A Mirror Full of Crack (Part One)

Part of me is now starting to find the ongoing saga we can call the Death of Pete Doherty quite funny, especially when we get blubber like the stuff that's been filling the Mirror and other red tops of late.

They won't be happy until he's gone.*

Personally, I find the lazy comparisons with Kurt Cobain pretty odious - for the Libertines have written far better songs than Nirvana churned out, and Pete Doherty, unlike Cobain, seems free of that American R&R speciality, anal-retentiveness. Neither is he pea-brained; if we must pick a forerunner it's Keith Richards: like him, in his darkest days with the Horse, it's still unlikely that he'll be checking out anytime soon.

Sure, he loves drugs; but unlike Cobain, you don't get the feeling that he hates the world. There's a difference - an important psychological difference - between a cavalier attitude to mortality and self-hate. Cobain obviously wanted out (and took the coward's option, despite the hypotheses of Nick Broomfield's silly doc on his death).

En passant, great as Smells Like Teen Spirit is as a recording (I think Nirvana are well overrated, but I'm not black and white small-minded about them, or any other band), it does have one of the stupidest choruses of any great song, doesn't it? I can half-convince myself that it's deliberately stupid, to reflect the bulbous smegma lava-lamping inside the brain of the average American teenager, which would then mean that it's not stupid at all - but I'm only half-convinced. I think my problem is that I think Kurt Cobain was a pretty stupid guy, who stupidly took his own life.

In my head, and often when playing it during my private whisky nights, I pair it with Some Might Say by Oasis, as that has the Nirvana song's faults in reverse: a fantastic chorus, but lame verses, especially the second one.

Back to the Death of Doherty. Given the alleged list of previous paramours (Bobby Gillespie?!?) I expected Doherty to do better, find someone a bit more interesting and exotic than Kate Moss. Then again, these are thin times for British culture, thin, thin times. I mean, we're about to anoint Showaddywaddy* as our Best Band.

* Franz Ferdinand, people.

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