Lock me up with Doherty

Pete Doherty and Babyshambles are playing a special comeback gig to celebrate his release from jail at one of my favourite music venues, the Kentish Town Forum, on Tuesday. There are still tickets available at the time of writing, which at £22.50 are a fair bit cheaper than the last London gig Doherty did at Wembley Stadium towards the end of last year. Doherty off the smack and crack is one of the best live performers around (he’s not too bad on it either, though a mite less reliable), so catch him while he's straight. Be warned, though, if you’re over 21: his audience is one of the youngest around and the mosh pit will be full of 14-year-olds.

I’m going to have to miss the gig myself as I’m pre-booked to be blindfolded and tied up in a wheelchair that evening as part of the Battersea Arts Centre’s Burst season. Later, I’m mixing it with the New York performance weirdo Ann Liv Young (sorry, Ann, but the performance is a bit, well, weird) in her ‘high energy explosion of pop songs, movement and mess’. Part of it involves her smearing her naked self with chocolate (or is it ketchup? I forget). The Burst programme says it’s ‘a powerful, open honesty’; my daughter insists it’s soft porn. I’m easy either way.

I’m paying my political dues before my quick Burst of debauchery (there’s a month of it to come, with A Trashy Multi-Artform Bingo Blowout Party at the old town hall that is the Battersea Arts Centre tonight) by turning out for the ‘1968 and all that’ event at London’s Conway Hall today. And tomorrow I’ve got to be in Morden by 8am for the ‘6n6’ swim and run duathlon. Someone should have locked me up with Pete Doherty.

Wembleyshambles

Kate Moss didn’t turn up but Pete Doherty did and Babyshambles turned in a set last night that made it worth the trip to that graveyard of English footballing aspirations called Wembley. (I said nothing about the Croatia game here last week and don’t intend to do so now. But Belarus, Andorra and Kazakhstan – the ninth biggest country in the world, bet you didn’t know that . . . aren’t you just itching for them to show us how it’s done in the World Cup qualifiers?)

I was told a possibly apocryphal tale by two lads in the Sports Bar across from the Wembley complex that the last time they’d been to a Babyshambles gig, on the Jools Holland show, Doherty’s failure to show resulted in his replacement with James Blunt of all people. Doherty himself remarked from the Wembley Arena stage: ‘They said that QPR and Babyshambles would never play at Wembley.’ Which might have been a good joke if it wasn’t for the fact that QPR have played there at least four times to my knowledge, including twice in the same year in 1982, when the FA Cup final against Spurs went to a replay.

But let’s not begrudge Doherty his moment of gloating. Given another chance to prove he can perform after a series of drug-induced disasters, he and Babyshambles seized the opportunity. Which is more than be said for the shambles of a football team who failed to turn up last Wednesday.