Pete Doherty has revealed in a new interview that he “nearly lost my feet” while he was battling drug addiction.
The Libertines musician has now been clean for over two years, and has spoken about that period, as well as his years battling addiction, in an interview with The Mirror.
- READ MORE: Pete Doherty and Frédéric Lo on how French serenity and being drug-free shaped their new album
“I was really pushing the limits,” Doherty recalled about his addiction. “There were a few close calls really. I nearly lost my feet and horrible things like that.
“It was very close, just because of the injecting. That’s what happens when you run out of veins. It all seems so long ago now, though, but it was a hell of a ride.”
Having moved to France with his new wife Katia de Vidas in early 2020, Doherty further credited meeting his latest collaborator Frédéric Lo – who released ‘The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime’ with Doherty earlier this month – with helping him kick his addiction.
“I hadn’t had a phone or been online for a couple of years,” Doherty said. “Word got to me that this fella wanted me to cover a song by French singer Daniel Darc. It was called ‘Inutile et hors d’usage’, which means ‘useless and all used up’.
“I got really emotional when [Lo] played it to me, it really hit home. I was giving up hard drugs and feeling fucked, really. The best way to describe it for me is like being hit by a bus.
“It’s still a bit of a struggle, but the obsession does lift and it’s getting easier. But at the time, it hadn’t quite lifted and it was really tough.”
Speaking to NME back in January, Doherty explained more about how he had “managed to somehow keep on the straight and narrow”, and said that his experience of lockdown in Normandy “completely separated [him] from England and from addiction”.
“I was getting clean. I suppose there was just so much recklessness for such a long period of time and not really caring what anyone else thought that it reverses, and all of a sudden you go from having no pressure to being hyper-sensitively aware of this new expectation,” he said.
“I think the creative process is like an addiction in itself. I need to write songs, and I’ve never really got to the bottom of it.”
Asked about the future of The Libertines, Doherty told NME that the band’s next record was being influenced by the The Clash’s ‘Sandinista!’.
“That’s still the format that we’re talking about,” the guitarist and singer said. “At the end of the tour we did that ended last month, everyone was really upbeat by the fact that we were all still alive after the various quarantines and John coming and going. We were all really upbeat about the future, so I don’t know how or when it’s going to happen but I think it will.
“‘Sandinista’ still encapsulates it because there are still a lot of ideas. It’s just about getting everyone in a room and getting on with it.”
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