Peter Doherty is our Love Lover of the month of February!

British singer, songwriter, rockstar, poet and painter Peter Doherty (The Libertines, Babyshambles) joined Love Love for one our our very first Love Love Tv interviews in 2020 & we were thrilled! Doherty was showing his exhibition “The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime” at Galerie Chappe in Paris at the time. He sat down with editor Lisa Marie to chat about film noir, painting, creativity, love & life. Watch the filmed interview below.

The interview was later published in Love Love #4 – The Love & Beat issue. You can now read the full interview below.

You can still get a copy of Love Love #4 on our shop here.

The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime –

an interview with Peter Doherty by Lisa Marie Järlborn

It’s December 2020 and Love Love is hanging out outside a gallery in a City of Love echoing of emptiness.

Inside is rockstar & poet Peter Doherty. Peter is talking to a few people before me, then he comes out to have a look at the magazine and to say hello. He is wearing rain boots. It’s getting kind of chilly outside now as the sun goes down. Peter has a rustic, rainproof coat on. He looks very countryside. Perhaps it’s the living in Normandy, because that’s where he’s been spending his time lately. 

Now we’re in Montmartre, Paris. At the foot of one of those steep, romantic steps is the Gallery Chappe with its silvery façade. This is where Peter is exhibiting what he’s been working on since the world closed down. It’s the day before the opening and the exhibition isn’t installed to perfection yet. It’s called «The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime» and it includes more than 30 of Peter’s recent paintings. We go inside. Many artworks are laying around, little sketches of Amy Winehouse catch my eye. I like all the typewritten poems on the paintings. And the stencil of Peter’s Olivetti typewriter. He seems to worship it, I get the feeling. 

Peter is drinking a beer. We’re walking around his exhibition together. It’s still a bit messy, but the artworks fill the space well. The colour white is dominant, then there is the neon pink, the yellows, the greens, the quick graffiti spray expression…Stencil typewriters and typed lyrics pop up everywhere, rapid pencil drawings, outlines of faces and forms. Someone says there is blood on one of the paintings. I try to find it later, but forget to ask Peter about it. He points out Nico to me in one of them, another one is a self-portrait, one has the image of The Man with the Golden Arm on it, they are all little stories bound together. On top of Samuel Beckett’s face Peter has spray-painted ‘Honky Noir’, this is his own label of his art, what he ‘tunes’ into, a kind of creative parallel reality…

We sit down together. Peter lights a cigarette.

Lisa Marie: When did you first know you were a poet Peter?

Peter: Well, when my mom told me I was a poet. I don’t know. Long before I was one. I just had a calling I think.

LM: Do you remember something of the first thing that you wrote? Was it a song or a poem maybe?

Peter: It’s really embarrassing but I think I was two or one and a half and my mom was putting me to bed and she said ‘lay down your head’ and apparently I sat up and went 

«head and bed, head and bed» 

and I learned my first words. It’s a true story.

LM: I love it.

I know you like William Blake. Anything in particular by him, like a favourite poem?

Peter: The one about the little boy “piping down the meadows wild” you know uh

A vision of rural arcady

LM: I can only remember 

“Tiger, Tiger burning bright

In the Forests of the Night”

Peter: Yeah, it makes me think of the Mentalist now.

LM: …I wouldn’t know, is that a TV-show?

Peter: Yeah, it’s a series about a serial killer and he’s obsessed with 

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

in the forest of the night 

What immortal hand or eye”

Then we end the quote together:

“Can frame thy fearful symmetry”

LM: Do you have any other big inspirations, poets or maybe musicians who are up there with William Blake for you?

Peter: William Blake is like some mystical grandfather figure that I can’t really touch or be with. It’s quite distant. The world was a much more unspoiled place. And the kind of poetry you wrote, about complete freedom of nature…

But yeah, there are too many people who I genuinely relate to and are influenced by.

Lots of writers. A lot of what I call ‘Honky Noir’. 

LM: It’s what you’ve written on Samuel Beckett (in pink neon spray paint on one of the artworks of the exhibition)

Peter: It’s people like Nelson Algren or Dashiell Hammett. Do you know Nelson Algren? He wrote the Man With The Golden Arm. It’s about the American Dream, or the American Nightmare if you like. And Hunter S. Thompson, do you know him?

LM: Yes I really like Hunter S. Thompson. Both Blake and Thompson were illustrators like you, no wait..Thompson didn’t make his own drawings…

Peter: No, it was Ralph Steadman yeah. But they worked amazingly hand-in-hand though. I don’t think ever…or Roald Dahl didn’t make his own pictures did he? I don’t think there’s ever been a greater meeting of artists in prose than Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman. And they were really good friends as well.

LM: Can you tell us a little bit about the paintings of the exhibition?

Peter:  Yeah, I mean I can try. This is about being in in Normandy and in a certain frame of mind. “The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime” as expressed in, shall we say Maurice Leblanc. But if Maurice Leblanc had been born 100 years later. 

LM: So how long did it take you to make these?

Peter: I don’t know, half an hour.

LM: Oh, for each one?

Peter: No, I’m joking, I’m joking. But it’s been a bit of a mad rush lately, the last couple of weeks. There is a couple that are a little bit older. It’s mainly stencils and using lyrics from some songs I’ve written recently.

LM: Is this your “lockdown” art then? Have you been over there (in Normandy) during the lockdown?

Peter: Yeah, in complete lockdown. That’s what the world is like now.

LM: Where do you work? Do you have an atelier?

Peter: Yeah, this lovely fella called Frank, who owns a restaurant in Étrétat called the Marie-Antoinette, he rented me a little space, on the other side of the valley. I think he’s going to live there eventually, but at the moment it’s just an empty huge, cold warehouse. So yeah, I got some rum and some of my favourite books and then I just immersed myself in Honky Noir really.

LM: How long is a session of work? Can you stay in there all day?

Peter: That’s the dream isn’t it? To be able to go three or four days at it, like I used to. But I don’t really take drugs like I used to, so I feel a bit different, I can’t do three or four days anymore, so it’s more like, I don’t know, 40 hours…is a good time…

LM: 40 hours!

Peter: Yeah, 40 hours is a good time to get into the space, without having to worry about the dogs or the outside world and just get stuck into writing and reading, drinking and listening to the audiobook of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ which is a fantastic book.

LM: I love that book.

Peter:  I can’t get enough of that book. The whole atmosphere.

LM: It made me write in my journal compulsively.

Peter: Yeah, it does make you wanna write letters as well.

LM: Any movies that you saw lately that you liked?

Peter: I do watch modern films intermittently. But I’m a little bit obsessive about the films I watch. I watch the same films over and over.

LM: What are your favourites?

Peter: John Huston’s ‘Beat the Devil”, with Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart. It’s on YouTube. You can watch it anytime you like. And The Man with The Golden Arm, the movie of the book. It’s one of the rare times that the book is matched in glory by the film.

And Maltese Falcon, do you know it?

LM: No (embarrassed).

Peter: Yes you do! There’s a black falcon incrusted with jewels and Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, the private detective. There are too many films to watch again and again and again and again. So yeah, I just sink into that atmosphere and the ambiance of film noir, I love it.

Peter and I get up and start walking around the exhibition, talking about Peter’s artworks.

LM: I like this one, with the pencil drawings.

Peter: That’s Edward G. Robinson He’s an incredible actor…he’s about here somewhere (pointing). So I see a lot of film noir and use the characters in them..and characters the way I imagine they’d look from books that I’ve read.

LM: Do you have any self-portraits?

Peter: Well, they’re all sort of self-portraits…I think there’s only one which really started as a self-portrait, but didn’t end as one. Which is here. (pointing) That was my silhouette and that’s «The Man with The Golden Arm» too. And there’s Nico, I don’t know what she’s doing there…

LM: Oh yeah, I see it. 

Peter: I suppose this guy is a bit of a self-portrait, even if he has shorter hair…but he or she pops up in a lot of nationalities and guises and sexualities and she or he’s going to be a character in a future book I haven’t written yet.

And that’s Nancy Carroll, she’s cool.

LM: So you’re gonna write a novel?

Peter: Nah, that’s a dream, I don’t really have the discipline or the solitude, but…

LM: Do you know what it would be about? Would it be about you or would it be a fictional story?

Peter: Oh, I wouldn’t want to speculate…

LM: Your memoirs?

Peter: Yeah, I’d just be a glorified version of myself right.

LM: Who do you identify with in a novel?

Peter: When I first read Brighton Rock I thought I was Pinky for a little bit, but that’s not very aspirational and not very positive. It’s not a good place to be, it’s not the person to want to be. I don’t know really, maybe Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil.

Only because he’s just in a really bad spot and somehow he manages to navigate the waters of ethics, though he’s not really that ethical actually, he just wants to make some money but, he ends up doing right at the end…

And that’s really not a film noir at all, since it has quite the happy ending I suppose.

LM: I was gonna ask you this, which is maybe a bit presumptuous…are you happy Peter?

Peter hesitates.

Peter: You can’t hesitate can you? If you’re happy you don’t hesitate. You know you’re happy.

No I’m a bit sick because of this fucking van that’s been taken by the “mairie”, you know the council. I’ve got all my journals in there and it would have been perfect to give you some stuff for your magazine. It just pisses me off also before we get back to Normandy we gotta find the van, so that’s just a personal complication, but uh I am happy enough yeah. I do know what real happiness is and I’m looking forward to feeling it again sometime soon.

LM: What do you think love is?

Peter: What do you think love is?

LM: I think it’s something unexplainable…

Peter: Well there you go, that’s not much of an answer is it.

LM: Well it’s just it’s invisible you know, it’s like the soul, you know it’s there but you don’t know what it is.

Peter: This is what you think or you what you know?

LM: I’m just saying what I’m thinking right now, like I don’t know, absolutely not, I’m just improvising.

Peter: Love is improvisation…

LM: Maybe love is happiness…I’m always thinking that when I ask people if they’re happy, that maybe people who have a lot of love in their lives or are feeling loved or loving at the moment feel happy.

Peter: I think that’s very uplifting.

LM: If you don’t have love around you, you can feel that life is a bit worthless.

Peter: Even more so though, like if you see love and you recognize love and you know what love is but you don’t know how to love yourself…that’s what creates hate I think. Knowing that something exists and you can’t have it.

LM: Envy. It’s hard, it’s like when you’ve been broken up with and you just keep seeing couples everywhere…well that happened to me, I don’t know if it happened to you?

Peter: Nah! I wish you more luck eh. No, that just fills me with joy, seeing happy couples. Or does it? How dare they be happy?

LM: It fills me with joy to see so many typewriters.

Peter: I know! Well it’s the same one stencil but I’ve got a bit of a collection… it’s one of my guilty secrets, my typewriter collection…I have 140.

LM:  Really!

Peter: Yeah. I like your shoes.

LM: Oh thank you, I have loads of leaves here.

Peter removes the leaves from under my shoes.

Peter: I’m gonna send you some stuff for your magazine. I feel that we have a connection here.

Peter Doherty joined Love Love again in issue 5 – the real fake issue

A few very rare copies are available on the shop here.

In Love Love #5 – The Real Fake issue – Peter’s writings were accompanied by photos by his friend, photographer & event planner pretty malina. These typewritten pages & photographs were also exhibited at The Real Fake exhibition at 0FR in Paris in March 2022.