Aw, Poor Pete

This is Pete taking a photo of Jamie-James backstage in Newcastle. Jamie reports: “Some of the gigs on the tour were literally the best thing I have ever seen in my life, ever. Everywhere he went there were legions of slathering girls and boys desperate to get a piece of him. It was like Beatlemania.” Photos by Jamie-James Medina.
 

Vice and Peter Doherty haven’t exactly had the most harmonious of relationships. The singer first appeared in our pages in the DON’Ts section of the Nature Issue, where we described him as “a junkie dad who’s so desperate for drugs he holds sock-footed concerts at his apartment where idiots pay £10 to hear him play songs from the band he just got kicked out of.”

The next time was in the Photo Issue, where we had a big portrait of him smoking crack. Pete volunteered to do the photo and even burned tobacco in the pipe to make more smoke come out of it. Then we did an interview with our friend James who signed him to Rough Trade. For some reason that didn’t go down very well either. Despite our “poor treatment of Pete,” staff photographer Jamie-James Medina got his way onto the recent Babyshambles UK tour as official photographer.


This is Pete’s Naltrexone implant. It blocks opiates. During the tour, the implant got infected, so it started leaking. Pus seeps out of it all the time. “Despite all that, the new album is really great,” says Jamie. “It’s a three-part concept album about boy meets girl, boy goes to jail, then jail and the girl save the boy.”