When Pete Doherty, a baby-faced Army major's son from Nuneaton, joined a rock band, he thought he knew the ropes: take drugs, avoid sleep, date supermodels. The band prospered but poor Pete got it in the neck, and last year, shocked by his unwholesome living, the chart-topping Libertines fired him.
Having Kate Moss to keep you company is, presumably, some kind of compensation. Maybe even a reason for staying alive. A 5ft 8in one-woman walking tobacco pyre Kate might be, but in her time she has overcome sufficient demons to set even the hardest cases an example.
These two might have been made for each other. One, a survivor of the fash-and-trash era of supermodel Babylon, the other a zonked-out, self-contrived melange of Sid Vicious and Lord Byron. Last week they found each other at Kate's 31st birthday party, and now, in the honourable tradition of celebrity lovers, are reported to be inseparable.
Don't even ask what they talk about. Rehab? Pete can easily trump Kate's de rigueur stretch in the Priory with an account of the three days he lasted in a remote Thai monastery, which – until his hurried departure for a Bangkok dope den – claimed to be able to clean up anybody. Lateness? "I think it's in my blood," says Kate. "My mum's always late. But I'll be, like, an hour late. Naomi [Campbell] is late, late." Pete can top that, too. For his last few concerts he failed to turn up at all, provoking riots among his inconsolable fans.
He made it to Kate's place in the Cotswolds in time, though, and his birthday present to her was a framed copy of one of his best songs, What Katie Did. According to the pop chatter, the number tells the story of a girl lost to drug addiction, although you might not guess so from the lyrics:
Shoop shoop, shoop de-lang-a-lang
(repeat eight times).
Oh whatcha gonna do, Katie?
You're a sweet, sweet girl
But it's a cruel, cruel world
A cruel, cruel world.
It's a crazy world, too. One in which a bandy-legged girl from Croydon can amass a £14 million fortune by wearing clothes, and a rock star can be kicked out of his band by doing what most of us assume rock stars are supposed to do. Pete's downfall came when Carl Barat, his co-star in The Libertines took him aside and said: "Don't come to the show we're doing in Paris, because you're not well. You haven't been to bed for days, and days, and days. You've smashed up cars, you've stolen loads of stuff. You've been doing all sorts of terrible things, and you are a danger to other people."
It would be hard to argue that Carl didn't have a point. Among the terrible things that Pete was accused of doing was trying to sell the band's passports in order to buy new curtains for their tour bus. They sent him on his way, but imploded anyway. It was curtains, too, for The Libertines.
As rock epitaphs go, all this may be something short of Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie, but it has a poignancy. For in their short time together The Libertines had turned themselves from baghead geezers playing drugged-up garage rock to become potentially the most era-shaping British band since Oasis.
The music press raved about them, and their two albums were smashes. The ex-Clash member Mick Jones, who produced the second one, Up The Bracket, says: "They just got it. Once in a while a band comes along that's like that, and they're the ones, and everybody sort of knew it." Pete was the face of the band. But it was a pallid face, drained of vigour and, sometimes, of hope. A writer with the rock magazine Rolling Stone saw him rise weakly from the interview table, and return with a can of Coke and 15 Crunchie bars. Can love put the energy back into him?
It isn't so much that Kate Moss has some experience of rock star boyfriends as that her list of exes reads like the line up for Knebworth. It includes Jesse Wood (son of Ronnie), Spacehog drummer Antony Langdon, Lemonhead singer Evan Dando, and Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja. Even the father of her two-year-old daughter, Lila, the magazine publisher Jefferson Hack, was named by his hippy parents after the 1960s San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane.
The pair have much else in common. Both were born into lower middle class families, both entered their professions largely by accident, each has a toddler by an estranged partner, and both are exceptionally close to their mothers.
Kate's even travels with her, while Pete's mother, Jacqueline, apprehensive about what her boy might say during a recent appearance on Newsnight, wrote in advance to tell the programme: "Peter is a gifted poet, writer and thinker. Please be considerate with him. He is a sensitive soul and has many good points." Let us hope Kate checks the points out thoroughly for she has found lasting love elusive. She fell hard and disastrously for the actor Johnny Depp, who dumped her for the sulphurous French chanteuse Vanessa Paradis, and last year she split from Hack. She says she dreams of a quieter life, but it is hard to achieve when you are out on the toot six nights a week.
She was spotted, at the age of 14, by a model agency scout while passing through JFK airport in New York. An appearance on the cover of The Face magazine in 1990 shot her to superwaifdom, and she has remained Britain's foremost model, along with Naomi Campbell, ever since. This longevity is no accident, for Kate, unlike many in her trade, knows and cares about what she is wearing. "Kate loves clothes," says fashion writer Lisa Armstrong. "Some models can take them or leave them."
For a girl born in 1974 into deepest suburban anonymity, the daughter of a travel agent, she has faced some serious accusations; promoting anorexia, paedophilia and the "heroin chic" look among them. "I was getting on a plane once," she says, "and the lady behind the desk said: `My daughter is starving herself to death because of you'. And I was like: `Hello? Do I eat?'"
Pete should save her a Crunchie. He is generous in that way, and those who know him portray him as weak and pseudish rather than stupid. "I miss him, " says Barat. "I live in hope. I want him to stop embracing this death and darkness crap and start embracing life."
Doherty's upbringing was peripatetic. He remembers "moving every five minutes", with his father's Army postings. At 17 he went to live with his grandmother in Kilburn, where, out of boredom, he learned to play the guitar, and worked as a gravedigger at Willesden Green cemetery. He says he was offered a place to read English at the University of London, but turned it down, and instead began writing poetry and fell into a young bohemian set that revolved around Filthy McNasty's Whiskey Cafe near King's Cross, where he met Barat.
It was while he was searching for what he calls "freedom and truth" that his drug addiction began. Every attempt at a cure has failed. "It's like you are in love with someone," he says of the craving. "You never stop loving them." Once, while shot full of heroin, he burgled Barat's flat, and was jailed for two months. Last September he was given a four-month suspended sentence for possessing a flick knife.
Kate needs reining in, and Pete needs straightening out. Behind the artifice and the media hype there is a core of seriousness in both of them. He's no Sid Vicious, and if you wanted to take a wild bet on his prospects, wager that he'll be back in the band. She's no Dorothy Stratton, and from what you can see through the tobacco fog, she looks like a woman gradually wearying of the life she leads. These two might even be good for each other, but only if they look upon their meeting as tomorrow's beginning rather than last night' s party."
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