You hoped that was just the feel, though.

It might be more than that, it turns out. They might just be about to crumble.

Doherty was booked into The Priory, a private rehabilitation and psychiatric hospital, just over a fortnight ago. He's now in Paris, allegedly. In an interview he gave to a Sun journalist for yesterday's paper, he talked about how people were coming to visit him, claiming to be family or close friends, but how he didn't recognise them. He talked about how his band-mates, his best friend Barat, and manager Alan MacGee, had all turned their back on him.

The band-mates, of course, tell a different story.

Doherty had turned up for the brief interview looking particularly dapper, by all accounts, decked out in a black suit and neck-tie. What he was saying, though, indicated that in his head things might be slightly more dishevelled.

At the end of the interview he stepped into a taxi and headed for Dover, intending to go to Paris to clear his head and so on.

I hope you do, Pete.

Watching him wander around London in the video for his collaboration with The Wolfman, the Verve-esque For Lovers, he seems so child-like, so innocent, that his spiralling addiction seems even more punishingly sad.

Fans flooded the NME's letters page last week, telling of Doherty's recent appearance with side-project Babyshambles, how he arrived onstage looking incredibly discordant, and stumbled through a few numbers which he either totally forgot about a couple lines in, or which he couldn't remember the words to.

Those folks who were penning the emails were saying about they weren't going to be spending 15 quid simply to fuel this bloke's destruction.

And it's even sadder because, unlike many of those rock-star types I mentioned earlier, Doherty does genuinely seem to want to free himself from it. He's not laughing about it, or telling all to FHM journalists, playing up the laddish antics and the lager-fuelled mayhem. He seems remorseful, piercingly aware of the effect it all has on his mother, and his friends and fans.

I hope Pete Doherty is able to carry on being Pete Doherty, member of The Libertines, one of the most genuinely exciting British bands of the last decade, and doesn't end up like another member of a certain British outfit, Richey Edwards, a name to whisper about and to talk of in hushed tones, an individual who was prodigiously talented, and yet who ended up self-destructing just as his band were about to cross over to the mainstream.

But most of all I hope he's able to carry on being Pete Doherty. Whether or not he remains an active participant in the scene he helped instigate is entirely up to him.

Good luck Pete.

You're a nice little bastard. I'd hate to see anything fucked-up happening.

The Duke resides at Mondo Irlando

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