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Let's Be Frank With Pete Doherty
Indie | Thursday 19th July 2012 | Osh
If the Government want a successful anti drug campaign all they need is a photo of a pallid, sweaty and slightly chubby Pete Doherty, baring his chipped yellow teeth as he tries to remember how to smile.
However, deciding that he didn’t want his next career move to be featuring as the poster boy for Talk To Frank, Doherty chose to clean his act up and head off to a rehab clinic in the middle of a Thailand Jungle.
And within three weeks has been kicked out.
The Cabin Clinic, where Doherty resided, have released a statement, following Doherty’s departure on the 17th of June, declaring “it is important to maintain the integrity of the treatment programme for the other clients to have a good chance of recovery”, i.e. Doherty was being a trouble maker. According, rather dubiously (and sourcelessly) to Dlisted this trouble making came in the form of Doherty “smoking (his) own blood in a pipe made from mouse bones.” I don’t even know where to begin on that one.
But whether or not he has been smoking his own blood out of instruments made from rodent carcasses, Pete really has lost the plot. In the glamorous days of his relationship with Kate Moss, an advocator of the ‘heroin chic’ look for the whole of her skinny and undernourished career, Pete’s drug habit didn’t seem out of control. He managed to pull off the whole rebel without a cause thing in a way where you knew he’d be on sky arts in his fifties, talking about ‘those crazy times’ and reuniting with Carl Barat for an acoustic performance of Don’t Look Back Into The Sun. But now he really has shown us all the ugly side of drugs, because unlike Kate, who was never going to snort coke til her pretty little nose crumbled, Pete seems to have no limit.
And now he has managed to get kicked out of Rehab. I thought Rehab was something that you had to be forced into, not out of.
It seems that in Celebrity world you aren’t considered a true tortured genius until you’ve done your stunt in Rehab. But this whole palaver with Pete arguably begs the question: can rehab actually work? The Cabin clinic offered Yoga and Elephant Trekking, all in the setting of the Jungle, to give clients an ‘inner calm’, but does this just make it a bit like Glastonbury? Where you can go, find a new life in touch with the earth and then get cruelly dropped back into real life: concrete, computers and credit cards. Because as great as learning to ride an Elephant is, I don’t think you would be allowed to leave one in Boris’s Bike racks, after you’ve calmly commuted around the city. Amy Winehouse went in and out of Rehab numerous times in her short lifetime, and the word ‘short’ says it all. And Charlie Sheen, drinker of Tiger blood, has also stated how rehab didn’t work for him.
Well let’s hope Pete manages to sort himself out with or without rehab, if the people who write genius albums such as Back to Black or Up The Bracket keep falling to drug addiction, all we’re going to be left with at the end are Katy Perry and Cheryl Cole. Oh God. Pete, please, please for our sake: Talk to Frank.
Mallory McDonald
