Pete Doherty

Anybody else think Pete Doherty is a thinking man's Sid Vicious?

The comparison's (or synchronicity's) are a little spooky. The tall, emaciated pale giraffe look, the drugs, the prison time, the bared chest and the the slow, almost childlike voice and odd innocence.

The difference of course is talent and 'education', Doherty comes top of the class here.

He has an air of the fallen dandy about him, the perennially misunderstood poetic soul who's passion for idea's and direct emotional expression, seems so beguiling in a world that is often more concerned with impression management and surface display.

Doherty's lack of contrivance, edginess and unpredictability - both onstage and off - often makes for awkward if fascinating watching. He's like a big precocious child who utters profound and annoying questions to show up the pomposity and insincerity of all the 'adults' in the room.

Yeah, I know all the potential cliches are there for the cynics to jump on: wasted rock 'n roll animal, druggie, lout, exhibitionist, narcissist...and so on. But Doherty knows the score, he has a deep ironic knowledge of rock-lore, he also knows he belongs to an older school of outsiders - the troubadour-poet tradition. He has to keep moving because the lesson from history is, sensitivity = sorrow and early death.

Mr Vicious would have spat in your face if you said he was a Romantic. Doherty appears to rejoice in what he calls his "paranoid narcissism" and see's romanticism as something to be endured - the Sturm and Drang tithe that must be paid to squeeze out a little honest poetry.

Is this a consequence of his diving too deeply into the death obsessed lyric ocean of dark Byronic chaos? Probably.

More interesting than watching Sid do 'My Way' though.