"IF I WAS STILL USING I WOULDN'T BE DOING THIS INTERVIEW"

Depending on what papers you read, back in the 00s Peter Doherty was either co-frontman of the most influential British guitar band of their generation or a crack-piping jailbird forever in the crosshairs of Fleet Street. A miracle, then, that in 2025 the Libertines and Babyshambles singer is not only drug-free but back with his strongest solo album to date. “Everything has shifted,” he tells Simon Goddard. Wastered youth: Roger Sargent

- Simon Goddard

You allow Peter Doherty into your hotel, you've only yourself to blame for the fresh pile of vomit on the foyer carpet.

“Oh... shit!” groans the sometime Libertine as he frantically scoops up the offending splatter with all the napkins he can grab — the polite thing to do since it’s not his sick but that of his gigantic and adorably docile dog, Gladys, who moments earlier took a funny turn after being fed scraps of batter from his plate of fish’n’chips. “Poor Glad-la,” he tuts, stroking her head, “she’s not been very well.”

Being publicly embarrassed in a North London Marriott by his queasy canine is, remarkably enough, as scandalous as Doherty's life gets these days. Once upon a redtop the nation’s most vilified drug addict, he’s been officially “clean” since Christmas 2019, helped by an idyllic decamp to the Normandy coast with his French wife and filmmaker Katia deVidas, since joined by their two-year-old daughter Billie-May, muse to one of the tracks on his third solo album, Felt Better Alive — a buoyantly folky affair evoking the spiked sea shanties of Shack and The Coral between the acoustic dippiness of Syd Barrett.

We've met once before, not that Doherty remembers, not that he should, back in 2007. “Oh, God,” he grimaces, half-laughing. “Just that word alone. ‘2007’. Say no more.”

It was the very week his headline-spewing relationship with Kate Moss fell apart, our interview conducted only after he’d stumbled over various items of furniture to shut the curtains on the preying paparazzi outside. That day he was blotchy-skinned, grubby-fingered and spoke in feeble whispers weaker than a death rattle. He was also acutely intelligent, hilarious and quite charming.