Britrockers in a bad way

One thing that really tickled me that I read in the last few years was from a Guardian profile of Pete Doherty. He's moved to rural Normandy and apparently given up hard drugs in favour of....  cheese and butter. The libertine has become a gourmet-gourmand - not an untypical trajectory, I suppose, for a young person becoming a middle-aged person, Eros gradually giving way to the Epicurean.

This was the quote that really made me chuckle: 

“The cheese in this area – the brie, the camembert. There’s something special in the grass, you can taste it in the milk, it’s different here, it’s so creamy. I drink it by the pint. And the butter, and the bread, and the saucisson..." 

Despite the apparently cleaned-up lifestyle, Pete looks just as sickly and sweaty as before. But now it's French farm produce rather than urban chemicals that are being ingested. There's a sallow, waxy tinge to Pete's complexion, as if it's composed out of rind from a particularly ripe camembert. 

In one of the photos, Doherty's got some kind of cape around him, hiding his portly girth, and with the walking stick and the cravat, there's a resemblance to Orson Welles in his sherry commercials era.  

Or maybe the look he's going for is more like Gustave Flaubert?

I was reminded of the dotage of Doherty when yesterday I came across this ticklesome snippet about Richard Ashcroft, affectionately nicknamed "Captain Rock" by his good pal Noel Gallagher: 

On 19 June 2006, Ashcroft was arrested in Wiltshire after bursting into a youth centre and asking to work with the teenagers present at the club. He began swearing and refusing to leave so employees called the police, resulting in Ashcroft being arrested and receiving an £80 fine for disorderly conduct.

More delicious details from the Wiltshire Times's report: 

Rock star Richard Ashcroft was arrested in Chippenham on Monday for disorderly behaviour after he burst into a youth centre and offered them £10,000. The former Verve frontman stumbled into The Bridge Centre, in Bath Road, at 8pm and announced to a group of 60 youngsters, who were all under 12, that he was Richard Ashcroft from the band The Verve and he wanted to give them money. Bemused children looked on as the star, who was looking scruffy and dishevelled, offered them money and volunteered to work at the centre....  Ashcroft, 35, who was apparently drunk, began shouting and swearing and refused to leave so staff were forced to call the police.... When he was arrested, Ashcroft started singing songs to officers from the back seat of the police car.... Ashcroft was taken to Melksham police station and left to cool off for a couple of hours before being issued with an on-the-spot fine of £80.

This must be a first for rock 'n' rollers - causing a disturbance through an uncontrollable urge to  commit community service. 

The proper rock'n'roll thing to do would surely be to burn down a youth centre, or at least smash in its windows. 

Any more for any more? Bizarre tales from the downward arcs of Britpop godstars of the 1990s? 

Let's keep in that zone between Madchester and the new whatever-it-was in the early 2000s. NME shite. 

Bear in mind, I haven't lived in the UK for decades so a lot of the stories that wash up in the tabloids, I will have completely missed. 

February 1 update: 

BRITROCKERS IN A BAD WAY:  SUGGESTIONS FROM THE COMMENTS BOX

William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut

Phil Knight feels we should piling on Captain Rock aka Richard Ashcroft (while also conceding that A Northern Soul was a good record... I'm quite partial to the early shoegazey stuff actually, or was at the time... and who can deny "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work")

Matt M finds amusement in Justine Frischmann's post-musicking career: 

Television

In 2003, Frischmann co-presented a series called Dreamspaces for the BBC Television about modern architecture. In 2004, she presented The South Bank Show and was a judge for the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.

Art

In 2005, Frischmann moved to Boulder, Colorado, to enroll in a masters program in visual arts at Naropa University, a small, Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, and "become a nobody". In 2012 her work was shortlisted for the UK's Marmite Prize for painting, and she has been included in The Amsterdam List of 1000 Living Painters.

In a 2016 interview regarding her art career, Frischmann stated, "I don't really have any desire to make music, to be honest."

Frischmann has said, "The themes and ideas I am working with are in direct relation to an ongoing personal narrative; the big questions are reflected in the choices I make in my art ... [including] my ever-evolving relationship with my spiritual faith. I think my approach and aesthetics reveal internal struggles and speak to my family origins and history."

Personal life

... In the spring of 2000, Justine took up competitive fencing. She married a meteorologist, Professor Ian Faloona in 2008, and lives and works in the United States.

This odd, motley aftermath-to-fame relates to something I have been meaning to blog about, a sequel (more like a twist) to Wiki-Fear. But I will save those thoughts for a later juncture. 

Phil, just getting warmed up, zeroes on in another televisual moment of awkwardness, this time involving Bobby G. 

Stylo swipes Jarvis 

Phil points to another example of the indie/cheese interface - "what we've got here is proto-cheese" says Alex from Blur. 

Straying off topic really, but a couple of examples of indie / Britpop parody, from Tyler and that man Phil again

After I expressed mild amazement that the words "Ian" and "Brown" had not been mentioned, people came with the goods

Strangeways, there he went (Stylo)

bizarre Welsh nationalist monkey protest (Phil)

Phil piles on the Libertine again, with this story about another associate who met a sticky end. 

Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes 

"The photographer and film-maker, had spent the past few years making Road to Albion, a documentary following Doherty after he left The Libertines. She had become the unofficial photographer of Doherty's new band, Babyshambles, and was reportedly working on another film about the singer in recent weeks.

"She is the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, and great-niece of the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith.

:Her mother, Dido Whitehead, is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, and her father is the 1960s film-maker Peter Whitehead" - the latter most known for his psych-era Pink Floyd-soundtracked film Tonight Let's All Make Love in London. 

Another example of the entanglement of the upper classes with the counterculture / bohemia...