the rooms acted as storage heaters, when fireplaces were boarded up in the fifties and sixties those old brick built dwellings began to die. The deep wainscoating and windows were made from a deep orange-pink Canadian Maple which had been so cheaply plentiful it had crossed the Atlantic as ballast in the ships returning from delivering Birmingham's manufactured goods to the New World and the furs with which the ships were packed for the return trip were not sufficiently heavy to set them adequately in the water. When I moved into mine at 70 Myrdle street there were hazlenuts set in every corner by the departing hippy girl and what I thought was a piece of electric cable beneath layers of paint on the door frame. I set about scraping it off only to discover too late that it was a Jewish prayer scroll, to be touched and acnowledged on entering and leaving the room. A tightly rolled scroll of paper with dense minutely printed Hebrew script on it in a tin or lead tube.
A larcenous looking old Jewish boy looking like a 1920s silent film villain with a pencil moustache would come by and call every week with scraps of smoked salmon for sale and tubby Mr Rogg on Cannon st Road pickled and sold about half a dozen types of soused herring from his premises. He wore an Astrakhan hat and was rosy-cheeked stamping his feet in the cold shop to warm them, his breath condensing like smoke on freezing mornings, his window display a dazzlingly precarious ziggurat of Matso boxes. Across from his premises running into Rampart Street was a short road called Sly Street and in 1976 "Operation Julie" gained the distinction of becoming Britain's largest ever under-cover police operation as up to 300 officers dressed in loon pants and Afghan coats left no turn unstoned as they combed the country in search of a nefarious cabal of L.S.D chemists and distributors responsible for flooding the world market with high quality and high strength purple pyramids and green and black microdots, 150 - 250 mic trips of a quality and strength hitherto unknown in such consistent quality. Her Majesty was being embarrassed as exports and the balance of trade boomed. Quantities of 10,000 and more were turning up in Australia and turning on the inhabitants. Numbers at free festivals in the West Country swelled that year with unconvincing looking and acting hippies hogging spaces round camp-fires as they attempted to "blend in" to the rest of the population who by now were trading their blue denim flares for black gaberdine drainpipes and leather jackets, their E.L.O. albums for Iggy Pop 7" singles.
A pair of Cambridge graduates were eventually collared by some overweight hairies begging to be given an antidote for their accidentally ingested light fantastic and back in Sly Street opposite Mr Rogg's soused herring shop, a building on the corner with Cannon Street Road was found to be warehousing such large quantities of lysergic acid that the building had to be dismantled brick by brick in case any was missed.
Please, please, please leave your comments: copies of the complete book, lavishly illustrated, ornately illuminated may be obtained direct from the author. Leave your email address and I will get back to you. Thank you.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/pete-doherty-to-anyone-struggling-with-addiction-just-hang-on--for-more-than-ten-years-ive-been-powerless-but-theres-a-way-out-9876331.html
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| Peter Doherty in Paris, August 2017 |
I am three years old and I have been put to bed upstairs in the vicarage of st Paul's South Harrow, it is probably 1958 late in the year for it is growing dark and my two sisters are already also in their beds in the adjoining room. There is a restless air abroad, we have not settled and my father still young, bounds up the stairs to offer the first one asleep a three-penny bit. I can visualise the gilded gleam of the small octagonal coin and a similar glint from the gloaming light limning the rims of his gold framed spectacles. His almost black hair, bryll-creamed to tame crisp curls also shone, its edges yellow metal. "How will I claim the thruppenny bit if I am asleep, how will I know?" I wondered. My father the philosopher with customary humour had imparted an early lesson in the politics of theology along the lines of one's reward in heaven … after one is dead! How will I know? I wondered, then slept.
It is sometime in the noughties and I am lying supine along the couch - north / south axis in the Whitechapel flat. Perpendicular walls having been removed to allow increase space and light, there now were hardboard sheets tacked onto the remaining joists giving the space an arched shape redolent of the interior of a Nissen hut. Wrapped around me is a tartan wool travelling rug backed with dark brown sheepskin with a lighter brown border. It was once the property of local gangland boss and murderer Ronnie Kray. I knew this because Mick the Finder had brought it from outside a pub belonging to the twins' cousin and on the death of senior brother Reggie it had been removed to outside covering a stack of beer kegs. Subsequently a senior detective recognised it and confirmed its provanence. My life and metabolism are governed by biological imperatives, exterior glands, narcotic secretions from gangland. I lay in stasis, horizonkal, biding time, reptilian, conserving chemicals. I am entirely dependent on outside factors, the whims and desires and needs of a select group of others. A knock on the door. It is a life that is unlife, necrotime, hands crossed at my chest like a cold stone carved knight sleeping his sleep of ages, a corpse in its crypt, underground, beneath the churchyards soggy sod, under rich earth and bright green grass blades, my dusty cavern.
I imagine the whispering, faint despairing whining of the surrounding gossiping dead. This dread unceasing bickering and whimpering, low wretched incontinent muttering, indistinct accusatory utterances achingly and eternally vapid spite-filled jabbering. It will not stop this eternal recriminatory blizzard in which I am participant.
Starving in my garret was a key element in my career trajectory, I had read somewhere, I think Hans Christian Anderson that first one must starve and suffer sufficiently long then one will achieve greatness, that's all you have to to do. So I tried it. When I moved into my Whitechapel flat there was a mixed demographic and amongst my neighbours were the last remnants of the white East End dock-workers and their families, old villains, old villains' pubs. Silver-smithing students from the John Cass, anarchists, bright long sari lengths hung from the washing lines between the buildings. The buildings had originally been built around the beginning of the 20th century for the mainly Jewish population that occupied the area and they represented the best of late Victorian civic virtue; by todays standards they were palatial, generously proportioned rooms with plain simple cornicing and architraves, a fireplace in front and back in which stood an cast-iron stove and oven which would burn coal or wood. The brick chimneys running up at each end of the rooms acted as storage heaters, when fireplaces were boarded up in the fifties and sixties those old brick built dwellings began to die. The deep wainscoating and windows were made from a deep orange-pink Canadian Maple which had been so cheaply plentiful it had crossed the Atlantic as ballast in the ships returning from delivering Birmingham's manufactured goods to the New World and the furs with which the ships were packed for the return trip were not sufficiently heavy to set them adequately in the water. When I moved into mine at 70 Myrdle street there were hazlenuts set in every corner by the departing hippy girl and what I thought was a piece of electric cable beneath layers of paint on the door frame. I set about scraping it off only to discover too late that it was a Jewish prayer scroll, to be touched and acnowledged on entering and leaving the room. A tightly rolled scroll of paper with dense minutely printed Hebrew script on it in a tin or lead tube.
A larcenous looking old Jewish boy looking like a 1920s silent film villain with a pencil moustache would come by and call every week with scraps of smoked salmon for sale and tubby Mr Rogg on Cannon st Road pickled and sold about half a dozen types of soused herring from his premises. He wore an Astrakhan hat and was rosy-cheeked stamping his feet in the cold shop to warm them, his breath condensing like smoke on freezing mornings, his window display a dazzlingly precarious ziggurat of Matso boxes. Across from his premises running into Rampart Street was a short road called Sly Street and in 1976 "Operation Julie" gained the distinction of becoming Britain's largest ever under-cover police operation as up to 300 officers dressed in loon pants and Afghan coats left no turn unstoned as they combed the country in search of a nefarious cabal of L.S.D chemists and distributors responsible for flooding the world market with high quality and high strength purple pyramids and green and black microdots, 150 - 250 mic trips of a quality and strength hitherto unknown in such consistent quality. Her Majesty was being embarrassed as exports and the balance of trade boomed. Quantities of 10,000 and more were turning up in Australia and turning on the inhabitants. Numbers at free festivals in the West Country swelled that year with unconvincing looking and acting hippies hogging spaces round camp-fires as they attempted to "blend in" to the rest of the population who by now were trading their blue denim flares for black gaberdine drainpipes and leather jackets, their E.L.O. albums for Iggy Pop 7" singles.
A pair of Cambridge graduates were eventually collared by some overweight hairies begging to be given an antidote for their accidentally ingested light fantastic and back in Sly Street opposite Mr Rogg's soused herring shop, a building on the corner with Cannon Street Road was found to be warehousing such large quantities of lysergic acid that the building had to be dismantled brick by brick in case any was missed.
Please, please, please leave your comments: copies of the complete book, lavishly illustrated, ornately illuminated may be obtained direct from the author. Leave your email address and I will get back to you. Thank you.
Brilliant. A fine fine read.
ReplyDeleteMore, more, more.....please?
ReplyDelete