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Pete Doherty

Peter Doherty (born 12 March 1979 in Hexham, Northumberland, England) is the frontman and songwriter for the band Babyshambles, and formerly co-frontman and songwriter (along with Carl Barât) of Britrock band, The Libertines. He is also a poet. Since 2005, he has become well known to the tabloid-reading public as a result of his on/off relationship with supermodel Kate Moss and his struggles with his drug addiction.

2005

 * Nooooooah. No, that was a big joke in the family. When I was 16, 17, I started drifting away from everything else and picking up a guitar, and it was like, "What are you doing? You can't sing and you can't play a guitar", right up to the day we got signed by Rough Trade. And then it was like, "Go on play us a song", whereas before it was, "Shut up, fucking racket."
 * The Guardian, November 2005

2008

 * ‘You can only be so thick-skinned. You can only pretend not to care for so long before you have to admit that you hate being made to look like an idiot. I hate seeing myself misquoted. I hate being linked romantically with girls I’ve been close to for years but never slept with. It’s just upsetting, isn’t it? My nan reads and believes these things. I say, “Hiya Nan, how are you getting on?” and she’ll say, “Are you all right? What about that cat you injected with crack?”’
 * Mail On Sunday, September 2008

People

 * Basically there’s a gulf between truth and untruth, I don’t want to be too mathematical about it, because I’m not very good at maths. But it’s a divide between, I dunno, a film and a cartoon. I’ve just become this cartoon character. I try not to follow it, but when you see pictures of yourself that have been photo-shopped to show you doing something you didn’t…. that’s wrong. It’s my worst nightmare – and being misquoted, too, especially as I’m so precious about words.
 * Speaking out on the media's caricature of him

 * I'm not going to be hardened by these people, to these things, I'm not going to let them destroy my feelings or my emotions.
 * Who The Fuck is Pete Doherty (2005)

 * We have played at venues up and down the country on this tour, some of which had no security, and have encountered no problems or witnessed any aggression. I simply asked the bouncer last night to apologise for his behaviour, three times in fact, and he refused. I was very upset at his attitude and although I'm very sorry for letting everyone down last night, I refuse to play at venues where pumped up, 16 stone men feel the need to be aggressively rude and to bully teenage kids around.
 * After cancelling a gig at the Barfly, August 2004

 * I made this big statement saying, "I've left The Libertines." A couple of people said, "You can't do that! You're such a great band! What are you gonna do about Brixton?" And some people said, "Well, I'd rather be here than Brixton." There's no reason you can't do both. If I was 16 or 17 and Morrissey opened his front door to me and let me go and listen to him and chat to him it would be a joy. Why not? It's possible. I don't really have that much else going on in my life.
 * On removing the barriers between performers and audiences, NME (New Musical Express), 13 March 2004.

 * "We've had death threats", Pete says, "saying, 'You're evil and your days are numbered." What was it, "Don't panic but be scared". Someone shat on our doorstep once and nailed a sparrow to our basement door. I don't mind, me. I'll out-weird any stalker.
 * On the downside of fame, NME (New Musical Express), 13 March 2004

 * I can't buy her diamonds, my dick's too small. I never know where I stand with her. It's either a black eye or a love bite.
 * On his relationship with Kate Moss

 * You've got to understand... these days I just can't afford to get involved [with the press]. People - they turn on you... on me. They write horrible things, deliberately twisting my words.
 * On his growing wariness in talking to the media, Spin Magazine, Autumn 2007.

Definitions and objects

 * The more you read and the more you teach yourself, the less you rely on something like drugs to take you to a better place.

 * I have a very bad relationship with the future. We don't get on. We just ignore each other.

 * Broken glass. It's just like glitter, isn't it?
 * NME (New Musical Express), November 2005

 * "Each man kills the things he loves". I recognise that in myself, in relationships, even with guitars, beautiful things that I've had and wilfully destroyed.

 * It's that mysterious thing called hype. I've looked under every rock, and I couldn't find out what it means. Certain people hear a certain melody, and they're attracted to it. I'm in love with that feeling. We're looking for fun and adventure and a bit of redemption and somewhere to live. Everything else is a blind venture into the unknown.

 * I don't really know what "intellectual" means, but if it means you've got a desire to learn, you've got a desire to look for things that haven't been presented to you, then, maybe. I think that "intellectual" is quite an exclusive word. I think it's just for anyone that has a thirst or a hunger to improve themselves, or a yearning to escape from somewhere to get to a better place.
 * When asked whether he considered himself (and Carl) to be "intellectual", 2002

 * The main instinct a lot of the time is to masquerade and hide the truth at all times. Whereas in reality what happens in songs is laying bare the truth. So a lot of time it's fighting that instinct, and the songs become almost confessional. They can also be quite condescending to myself, almost like I'm putting myself down.

 * I do have utopian fantasies. A lot of them are more - I wouldn't say spiritual, but they relate more to the imagination and the individual. But for me socialism is a way of trying to put far-fetched ideas into everyday use, trying to find a way to bridge the gap between that fantasy and reality, and reaching out across that gap to the people who can actually do something to make the change.

 * I know the basic facts cause they’ve been repeated again and again across various duty desk counters at police stations over the past months and years: I’m 6ft 2in, green-brown eyes. Distinguishing features: moles. Tattoos: loads. Got a wolf, a mermaid, a heart with a K in it. They don’t go through your personality traits.
 * When asked how he sees himself, The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

 * Something good has happened to us. We are, dare I say it, a professional unit these days. When people get us in a room together now, they actually treat us like musicians. Before, they would treat us as anything but: pigeon fanciers, candles, dry humpers...
 * Talking about Babyshambles to Spin Magazine, Autumn 2007

 * There are three things that I know a bit about in my life and that's QPR, my guitar and drugs. I know QPR are the best football team in the world, my guitar is the most beautiful thing I own and that I don't take enough drugs to kill me. It isnt drugs that I need to get rid of; it's the demons that fill my head. Once I have come to terms with my demons, maybe I'll be able to get clean.

 * Until I was nine years old I thought 'cunt' was a term of endearment

 * The story of The Libertines starts for me when it was me, Carl Barât and Steve Bedlow sat on the side of a canal, throwing stones at a bottle and we had a game where whoever hit the bottle first with the stone got to choose the name of the band - I can't even remember who it was that hit the bottle but, yeah, from that night onwards we became The Libertines. We ended up throwing ourselves into eternity, as we called it at the time
 * On how The Libertines got their name

Arcadia

 * Arcadia? The realm of the infinite? It's a poet's corner... It's not a cult or a religion – it's an awareness of your surroundings; you're not going to force yourself on anyone and, equally, no one's going to force themselves on you. And it's about community and pleasure. It came from a whisper through the trees. It came from a crack in the pavement. It can also come when you open a bag of crisps, or when you kick a football against a goalpost. Even if I was winding you up, it would still be true, because Arcadia and the Arcadian Dream is so deep, is so true to our hearts... It can be as powerful as your imagination can allow it to be. But, it can also be as dark and twisted as your soul... Arcadia encompasses the infinite, and that's why it comforts me.
 * 2002

 * Just when you get really wound up, you turn a corner and you're somewhere else completely. You find an Arcadian glade - a glimpse of paradise in the middle of it all. And that's why you persevere. That's why you don't chuck yourself off a building or shoot yourself at the same time as someone else, like he [Carl] wanted us to.
 * The Guardian, 10 January 2003.

 * I still do. It's changed a lot. It started off as something ancient and forgotten; and became something modern and real. I just couldn't swim. The tunnels get narrower and narrower.
 * NME (New Musical Express), 15 December 2006, when asked if he still believes in Arcadia.

Music and politics

 * Has there ever been a musician of cultural significance who's been aware they're significant? Maybe it's a generation whose parents came from a working class environment and because they were rootless in a way, like me and him, they latched onto that as an identity. Maybe we romanticise what our parents wanted to escape from. We're, like, fantasising out a living.
 * NME (New Musical Express), 13 March 2004

 * There's a point you reach before you're perverted and tainted by all the things that drag you into the music business, like avarice or a lust for fame. The original reason why I started was some feeling of community, equality, wanting to fight for things you believe in. Any kid who's gone to a state school knows what it's all about - bullying, racism. And you've just got to make a stand.
 * 2004, The Socialist Review; on why it was important to do the Love Music, Hate Racism gig

 * You can't get that feeling anywhere else. It's communion. It's like being washed away in the ocean, carried aloft on a wave.
 * On performing, interview by Neil McCormick, March 2003

 * I think it's woken me up to a few things, and you do become complacent. As well as being anti something, you've got to be pro something. So you're anti racism, so what are you pro? You're pro community. I would put my hand on my heart and I'd attach myself to socialist ideas. Because I believe in society. And it's bollocks that black people have any less worth in society than white people, which is basically what people like the BNP say.
 * 2004, The Socialist Review; on what the Love Music, Hate Racism campaign could achieve today

 * They left me, by the side of the road, with a plastic bag and all kinds of bitterness Well, in my mind, and I can say this forever I suppose, and people might laugh at it, but I don't think I ever really left The Libertines, nor can I ever leave The Libertines, you know, having been a founder of the band with Carl, but that sounds silly, doesn't it, seeing as they played all the festivals without me and made it difficult, no - impossible, for me to play live with them.
 * December 2004, Newsnight; when asked whether he left The Libertines or The Libertines left him

 * I’ve got a fierce passion for politics but I can’t stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I’m up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets.
 * Metro, 15 August 2006

 * I think I only needed something to hold on to. It has never been about depravity. It's always been about melody. But melody and I met in many depraved situations. Meeting melody is the victory of the empty spiralling nightmare.
 * Extract from Prison Diaries, published in The Guardian, 2006

Oasis (band)

 * “Yeah, well, I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel is a Poet and Liam is a town crier.”
 * Gigwise, 1997

 * "With Oasis stepping up a gear and proving they've still got it, they need to be shown there are people out there who can surpass them. Can we match them? The quality is good (in Oasis), but there really is no competition because my band is the greatest in the world and we're going to prove it."
 * May 2009, latest news

I'd like to see Noel play in his livin'n room, but apparently he's a bit moody. (or something like that) Pete on Oasis, BBC Seven Ages of Rock

Drugs

 * It's not people in bands, is it? Why do people who take drugs, why are they in bands? 'Cos they're trying to prove themselves. To make themselves blank and numb and not able to communicate with other people.
 * October 2002, NME (New Musical Express); when asked why people in bands take drugs

 * If I want drugs, I don't have to do a gig to get them. I do a gig when I feel shit, because I need to be playing. There's no drug in the world that can compare with playing music
 * July 2004, the Guardian; when asked about the perception that he staged gigs to get drug money

 * With drugs, I think the sort of person that would die from an overdose is gonna die soon enough anyway, because they’ve got that will to destroy what’s left of their life.
 * Rockfeedback.com

 * I'd say exercising self-control is very important for a dissolute life. You don't need to control your drug intake to lead a free life. Whether you take no drugs at all or everything you can get your hands on, a free life is separated from that.
 * NME (New Musical Express), 15 December 2006

 * Sometimes I feel really guilty complaining about it because there are some amazing things happening around me but the darkness has prevailed, to be honest, in extremis. Yesterday, man, I went to buy a pint of milk and I got stopped in the street and searched. They found a crumb of rock in the lining of my coat that I didn’t even know was there and I spent all day in fucking Charing Cross [police] station. They’re taking the piss, mate.
 * Metro, 25 August 2006

 * That’s right, but I’m not sure it’s my place to talk about drugs. I’d rather take them or not take them - but not talk about them.
 * Metro, 25 August 2006 (When asked if he was trying to stop taking drugs)

 * I was so, so lost and unhappy. If you listen to the songs on the first album, you can hear it. They’re really sad songs and they come from a lonely place. The relationship broke up, and I went into free fall. I saw drugs as a way of avoiding…the darkness.
 * The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

 * I realise it’s proved to people that I don’t love them. It’s dawning on me now that if I say I love someone… it’s like lying, really. As long as I’m taking it, the lie continues. I’ve got a lot of proving myself to do.
 * The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

 * Drugs don’t work. They don’t even make you forget – only momentarily, because if something’s that painful, nothing’s going to make you forget it. You think they’ll fill the hole, but the hole just gets deeper… It’s like trying to fill in a hole without a spade.
 * The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

 * After years of entrenched drug abuse, you have a mourning period. I know it’s a bit sad, but I’m in mourning. I’m in mourning for an armful.
 * NME (New Music Express), 5 November 2007 (days before heroin relapse)

 * They've been around me since day one, but so has corduroy. Know what I mean? Drugs don't create the sound - they might just change the pitch slightly. Or make you spell a word wrong.
 * Loaded Magazine, August 2008

Carl Barat

 * Yes, it was riveting. Despite everything, you knew there was goodness there. Something to believe in. Something which is good, pure and untainted by anything.
 * On meeting Carl Barat, The Guardian, January 2003.

 * Carl's all right. It's just like EastEnders really. He's still my kid.
 * NME (New Musical Express), 15 December 2006, when asked if the Libertines were a perfect vehicle for his early dreams.

 * I got headbutted in Wolverhampton. You [Carl] get snogged in Northampton, head butted in Wolverhampton and I won't even tell you what happened in Southampton. Basically Carlos gets the love and I get all the head butts, it seems to be the way of things.
 * 2002

 * Probably Carlos
 * When asked what his best feature was, 2002

 * Basically, too many other people made important decisions for us and we just wrote songs and worried about clothes and girls. In the early days he came round once with this girl who had convinced him that I was just a weirdo and that we had an unhealthy relationship. He sat me down and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t see so much of each other? Maybe we should knock the band on the head? It’s not really going anywhere, is it?" I was desperate for us to stick together and see it through because I never stopped believing. When we got signed, Carl was shocked. I had prepared myself and had been reading the NME since I was 16. Carl wasn’t like that.
 * Mail On Sunday, September 2008

Britain

 * I fall in love with Britain every day, with bridges, buses, blue skies... but it’s a brutal world, man.
 * Metro, 25 August 2006

 * I knew I was destined for London, so I came to live with my nan in her council flat. It was the summer after my A-levels. Got a job in Willesden cemetery. I was getting a man’s wage, filling in graves. Stood around while they did the last rites. Cut the grass. A lot of the time I’d just sit on the gravestones and read and write. Scribbling away.
 * The Sunday Times, 16 May 2006

Miscellaneous

 * I mean you look in the paper and you see the bodies of mutilated people, and that's controversy. Controversy isn't saying something like 'Oh I've fucked Noel Gallagher' or something. Which I have.
 * October 2002, Interview by Flashers Inc.

 * No, because it's not like they're the only songs we have. They're like children; you shouldn't really have a favourite. Unless one of your kids develops into a pervert.
 * February 2005, Guitar and Bass, on whether publishing Babyshambles songs online would cause legal problems when they were released on an album.

 * Mental-stability, I would say. I’d like to achieve a fluidity, where everything stays consistent – always doing shows, always with the chance to release records, meeting new people.
 * Rockfeedback.com (around 2002), when asked about his goals for the future.

 * I’m vain because I’m imperfect.
 * The Sunday Times, 14 May 2006

 * I got bitten last night actually. Just some bloke bit me. I wasn't doing anything and he just bit me. I was in a public telephone box in the centre of London and some fella came up and started biting me. Nah, I didn't bite him back. I hit him with a telephone, right on the hooter and it exploded like a ripe tomato
 * July 2003

 * My idea of paradise is that period just before the sun rises and I’m at home painting or writing songs and everything is flowing. I pray that the sun won’t rise so I can paint and write for ever. That’s my ideal time.
 * Mail On Sunday, September 2008

 * I may be a fool, but I'm not a f**ker.
 * From the BBC Documentary, Who the F is Pete Doherty? on what his thoughts of his ex-band mates opinions of him were at the time of their break up

Lyrics and poetry

 * I knew she wasn't English Because she spoke it far too well The grammar was goodly, the verbs as they should be And the slang was bang on the bell So as the language barrier clanged and banged I couldn't hear--hear or see England, London, and Bow Crumbled into the sea.
 * Recited on Newsnight with Kirsty Wark, 22 December 2004

 * But if I should fall Would you vow today to pay tomorrow the fucked off big debt I owe to sorrow
 * A'rebours (Babyshambles)

 * The Thames and the Mersey, the Tyne and the Wear and the Clyde They spew slums like gravy on the banks of the poisonous tide They washed up a pale thin girl Alone in her ivory tower Scratching her skin with the thorns that grow On the stems of the wild flowers What became of the love we knew? We beat the swine black and blue You and I Me and you What became of the love we knew? What became of the working class? Nike, Reebok, Adidas Scratchcards, pitbulls, ecstasy Hooray for the 21st Century
 * "Hooray for the 21st Century"

 * If you've lost your faith in love and music The end won't be long But if it's gone for you I too may lose it And that would be wrong...
 * "The Good Old Days" (with Carl Barat)

 * The red-faced president took afternoon tea With her majesty The Queen And they watched old films flicker Across the old palace movie screen Crying, "What a shame!" As she slipped in the rain Poor dancing girl Well, she won't dance again...
 * "Radio America"(with Carl Barat)

 * There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap Yeah, we'll die in the class we were born That's a class of our own, my love
 * "Time for Heroes"(with Carl Barat)

 * Don't let the tide of your sorrow Drown your nights and flood your days
 * "Don't Be Shy"(with Carl Barat)

 * Her old man, he don't like blacks or queers Yet he's proud we beat the Nazis How queer...
 * "Arbeit Macht Frei"(with Carl Barat)

 * Music when the lights go out Love goes cold in shades of doubt The strange face in my mind is all too clear Music when the lights come on The girl I thought I knew has gone And with her my heart has disappeared
 * "Music When the Lights Go Out" (with Carl Barat)

 * When she wakes up in the morning She writes down all her dreams Reads like the Book of Revelations Or the Beano or the unabridged Ulysses Oh, I really wanna know So tell me, Where does all the money go? Where does all the money go? Straight, straight up her nose
 * "What a Waster"(with Carl Barat)

 * I was a troubled teen Who put an advert in a magazine To the annoyance of my imaginary lover She doubted my integrity And this is what she said to me: She said, "Oh, you, you're green You don't know what love means Well, let me tell you
 * "I Love You (But You're Green)"

 * If you get tired of just hanging around Pick up a guitar, spin a web of sound And then you could be strung out all day With lovers and clowns Now I find myself still hanging around
 * "Ha Ha Wall"(with Carl Barat)

 * New York City's very pretty in the night-time But oh, don't you miss Soho?
 * "The Boy Looked at Johnny"(with Carl Barat)

 * She said, "I'll show you a picture, A picture of tomorrow, There's nothing changing, it's all sorrow." "Oh, no, please don't show me I'm a swine, you don't wanna know me!"
 * "Horrorshow" (with Carl Barat)

 * If you're looking for a cheap sort Glint with perspiration There's a five mile queue Outside the disused powerstation
 * "Albion"

 * I defy you all To know twice as much as nothing at all It's still nothing at all.
 * "A'Rebours"

 * I can't believe you've listed everything I stole since we met But I stole no kisses Just some books And the odd cigarette
 * "Love Reign o'er Me"

 * In the morning theres a buzz of flies Between the pillows and the skies that beg into your eyes Through the looking glass in between your thighs It's really no small surprise How it goes straight down the rabbit hole There it goes
 * "Through the Looking Glass"

 * And if lust and depair Are two bullets in the same gun Well we've been playing Russian Roulette for far too long
 * Breck Road Lover

 * Well, I'll tell you a story but you won't listen It's about a nightmare steeped in tradition It's the story of a coked-up pansy Who spends his nights in flights of fancy Met two fellas over gin and mixers They talked for a while, he soon got the picture One was a souped up Soho mincer And the other was a pikey with a knowledge of scripture
 * "La Belle et la Bete"

 * She was getting pally with a scally in the alley Giving head for gear She called a spade a spade Got slit from ear to ear I showed no decorum Spilled my heart out on the forum Like a snapshot of the most tragic day Carl is kept sedated,for the frontman elevated While McGee does all he can to ruin my band and keep me out the way In this industry of fools, musclemen and ghouls If you're not a puppet or a muppet then you might as well call it a day The truth gets so distorted The wall scrapings get snorted I'm welcome back if I give up crack But you gave me my first pipe anyway
 * "Gang of Gin" (never released owing to threats of legal action by pop mogul Alan McGee)

 * You should get some sun on your face We've been sitting like a lord in the bath for days It's getting like I don't even know you
 * "Merrygoround (That Bowery Song)"

 * It's one and the same, one and the same What's the use between death and glory? Hard to choose between death and glory Happy endings they never bored me Happy endings, they still don't bore me They have a way, a way to make you pay And to make you toe the line Now I'm severing the ties because I'm so clever but clever ain't wise
 * "Fuck Forever"

 * Make no mistake She sheds her skin like a snake On the dirty road to fame.
 * "There She Goes (A Little Heartache)"

 * Now I can deal with all the blood on my shoes, The holes in my sole, My spirit is tainted and, Oh, all my tears are painted
 * "Lust of the Libertines"

 * What did I dream? Oh, what did I dream? No one can keep me from my... No one could keep me from my... No fucker gonna keep me from my... Oh, what did I dream?
 * "Loyalty Song"

 * Doff your cap and raise your glasses, Make a toast to the boring classes I'm burning your secrets to keep me warm.
 * "Love on the Dole"

 * And he's crossing the road, He's picking up his Daily...Star
 * "Begging" (with Carl Barat)

 * Once upon a time... When the cold wind that blows, when the cold wind that blows in my heart, it was a summer breeze and she would meet me in Chinatown, for opium and tea and she always brought me flowers but I spared you those old ballads All those songs I couldn’t play But every giro day she’d dress me like a lady boy And take me high out of the way Don’t let the horse chase the new deal away, no If we make love in the morning I see your eyes look like two marbles in your head
 * "Lady Don't Fall Backwards"

 * Oh promises, promises I know you've heard them all before Love is, love is, love is, love is, love is... Oh well, it's just around the corner
 * "Back From The Dead"

 * Why should I wait until tomorrow? I've already been I've already seen All the sorrow that's in store
 * "Beg Steal or Borrow"

 * There's a slow train rumbling east of a place called Eden Feeling wind-blown and proud as the trees upon the plain And a stranger's voice talked to me of liberty and freedom Yeah, it seems like he done gone wrong again And he wears that hat like shame Well he tasted the fruit of another And when his Margie, when she discovered Said she's gonna love him ten times more Ain't nobody's business if she do
 * "East of Eden"

 * There's a man who came to stay The boy he replaced, disappeared without a trace. Stole all my songs and my style away No-one would say what they wanted to say So he was king for a day. If you sail into the sun Beware the eyes of green And if the whole world tells you 'you are the one' I defy you not to believe them, my son...
 * "The Man Who Came to Stay"

About

 * He's a sweet kid, I've met him a few times. He'll go down in history as a Morrissey and Marr or Lennon and McCartney type character. Him and Carl were great for each other. Apart they'll probably be shocking. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the British press about drugs. The people who write the stories are usually off their heads on cocaine anyway.
 * Noel Gallagher, 2005

 * What are you thinking when you see Pete Doherty self-destruct? - He's such an intelligent man. I completely understand, I just understand.
 * A Guardian interview asked Pete Townshend of The Who in 2006

 * "I think two years ago, if you thought Pete Doherty, he was kind of untouchable. Now when you think of Pete Doherty you think of that guy who's always in the background of that picture with Kate Moss. And if he wants to go out like that, then each to their own, and I'm sure he's having a great time but, y'know, are you gonna be remembered as Kate Moss's boyfriend or a f**king artist? In six months, if he's not put a record out, it's gonna smack of the emperor's new clothes, all of it. My opinion of him hasn't changed. His heart's in the right place but the people he's around are not that good for him,"
 * Noel Gallagher (Oasis), Entertainment News Staff

 * I think I felt a bit trapped before I met Pete. Have you seen The Lavender Hill Mob? Alec Guinness plays this wonderful, colourful person who locks it all up and goes through the motions. I always felt a bit like that. But then I met the Pigman and he said, 'You can actually knock that on the head and get out.' So we threw ourselves into eternity. And it worked.
 * Carl Barât, The Guardian, January 2003.

 * Pete is incredibly frustrating, yet you can't help but like him. The trouble is, he knows it.
 * Stephen Street, Spin Magazine, Autumn 2007.

 * I immediately fell for him; not only as a musician and poet - he has a rare grace, as well.
 * Hedi Slimane, 2007.

 * Peter is a gifted poet, writer and thinker. Please be considerate with him; I feel he's very vulnerable. He has a sensitive soul and he has many good points. He has helped so many people, in spite of, perhaps, your first impression of him he is actually trying to address his problems.
 * Jaqueline Doherty, Letter recited on BBC4 in 2004.

 * "I just wanted to give him a big hug. He'd come out from rehab and he was extremely charismatic. He's a lovely genuine guy. I hope he can fight his demons and come back to music."
 * Singer Amy MacDonald, 2008

 * "I actually like Pete as a person a lot. He is very funny, warm and charming. He has rough press and not surprisingly so. He is also very impressionable, quite vulnerable, rather too trusting and needlessly gets himself into some difficulties - basically and unfortunately for him, he is a scumbag magnet.
 * Graham Coxon, January 2009

title: Pete Doherty


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User talk:66.99.140.2

~ UDScott 21:21, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:66.99.140.2


text:
User:130.111.98.131

yeah, that guy is great

title: User:130.111.98.131


text:
Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (3 June 1926 – 5 April 1997) was an American poet born in Newark, New Jersey. He was a central figure among Beat Generation writers. Ginsberg is best known for "Howl", a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

Quotes

language abused for Advertisement, language used like magic for power on the planet.
 * The war is language,
 * From Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966)

 * The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found—the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.
 * As quoted in C. F. Main & Peter J. Seng, Poems (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973), p. 3

 * Millions of fathers in rain Millions of mothers in pain Millions of brothers in woe Millions of sisters nowhere to go Millions of daughters walk in the mud Millions of children wash in the flood A Million girls vomit & groan Millions of families hopeless alone  Millions of souls nineteen seventy one homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan
 * Allen Ginsberg. September on Jessore Road" is a poem by American poet and activist Allen Ginsberg

 * I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit. On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”. After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit.
 * Face to Face, BBC, 1994.

Howl (1956)

 * I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

America (1956)

 * America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

 * America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

 * I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

 * America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.

Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox

 * The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots
 * Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox (1975).

Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties

 * I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Heavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization.
 * Gordon Ball (1977), Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, Grove Press NY

Great Poets Howl

 * Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.
 * Glen Burns (1983), Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955, Peter Lang GmbH, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6.

Family Business

 * You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.
 * Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) (2001), Bloomsbury Publishing NY, ISBN 1582341079, p. 21.

Ginsberg's theorem

 * 1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game.
 * Several publications attribute the quote to Ginsberg, probably the first one is The Coevolution Quarterly in 1975 [Google books https://books.google.it/books?id=MylJAQAAIAAJ&q=%22ginsberg%27s+theorem%22&dq=%22ginsberg%27s+theorem%22&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y], but there's is no evidence whatsoever that he ever pronounced it. A more detailed analysis can be found in this post

Quotes about Ginsberg

 * He (Bob Creeley) introduced me to Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg-and Ginsberg has been a major model of mine. Olson has been a major model.
 * Paula Gunn Allen Interview in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets by Joseph Bruchac (1987)

 * A few days after the Congress ended, David and I encountered Allen Ginsberg in Hyde Park talking to a large crowd of flower children. Someone in the crowd around him asked his opinion of Che Guevara. Ginsberg replied that Ché was uptight, that he should just sit down and get stoned on coca leaf with the Indians in Bolivia. The questioner grew angry and yelled to the crowd: "The Indians chew coca to numb hunger pains, not for fun, and that's why Ché is there, it's about hunger and disease, not about getting high." Ginsberg laughed, and said, "I'll bet those are some happy, hungry Indians, chewing coca," and resumed chanting.
 * Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Outlaw Woman (2001)

 * I am also happily quite unable to suppress the surreal occasion when Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, the distant "Beat Poets" of San Francisco, made a curious kind of state visit to the Universities. It was something of a genial occasion – Alan Ginsberg was a genial poet, I remember, – and read his sub-standard Walt Whitman rhetoric for a long, long time. At the end, eventually, the undergraduate hippy-colony was joined by a few members of the Senior Common Room (I think the occasion took place in New College), among them Lord David, after dinner at High Table, dressed in a dinner-jacket. I was standing next to Lord David, when the bearded Beatnik asked him: "Who do you love, man?" To which Lord David replied: "my family and my friends".
 * Patrick Garland, 'David As Lecturer and Critic', in David Cecil: A Portrait by his Friends (1990), p. 121

 * At the start of the Iraq War, Bush issued an executive order banning photos of soldiers' caskets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, neatly decoupling the disastrous war from its body count. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration's decisive intervention was to ban images of dead bodies floating down the boulevards of New Orleans. And President Bush's advance team has banished protesters from appearing anyplace where cameras might capture them. It is all part of an elaborate effort to create a Potemkin presidency, where reality is defined and managed by those in power. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg explained the rationale best: "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."
 * Amy Goodman Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008)

 * Gay poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer set a post-beatnik tone for the dropout culture.
 * Judy Grahn Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1985)

 * Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance.
 * Roger Kimball, "A gospel of emancipation", The New Criterion, October 1997

 * there are also times when there is chaos in the world that is so powerful, and the world's weapons have gotten so strong... What are we going to do about the bomb? I don't know what the people with right politics and gentle weapons such as words can do. I remember during the Vietnam War Allen Ginsberg declared an end to the war on PBS, and he did it poetically.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * His bouncing back has to do with irrepressible joy and his spirit of fun. Somehow we are going to solve the world's problems with fun and theater. And with laughter. The reason this is all set in the Sixties, too, is that the monkey was here, in the Sixties. Abby Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, you know? They were monkey spirits, trying to change the world with costumes and street theater.
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * Toni Morrison and I and Leslie Marmon Silko traveled through China together five years ago, with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Francine du Plessix Gray...Ginsberg and Snyder are Buddhists. Gary Snyder had that book, Cold Mountain Poems, and we went to the Cold Mountain Monastery where he presented the poems to the monks that were there. And there was a painting on the wall that was the same painting that was in his book, which he identified with. And it felt really good because though the Chinese have wiped out the temples, his temple was still there. Allen Ginsberg went to a monastery that came from Tibetan teachings, and found symbols that he recognized, especially some kind of old bone that he worshipped.
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry!
 * Maxine Hong Kingston To Be the Poet (2002) p 10

 * Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926, was closer in age to Lowell than he was to the students of 1968. But Ginsberg, even in his forties, balding and a bit paunchy, with his thick beard and wreath of wild dark hair, had both the personal spirit and literary style that characterized the sixties. He was really a fifties figure, a central figure of the beat generation. But by 1968 many of the beats had faded. Jack Kerouac was dissipated from alcohol and did not approve of the antiwar movement. He accused his old friend Ginsberg of being unpatriotic. Neal Cassady died in Mexico in early 1968 while undertaking a fifteen-mile hike following a railroad line. He said he would pass the time counting railroad ties. But along the way he managed to get himself invited to a wedding party, where he spent hours drinking and taking Seconal. He was found the next day along the railroad tracks where he had spent the rainy night. Suffering from overexposure, he soon died, exiting in that free and offbeat style that had made his group famous. According to legend, his last words were, “Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.” Despite losing many friends to alcohol and drugs, Ginsberg was a passionate believer in certain drugs, especially marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. In fact, although he was a determined adversary of the Vietnam War and the American military and industrial war machine, there were three other topics that he seemed to bring up on most occasions. One was fair treatment for homosexuals. Always extremely candid in his poetry, some said graphic, about his own sexual preference, he was a gay rights activist before the term was invented. And he always championed his theories on the beneficial uses of narcotics as well as the unfair persecution of users. He was also a persistent believer in the value of Buddhist chants. By 1968, when Eastern religion had become a trend, it was easy to forget that Ginsberg had been very serious about his Buddhism for a number of years. Hinduism was also in vogue, especially having a guru, a new enough word in 1968 for the press to usually offer the pronunciation (goo-roo).
 * Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004), pp. 129-130 ISBN 0-345-45581-9

 * I was working as a secretary in Chicago when I went with a friend to hear Allen Ginsberg read...That night Allen Ginsberg broke open the world of writing for me. He wrote in the vernacular. This was real language, living and passionate. He wrote out of his own sexuality, not the way he had been programmed to believe it should be, but as he experienced it in his body and mind. He wrote with emotion and sometimes with humor. His poems were those of a Jew and a radical. As I sat there almost bolting out of my seat, he peeled off me all the veneer of graduate school...Because he was writing honestly, he offered to all of us a poetic license to tell our own truths...The academics may make a fuss about Ginsberg now that he is safely dead and it is fifty years since Howl broke a hole in the wall that had been erected around real poetry with the capacity to move people.
 * Marge Piercy "TOUCHED BY GINSBERG AT A (RELATIVELY) TENDER AGE" in My Life, My Body (2015)

 * I thought/about the reading he'd given at our college in Texas/that year, incense adrift on the air, his harmonium/humming. We'd all gone into a sandalwood poetry/trance, sitting with legs crossed, smiling back at him.
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

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~ UDScott 22:39, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

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