How the hellraising Noughties crowd embraced middle age... even Pete Doherty

Kate Moss lives quietly in the Cotswolds, Sadie Frost runs online yoga classes, and Noel Fielding presents The Great British Bake Off. Now it seems that Pete Doherty has finally joined his old party crowd in settling down.

Pictures emerged yesterday of Doherty, the wild child of the Noughties and Moss’s former lover, looking relaxed, happy and decidedly paunchy as he took his dog for a walk in the coastal French town of Étretat with his girlfriend, Katia de Vidas. Gone were the skinny jeans and crooked trilby of his rabble-rousing days. In their place were navy blue tracksuit bottoms, an ill-fitting white T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops.

When the pictures emerged, Twitter was full of barbed comments comparing the stick-thin, drug-addled Doherty of yesteryear with the fuller-figured, grey haired 42-year-old man strolling along a footpath in a seaside spot. But there was kindness among the trolling: “This is the most relatable Pete Doherty has ever been,” one user opined.

The pictures suggest the end of an era. They suggest that the last of the gang of celebrities who filled the nation’s newspapers on a daily basis in the early Noughties has opted for the quiet life. Through Doherty’s relationship with Moss, who he dated on and off between 2005 and 2007, he was connected to the so-called Primrose Hill Set, a hard-partying group of actors, models and musicians that included Frost and her then-husband Jude Law.

Doherty appears to have finally joined this group in embracing middle age. A key member of the set, Meg Mathews, who was married to Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, has written a book about (and launched an online platform dedicated to) going through the menopause. Among other things, Frost now runs yoga workouts under the Yin&Tonic brand name. And hair stylist to the stars, James Brown, is hunkering down in the Cotswolds with Moss over lockdown. The partying days seem behind them all. Moss told Elle magazine last year that her idea of a good night is now going to bed at around 11pm and watching Netflix. Fielding, who was a regular on the London party scene, once talked of routinely being photographed “in a gutter with Pete Doherty”. Since then he’s “mellowed out”, become a public cake-taster and a father, too.

A music PR who used to work with the musician said that it’s “great news” that Doherty appears to have traded hard nights for the good life with de Vidas, who plays the keyboard in his latest musical outfit Pete Doherty and the Puta Madres. “It looks like Pete has finally found happiness. The kind of lifestyle he had was unsustainable; things seemed doomed for a while.”

And doomed is an apt word when it comes to Doherty, whose former lover, Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 following years of addiction issues. Looking at the pictures, it’s easy to forget just how tangled, murky and unpleasant his life was in the years after his band The Libertines spearheaded a UK revival in shambolic indie rock. From 2002 to around 2007, the band’s popularity made Doherty a pin-up for a generation of music fans. But the times were also dark.

Innately talented but crippled by drug addiction, Doherty surrounded himself with a grubby entourage and seemed to ricochet from one calamity to the next. He was arrested countless times for drug offences – once when 13 wraps of heroin fell from his pocket during a criminal hearing – and pleaded guilty to possession of crack cocaine, heroin, cannabis and ketamine. He went to prison on numerous occasions. One of these sentences, in 2003, came about after he broke into bandmate Carl Barât’s Harley Street flat and stole a guitar and a laptop while The Libertines were touring Japan without him.

Creation Records founder Alan McGee managed the band around the time of their second album in 2004; the tough Glaswegian had managed to keep the likes of Oasis and Primal Scream under control. But no such luck with The Libertines. McGee wrote in his 2013 autobiography that a sober Doherty could have been “the biggest rock and roll star in the world” – instead, he was “the most nihilistic man” he had ever met. One night the band were due to play a gig in Birmingham but Doherty was AWOL. McGee writes of finding him “in a crackhouse” in no state to walk and wearing no trousers. So he wrapped him in a carpet, carried him into the tour van and stopped en route to the concert to buy him some clothes. Stories like this abound from those who knew him at the time, during which Doherty was in and out of rehab. Even as recently as 2019, Doherty was arrested twice in three days in Paris, once for having cocaine on him and then for a drunken brawl.

But he, like many of his old pals, appears to have spent the last couple of years doing an about-turn. Doherty has two children: a son, Astile, 17, with singer Lisa Moorish (whose daughter’s father is Liam Gallager), and a daughter Aisling, nine, with the model Lindi Hingston. And he seems blissfully content with de Vidas. In one picture he has his arm around her shoulder. In another he’s perusing the meat aisle of a convenience store; her Instagram account also features loved-up snaps.

It’s a world away from falling out of the Groucho Club at 2am or being found semi-naked in a squat, as McGee claims to have found Doherty. “Some musicians go on forever, like Bowie did,” another veteran music PR tells me, “and some go suburban, which it looks like Pete has done.” Is it important that he doesn’t look the picture of physical fitness? After all, lockdown has left many people looking like a gym visit might not go amiss.

“He certainly looks like he’s fully embraced a more relaxed lifestyle,” the source says. “Many of us never thought we’d see the day. But I guess middle-age comes to us all eventually, even Pete Doherty.”

Read Meg Mathews’ new fortnightly column for Stella magazine, where she reveals what she’s learnt about the menopause