Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  Christopher: We met Peter through our pal Brezzie when he was in Manchester with Babyshambles on tour. We organised an after-show party for them on our Gio-Goi double-decker because no one would give them a venue to party in. I gave him a Rudolf Dassler jacket, which was a collector’s piece worth £1,000. We put Gio-Goi on it and took pictures. Those were the ones that appeared in The Sun. There was a big indie explosion going on. It was all indie. Everything was about Camden. Peter was all over the press. It was all about him and Kate. But because he was always in and out of court on a variety of drug charges no one would touch him with a bargepole. He was a perfect fit of us.

  Anthony: We lapped it up. Guess what? If it’s good enough for GQ it’s good enough for us. Peter came to stay with me right after the Kate thing. He was at my house for three days hiding from the press. When he first got here he was with a journalist but Pete didn’t know he was talking to a journalist. They rang me at five in the morning. I was still up. When they got to my house I said to the journalist, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He was driving Pete’s Jag. Pete said, ‘Oh, he’s helping me because I’m on the run from the press.’ I said, ‘He is the fucking press.’ I then became part of the story. The guy said I kicked him up the arse and put him on the next train back to London. [27 March 2006, Evening Standard. A two-page feature focused on the journalist’s all-night drive to Manchester with Doherty. When they arrived at Anthony’s home the journalist wrote: ‘He takes one look at Pete’s filthy hands, throws him in the bath, and pours us both a gin and tonic. “I’ve booked you a hotel room next to Mike Tyson, as much cocaine as you like, and a woman, yeah, and tonight you’ll meet the Manchester massive.” Then he gets on the phone to his sister and asks Pete to play something for her, while he dances clutching his groin around the living room. But Anthony’s mood changes when I tell him I’m a writer. “No offence, son, but I’m a premier league cunt into stuff you don’t want to know about. I don’t like writers and I’d prefer it if you’d just fuck off.” Fair enough, I say, but you could ask me nicely. Pete, looking slightly shame-faced, says, “That’s Anthony asking nicely. Do you mind? We had a good run.”’]

  I put Peter in the Great John Street Hotel where Mike Tyson was staying. That’s when the press put we were singing in the bar – me, Tyson and Doherty. They said we were all together but Pete didn’t come out of his room very much and did not even meet Tyson. When I came to pay him out of his room, I had to pay an extra cleaning charge of £120 because there was blood up the walls and everywhere because of what he was doing in that room. I put him in a Gio-Goi T-shirt and when we walked out the door, the press was there and he was papped getting in the car. We went back to my house and I hid him again. But the press started getting really hot. Everyone was looking for him and he was in my house off his barnet. I was in the middle of this big intense press hysteria – there were journalists banging on my mum’s door. I told him to go back and square things off in London. He drove back, stopped at a service station and picked up a paper, one of the tabloids. In it there was a big feature a double page on me and Chris, with the headline: ‘Keks, Drugs and Rock N Roll’. In it, it said we made Shaun Ryder and Pete Doherty look like naughty schoolboys. Peter was ultra-impressed and from then on we were thick as thieves. He wanted me to be his manager. I loved him and wanted to but he was absolutely crackers so I said no. But we now became part of the story.

  Christopher: Peter was around all the time. He’d come up and stay. He was all over the papers with Kate. Then he’d be at the Admiral pub on Sunday afternoon in Ancoats playing his guitar to ten old blokes all sat having a pint of bitter. He was papped wearing a Gio T-shirt with the slogan ‘It Is What It Is’. That was one of mine. I was doing the slogans and graphics. I did an interview and they asked me what happened to Gio-Goi first time around and I said, ‘Too much rock ’n’ roll, that’s what killed it, too much rock ’n’ roll and not concentrating on the business.’ So we put out a ‘Too Much Rock & Roll’ T-shirt and it ended up selling shitloads, tens and tens of thousands. Another T-shirt said ‘Those Without Vision Shall Perish’. I used the thing from Stuffed Olives, ‘Once is all you need but it’s seldom enough.’ I also used ‘Drug Free’ again and that sold tens and tens of thousands. I would come up with the slogans and then sit with Glen and we’d do the graphics together.

  In the early days we rarely saw Melville Capital. I think they were a bit embarrassed about their lack of knowledge in the branded market. We did a show in Berlin and even though they were in Berlin they never even came to the stand. But once it started firing, once it started making money, once the profile went through the roof, then they wanted to be involved, puffing their chests out, saying it was all about them. They brought a designer in called Steve Atkinson, who was quite well known for doing denim. Steve had worked at Firetrap so he’d worked in a very corporate environment and was used to critical paths and all that – ‘this has to be done by this time, this has to be done by that time,’ whereas we just didn’t give a fuck, ‘you got it when you got it’ kind of attitude.

  It seemed to us that Melville was trying to change the company and make it into this corporate thing. They started coming to Manchester more often. Steve went off and built this whole range and when it came in, it was not what Gio was about at that time. It was little button-down shirts, real skinny jeans, skinny black leather jackets, cool stuff but not what we were selling. It was a bit before its time. It was indie. The logo was of two guitars laid across one another in the shape of a cross. I knew it wasn’t going to work. It was too much of a big step, too far forward from where the brand was at the time. So Douglas came to me and asked me to put a range together. Glen and me put a range together in a few days. We did basic stuff and that was what sold – graphic T-shirts, casual fits – not too high fashion. I called it White Label.

  Anthony: I went to meet Pete in Bath with Brezzie. Pete was doing some recording. I said, ‘We need to wind this up a bit more.’ I said, ‘Let’s do a clothing range together.’ Kate had just announced she was doing a range for Top Shop in a [reported] £3 million deal. It was the same principle as Robbie. There’s a big campaign around Kate so why not do a clothing deal with Peter – he’s the controversial one of the two. Reuters wrote that it was one of the cleverest marketing campaigns ever. Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen.

  So we were in a pub in Bath discussing him doing a clothing range and he kept walking away and doing drugs in the corner of the room. He knows I don’t like heroin. I kept telling him off: ‘I don’t mind you smoking crack or weed or drinking, but not heroin.’ He keeps getting up and down, smoking crack. I got pissed and I must have blacked out.

  In the morning when I got up he was still at it, doing the same, and that’s when we actually nailed the deal. I went down with a typed piece of paper, a contract saying I would sign him from 2006 to 2009 and he would market Gio-Goi exclusively. I said, ‘We’ll do the clothes and we’ll just put your name in the back of the neck, you don’t do fuck all; we’ll just say you designed it.’ He is very scatty and unreliable, as well as being a beautiful and loveable person. He just quite calmly said, ‘Yeah, no problem. Do what you want.’ That’s when I asked him, ‘If you drop dead, now or later, and I’m with you and you’re not wearing the brand, would you mind if I took your shirt off and put a Gio-Goi garment on?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely’ and he gifted me his favourite set of rosary beads and posed in a ‘Drug Free’ T-shirt for a photograph.

  I left with the contract, the photo and the agreement that I could photograph him dead should some Kurt Cobain incident happen or some sort of overdose. He was one of the most famous people in the world at that time. We had the crown jewels. He was controversial. Every day something was happening with him. Paul McCartney had a private meeting with him for two hours. Harrods were sending helicopters to pick him up and take him to parties. It was bizarre.

  Dominique Vidalon and Reuters got in touch and I accidentally told them Pe
ter had signed to do a clothing deal. They released it on the wire and it went crazy. I could not open my front door. It was like a scene from Notting Hill. The cat was out of the bag: the junkie, Moss’s boyfriend, was doing his own clothing collection. The story went round the world. They said we must be insane dealing with him, but it just elevated the company globally and opened doors all over the world. Every time Kate did something, Pete was there, or vice versa, and between the two of them it was the biggest story in the world.

  I picked him up one morning from Kate’s house in St John’s Wood. Pete came to the door; he had two hats on and a bottle of wine in his hand. He’d been up all night and everyone else was asleep. He asked me to drop him off at rehab. He was an outpatient. I had to fight the paparazzi and we got chased through London.

  Christopher: We had piles and piles of samples of this indie stuff Steve had designed for Gio-Goi, so you know what? It’s perfect for Peter, that’s what he wears. So basically we blagged it. We said Peter and me had designed a range of clothes – it was a complete fabrication. We then announced we were doing a gig in Selfridges to launch the Doherty range. I went on tour with Babyshambles for a week filming to make a video and it was rock ’n’ roll of the highest order, as rock ’n’ roll as rock ’n’ roll gets. I saw Peter as a tortured poet and he liked things we did, like ‘Dodgin’ the Rain ’n’ Bullets’. He said we were modern-day poets, which we thought was great praise from an amazing songwriter and poet himself.

  The Doherty/Gio-Goi collaboration was to be exclusively available from Selfridges in London from 7 December 2006 for thirty days and would be released to selected stores thereafter. To launch the range Babyshambles would play a gig on the seventh-floor car park of Selfridges on Oxford Street in London. The Monday before the launch, Doherty was fined £770 for possession of heroin, crack cocaine and cannabis in his latest court appearance. A question was put to Selfridges: Why was a respectable department store using a junkie with a tendency to get into fights to advertise their wares? ‘He is the face of a brand we have in store,’ said a spokesman. ‘So it’s not a direct association with Selfridges, it’s a collaboration between him and the label.’

  Christopher: So we managed to blag our way into this situation where we’re doing a gig in Selfridges car park on Oxford Street with a load of samples that we couldn’t sell. We drove from Bristol with Babyshambles the night before. There was a load of people at the Sanderson Hotel waiting for us. I was wasted because I’d just done a week on the road with them. I said to Anthony, ‘All you have to do is make sure Peter doesn’t disappear tonight.’ I get up in the morning, phone goes, it’s Anthony – Pete’s disappeared. He had sneaked off in the night to a crack den. Anthony had followed him but Pete didn’t want to leave the crack house and they had a bust-up.

  Anthony: My bar bill at the Sanderson was £15,000. Dealers were following trolleys full of booze to my room. We were supposed to be doing that launch in-store at Selfridges. We should have done a private gig and taken money on the door. They didn’t want us in the store because of the reputation of Babyshambles. Peter was ill; he was an addict not a criminal.

  I went to meet the head of security and saw the guest list – MTV, BBC, Bryan Adams, the Sex Pistols, Kate Moss, and Alannah Weston who owns Selfridges and Primark. There was an interest in the brand but there was more of an interest in Peter.

  It was like Madchester all over again – here we are again with another load of drug-crazed lunatics. The security said to me, ‘We can’t risk a family coming in for a shopping experience and seeing him off his head in the middle of the store.’ They wanted it but in the end they decided to do it in the car park. They get the publicity but they don’t get the shit that comes with it.

  Christopher: We’re doing the gig at 2 p.m. and there was 500 people waiting from the press and there was no Peter. He was at least one hour and a half late. I was going ballistic. It was a disaster; people were saying they were leaving. Then Peter turns up. He said he’d been lost in the stationery department. He’s a charming geezer, so you kind of think, ‘Okay.’ And then the bailiffs jumped out from nowhere and cornered him. They wouldn’t let him go onstage because he had an outstanding fi ne. We have to pay the bailiffs a grand in cash. He then did three tracks which were electrifying – he’d not been to bed for two days. That was it – the launch of the range. We got what we wanted out of it. It was all over the world’s press.

  24 December 2006, The Sunday Times Style magazine ran a large and prestigious feature on the Selfridges event and Doherty’s relationship with Gio-Goi under the headline: ‘Who’s Keeping Pete Sweet?’ The blurb read: ‘Making Pete Doherty the front man for your menswear brand seems like asking for trouble. But if anyone can tame the wayward rocker it’s the label’s hard-nosed Mancunian owners.’ The article described how Anthony had chased down Doherty the night before the Selfridges gig in a Jamaican shebeen and threatened him with a pool cue. Asked what made his relationship with the Donnellys work, Pete said, ‘Ah, it’s love. Love and intimidation, like all the best relationships.’ The article also mentioned Doherty being interviewed by the CID over the death of Mark Blanco, a struggling actor, who fell to his death from the balcony of a London block of flats where Doherty was partying in December 2006. Doherty also said, ‘Gio-Goi are on the fashionista manor. They’ve tumbled their gain. I love the clothes.’

  Anthony: We were doing the photo shoot for the Sunday Times piece in Manchester and we were driving up the road and Peter was saying how uncomfortable he was. He was sat in the back seat. He lifted his shirt up and there was a bag coming out of his stomach. I said, ‘What the fuck is going on? What’s that? Oh my God, he is leaking.’ He was saying it’ll be all right. I said, ‘Are you mad?’ and I rang the hospital on my private health care plan. I told them I had a very famous person who needed attention but we needed to come in the back door. I told them it was Robbie Williams. I said it was an emergency. We walked in and they were shocked at who it was. They took him into a room. My phone went and it was Kate, ‘What the hell is going on?’

  I went into the room. It was an operating theatre – that surprised me. Pete was conscious with three people operating on him. He was looking at me and I said, ‘It’s Kate.’ I passed him the phone on the operating table … it was surreal.

  I paid the bill, £720. On it, it said, ‘Pete Doherty, removal of alien implants’ [Naltrexone implants used to block the effects of heroin]. I then took him to the studio where he did the photo shoot for the Times Style magazine like nothing had happened.

  I’ve never met a more resilient human being, bordering on madness. He played football, he danced and he went on stage to do a gig at the Academy that night and announced to the crowd I had removed his implants.

  Weeks passed and then he rang me from a gig and said, ‘Come meet the missus in Brixton Academy.’ The game was still on with the press – are they an item or not? He picked me up from the VIP area and took me backstage to meet Kate. Pete asked, ‘Do you have some money for me?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I went and got Rhianwen – the money was in her handbag – from the VIP area and went backstage. She and Kate got on well and as Rhianwen went to pass Pete the money, Kate took it instead.

  Obviously, Pete would spunk it on drugs – he was deranged. I’d never seen anything like it. You felt like you were with Jimi Hendrix. This kid had a Ready Brek glow; people just wanted to be near him. I loved him and he loved me. People were always kissing his arse and with me it wasn’t like that. Kate was a pleasure – really nice person. We got on.

  Then there was a lull and I didn’t see him for while. But I saw some pictures of him in a bar in Ireland with Kate and Shane MacGowan. I rang my pals in Dublin and asked them to go and find him and to tell him I wanted to meet him. I had to remind him we had a clothing range to publicise. My pals in Dublin went to where he was and put me on the phone to him. ‘Peter, we need to do the photos for the collection, the gear’s ready.’

  Christopher:
We ended up making up some of the range that Steve [Atkinson] had made to sell through Selfridges. Steve then became the head designer at Gio-Goi and I took a step back. Steve knew the value of what we did but he could play that corporate game as well. He was in the middle. Steve was in Manchester for a little while and when Gio-Goi opened an office in London he went there. Glen was down there before anybody, but inside the business it was getting very corporate. People started to get upset with me just turning up and taking Glen out. I got asked very politely could I not keep taking him out because he had a job to do. I would go down there weekly, so I rented a house in Camden. It was party central, nicknamed the ‘Gio Mansion’ – a £3 million pad on Camden Mews. Radiohead lived opposite. Pete was always popping in and out. It was like a railway station, people always coming and going.

  Anthony: I was drinking with Pete’s manager and he said, ‘Look, we’re doing this Vogue photo shoot for Dior [Dior Homme by French fashion designer Hedi Slimane] with Shane MacGowan’s wife [author/ journalist Victoria Mary Clarke], Carine Roitfeld from Vogue and [photographer] Mario Testino.’ He asked me would I like to get involved. I said, ‘It’s not a case of would I like to be involved. I’ve got the contract, he’s signed exclusively to Gio, so he can’t do this Dior shoot, but I am prepared to share the shoot with them because of course I would like to be on the cover of Vogue.’

  That was it. They flew in with loads of jewellery and Dior’s firm were just looking at us like, ‘Oh my fucking God. What’s happening here?’ Mario Testino completely got us and was trying all our gear on, saying how wonderful it was. He loved us. All of a sudden the Dior was binned and it was all about Gio. It was a very drug-fuelled time. I was not in a good place mentally.