BigShinyThing

See how frightened they look? Free the crackhead 3!

Via the much-better-than perezhilton blog, dlisted.

UPDATE (also courtesy of dlisted). Kitten-flaunting appears to be an emergent celebrity trend. Where’s PETA when you need them?

First, a graph showing the number of blog posts that contain the words "Pete Doherty" + KLF per day for the last 30 days.

There are LOTS of people out there willing this to be true and we always had our suspicions.

The story goes:

From tomorrow’s Dagenham Evening Chronicle:
FURY AS DOHERTY TRUTH REVEALED

The Samaritans have today recruited 600 extra staff to deal with an expected surge in calls as troubled fans come to terms with today’s revelations about rocker and teen icon Pete Doherty. In a surprise press conference today, the men behind Doherty’s career reveled themselves - and admitted that the Libertines, Babyshambles, the tales of drug use, the armed robberies and the affair with supermodel Kate Moss have all been part of one of the largest hoaxes in British history.

The men behind the scandal - Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, who were themselves infamous popstars under the name The KLF - admitted how they plucked a young Buddy Holly impersonator Doherty from obscurity and made him a media darling. “It was a meant to be a quick stunt to show the frailties of our celbrity-obsessed culture,” said Cauty, adding, “there are too many people who are famous despite their lack of talent, usefulness and basic intelligence. We wanted to do something that held a mirror up to that.” Mr Drummond called Britain’s pop-culture “sick” and said that although he regretted the hurt caused to Doherty’s many fans, he hoped “this incident taught us all some important things”.

In a prepared statement, the two men - famous for many other pop pranks, including the famous burning of GBP1million on a remote Scottish island - detailed how they manipulated the British Press into making Doherty an icon. Doherty - whose real name has now been revealed to be Trevor McDermott - was making a living as a part-time Buddy Holly impersonator in the Cornwall holiday circuit. He began a short-lived affair with the singer of a well known 80’s rock band, and was introduced to Drummond and Cauty at a backstage party in London’s West End. The men described how a drunken McDermott amused them with his slurred singing and frenetic dance movements, and how they then realised that this would be the perfect “dupe” for a plan they had been hatching for some time.

“The plan involved proving three theories we have about current British society,” reads the statement. “The first is that in the so-called “alternative” scene, everybody is too scared of missing The Next Big Thing to worry about anything else.” To prove this, some session musicians were provided to compose the rest of the “band”, The Libertines, and rumours of exposive gigs were leaked to the media. “The gigs in question never actually took place, but we didn’t have to worry about that. Soon the buzz around The Libertines was so frenetic, journalists were falling over themselves to claim to have been at the front of every single fictional gig.” Within weeks, The Libertines were appearing on magazines and receiving record offers. Gigs sold out in minutes, while their first album “Up The Bracket” flew off shelves.

Feeling that their first point had been proved, Drummond and Cauty moved to their second theory: “We feel that our culture has become an enormous soap opera. We don’t care what a person thinks, or creates, or contributes. We just care about what they do in their normal lives. Especially when it’s something they shouldn’t be doing.”

To demonstrate this, the men co-ordinated a number of scandals. First was a robbery staged in the house of one of the band members. When this took place, McDermott (aka Doherty) was unknown outside of the alternative music scene. An incident of this calibre was sufficient, however, to catapult McDermott onto the front page of every major national tabloid. “One day we has just another singer, the next day he was ‘Disgraced Celebrity Rocker’, and he hasn’t been out of the papers since”. Further revelations about drug abuse and violence kept McDermott and The Libertines on the front pages for months.

One thing that took even Drummond and Cauty by surprise was the affair with model Kate Moss. “That was not something that we planned or had any involvement. Whether she knew about the hoax is something we are not party to. We have never had any contact with Miss Moss.” However, this was the boost their project needed - where the drugs and crime had made McDermott a media sensation, the relationship with one of fashion’s most famous women catapulted him into the world of true celebrity. “While we had not planned this, it certainly proved our point. There are many superior artists in the country today, but they never appear in Heat or The Sun, because they don’t have the words ‘boyfriend of Kate Moss’ after their name.”

Despite this boost, the project began running into a major setback for Drummond and Cauty. Just as they were preparing to enter the final phase of their scheme, Doherty decided that he wanted to part company with them, the fake band, and begin seriously recording music. He stopped all contact with the men, and threatened legal actions if any details were leaked to the press. “We were upset at the apparent failure of our grand project, and also at the monster we had created in Pete Doherty. Our third theorem - that ‘If enough people say that a piece of s*** is a bar of gold, we’ll believe it’s a bar of gold’ - seemed to have been beyond salvation. Fortunately, at that point Pete released the first Babyshambles album.”

In the time since then, Drummond and Cauty have been locked in a vicious legal battle, which was eventually settled out of court by the discovery of a videotape showing McDermott singing “Peggy Sue” at a Butlin’s in Devon. Publicly, McDermott still strongly denies all charges. How this affects the future career of Pete Doherty remains to be seen.

Whatever the truth (it seems to have originated here)… it’s a glorious idea. We can hear the Babyshambles/KLF mash ups already…

Via Gawker, Debaser, Heckler Spray etc etc.

The controversial images are popular with some people and not others. We say there’s a (not all that actually) fine line between cute boy skinny and a look that says I’m wasted and/or ill. And yes, that is supposed to look like Pete Doherty.

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.