BigShinyThing

Pete Doherty is bloody everywhere at the moment. Similarly, actress Juliette Lewis can be seen on magazine covers and in clothes ads flogging her band Juliette and the Licks.

Juliette and the Licks have had pretty respectable reviews for a band fronted by a Hollywood star. Let’s face it – Keanu Reeves’ Dogstar wasn’t treated this nicely. And then you notice that Lewis is currently also fronting a campaign for Swedish designer J Lindberg who is obviously in need of a bit of rock mystique. He has also taken on the services of Doherty’s old mucker, ex-Libertine Carl Barat to front his clothes campaign – oddly, Barat has a new album of solo material coming out.

In last week’s Evening Standard magazine, Lewis raved, “I am really into Swedish designer J Lindberg, who is known in LA as the rock’n'roll designer and who has a store in Covent Garden. I got a pair of black jeans from him recently and a grey sweater.”

How kind of her to mention in a London-based publication where his shop is. And oddly neglect to mention that she fronts his campaign and is therefore paid to wear his clothes. Pictured is Lewis on the cover of another Evening Standard publication, the listing mag Metro, wearing – yes – J Lindberg.

Could it be that Juliette Lewis and the Licks are an actress’s hobby rolled into a clever marketing ploy?

Meanwhile, Pete Doherty spent most of last year selling stories about his drug habit, Kate Moss and various other misdeamenors to the tabloid press and building up a nice bit of rock’n'roll notoriety in the process. Marketing for his previous band, The Libertines, rarely shied from exploiting the ‘glamorous’ side of his drug problems – witness the cover shot of their last album, The Libertines. It also hasn’t hurt his current band Babyshambles, whose new single has entered the charts at no. 4. Just as the song Fuck Forever entered the top 10 in the UK, the band turned up late for a gig in Norway because Doherty and a friend had been detained at Oslo airport for carrying 1.7g of cocaine and 1.5g of heroin. Just enough to get arrested and enjoy the ensuing worldwide press coverage, charged £700 each and released.

Now, as even Iggy Pop can tell you, rock’n'roll sells. All of a sudden, Doherty is muse for Hedi Slimane, creative director of Dior Homme – the designer has even published a book of his photographs of the singer. A canny move, given that Doherty’s cover image is selling issues of everything from the News of the World to Arena Homme. Now, he’s launched his own website, Balachadha.com, to tell (and sell) his side of the story to his fans. And gotten round to issuing a press release about it.

Funnily enough, the site is subscription-based – how else to squeeze more money out of journalists and teenagers for access to his louche lifestyle? Of course, the website can also provide access to ‘censored’ coverage that TV and tabloid can’t reach – how else can Doherty make a killing from carving up his arm? The site promises to show such footage that was expunged from a documentary about the singer – all of which has garnered even more press. A quote from the director of said BBC 3 documentaryabout the singer shows just how calculated the whole enterprise has become:

When I first met Pete I felt he had multimedia potential and he would break the mould, dismantling the barriers between the band and the audience. The potential for him to work in different media is immense but it is also necessary for him to keep control. This site is making a statement. It’s way for Peter to be in control of all the different aspects of his work.

There are, of course, plans to develop the site so that clips of Doherty’s performances can be downloaded to 3G mobile phones. Maybe they should consider selling a ringtone version of Fuck Forever. After all, in its own way, the canonisation and selling of Pete Doherty has been as calculated and cold as Jamster’s Crazy Frog.