Pete Doherty no longer wants a reckless life
«And I Had Always Planned to Sing in Sweet and Soulful Way As Only a Cowboy Can, But by Saddle Stap Snavd Like a Dog-Chewed Tourniquet”, “I had always planned to sing in a sweet way full of feeling as only the cowboys can do, but the belt of my saddle broke like a hemostatic lace chewed by a dog», Sing Pete Doherty in”Felt Better Alive“, The sixth of the eleven songs contained in its new, namesake album of unpublished, the ideal heart of the disc, mixing introspection and dreamlike visions. The song, explains the frontman of the Libertines, is a tribute to the legend of the US rock legendary Townnes van zandtwho disappeared in 1997, a character with a shy and melancholy character who, despite not having obtained a sensational popularity, always remained a figure of worship, and to his song “Bencho and Lefty”: “For me, it is the English version of that song. He talks about the soul of an old Cowboy Rock’n’roll tired but still on the go, who fights against time knowing that, in the end, you cannot win. It is a love song for what you lose and what you try to preserve». The old Cowboy Rock’n’roll comes by himself, he is the ex-cursed rocker, the lost baby-dandy, The last libertine who survived self -destruction and today makes overdose of cheese, rather than substances.
“Felt Better Alive”, which will come out tomorrow, It is his first solo album in nine yearsas many as they have gone from “Hamburg Demonstractions”. From 2016 to today Doherty has set up a new band, the Puta Madas (with which in 2019 he released the album “Peter Doherty & The Puta Madres”), recorded a album with the French artist Frédéric Lo (“The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime”, released in 2022), met with the Libertines (together with which he recorded the album “All Quiet on last year The Eastern Esplanade “). In 2023 he also told his new life as a former toxic in a documentary, “Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin“, Directed by his wife Katia Devidas, who became the mother of the third daughter of the singer -songwriter in the same year, Billie Mae.
It was 2021 when the images stolen by the paparazzi who found it in Étreat, a small French municipality in which he had been holed up to clean up, far from everything and everyone, after being arrested in 2019 in Paris twice in less than 48 hours, made the tour of the world, showing him visibly gained, scruffy and unrecognizable: “I stopped making me heroin and ketamine. I like to experiment, prepare cocktails with champagne, a little rum, orange juice. I can give the idea of an alcoholic, but they are not. I like a nice glass of water“He confessed at the time to the tabloids, still saying he was dependent, yes, but this time not by drugs, but by cheese. In 2023 he said he heard that “death was lurking” because of the damage that years of drugs of drugs and alcohol had caused his body. Clean since 2019, in one of the interviews granted on the occasion of the release of “Felt Better Alive”, at the Times, Doherty confessed that its cheese diet, while she lived in France, ended up aggravating her health problems, above all diabetes: “First heroin and crack, then cocaine, smoke and alcohol. Now cheese, salami and sugar in tea ».
It was precisely the fear of death that inspired the eleven songs included in “Felt Better Alive”, which see Doherty flirting with country sound. To the microphones of the podcast “Happy Place” by Fearne Cotton, the former Rockstar said she had warned greater pressure in writing the songs of her first solo album in nine years because she thought she didn’t have much time available: “I thought: “I’m dying. I have to write a fantastic song before it happens”. It often happened. I don’t care so much so much to write. I love playing, but that need to write and create was fed by anxiety and darkness».
