Poet or plank?

There were a number of things I thought about writing today, all of them rants, because they have come to my attention in the last few days (slow middle lane drivers on the motorway, the endless roadworks to install those utterly useless 'driver information systems' which only serve to tell you that you are in a traffic jam, like you hadn't already noticed, or to distract you with patronising messages and pointless estimates of how long it will take you to drive an arbitrary distance. Quite how we managed before all this technical wizardry is a mystery to me). However, something I have just read changed all that in an instant when it made my sides hurt with laughing.

The subject of this humour is none other than Pete Doherty, the smack addled and talentless pikey du jour. For those not in the know (and who can't be arsed to read the wiki link), Doherty first came into the public eye as the front man for a (at the time) little known indie band called The Libertines. Essentially, they were a re-hashed and re-branded punk outfit who stole mercilessly from those who had been before but for some bizarre reason they were heralded as the next big thing and even more inexplicably, Doherty was touted as some sort of musical genius.

To be honest, I'm amazed he can sit on a toilet the right way round. He is a skinny, acne infested waster who spends his entire time filling himself with more or less any substance which might just give him a bit of a buzz and he most certainly is not any kind of genius - quite the opposite in fact. Somehow he has ended up doinking Kate Moss, herself no brain of Britain and no stranger to a bit of Bolivian, and the tabloids love it. The Libertines eventually saw sense and booted him out of the band because he rarely bothered to turn up for gigs anyway (and they had produced only one track that was even vaguely worth the effort, although naturally that didn't deter NME from declaiming them as some sort of messiahs and spouting reams of bad prose about them. Sadly this is normal for the NME - a bunch of washed up hacks with their heads so firmly entrenched in their own arseholes that they would struggle to recognise a decent tune if it bit them on the balls) but he was soon back with another band called Babyshambles, and a shambles they certainly were. A real low was reached when, during a television interview, Doherty squirted a syringe full of his own blood over the camera. Even his own band mates were disgusted but that didn't bother Doherty one little bit. The music they produce is boring, unoriginal and mostly sounds like they can barely be arsed to play it (and many people certainly wish they would go the whole hog and just give up) and the only thing keeping Doherty going now is tabloid notoriety.

However, it seems that our Pete has actually learnt to write and has made a book out of his 'collected writings' so now those odd people who are fans of his can fawn over his sub-teenage (ahem) 'poetry', which is fair enough if you're into that sort of thing, but a little snippet about this book on the legendary Popbitch made me laugh rather a lot. It was a review of his book (or an excerpt thereof) and it was safe to say that the writer was not a big fan of the book or the man:

A review of Pete Doherty's writings on Amazon: "I have ordered 53 of these books as I understand that they are written in his blood. According to my calculations that should use up about eight pints of it and hopefully bring an end to the adolescent dribblings of this smacked-up sub-Dickensian tossclump."

So, I decided to take a look at all the reviews on Amazon and nearly wet myself. They are either starry-eyed sycophants who sound like they want to crawl up his arse or people who have seen the book for what it is - the outpourings of someone on whom the moniker of 'idiot' would actually be an insult to idiots everywhere. Needless to say there are some colourful phrases involved but it is well worth the effort of reading them because they're really rather good overall. Enjoy!