Drowning On Camera

Pete Doherty got drunk in Berlin and smashed a parked car with a beer bottle. When nothing happened—when the car just stayed there dented and he stayed there stupid—passersby called the cops. He slept it off at the station. It’s a pretty perfect metaphor for what Pete’s been doing for the last decade.

The first argument for him is solid: he wrote songs that actually meant something. Can’t Stand Me Now and Fuck Forever and Music When the Lights Go Out aren’t clever—they’re just raw. He dressed like he meant it, wore his damage in the way he moved, looked like he’d been awake for three days even when he’d probably been awake for three weeks. The whole thing was coherent in a way that most people who claim to be broken aren’t. You believed it because he clearly did.

Against that: he’s spent the last fifteen years turning himself into a cautionary tale. Drugs are his diet. His face looks like it’s caving in. He’s unreliable in ways that go past rock-and-roll drama into just being mean to people. He’s a guy who had every advantage and chose to systematically destroy himself, and I’m not sure anymore why that should be interesting.

But here’s what stuck with me: it didn’t seem like an act. He wasn’t playing the tortured artist. He was actually, genuinely unable to function the way other people do, and instead of pretending he could, he just went all the way down. There’s something almost honest about that, even if the honesty comes with a bill that everyone else has to pay.

I haven’t thought about Pete in years. The songs are still there though, and they still sound like someone trying to speak while they’re drowning. That’s not nothing. It’s not nothing.