Cast your eye up to a craggy hilltop in the small French coastal town of Étretat and it might land upon a tall, trilby-hatted figure ambling around after two giant dogs. Clad in swim shorts and wellies, with a sizeable moustache and his T-shirt on inside out — M&S label poking merrily from the side — he looks more like an eccentric farmer than one of the most written-about rock stars of the 21st century. But these days, Peter Doherty — he’s not ‘Pete’ any more — is embracing the simple life.
‘Look at Gladys, she looks like one of those hound dogs from the Deep South, like one of them smell dawgs,’ he chuckles in his best American brogue, as the more lumbering of his canines stares dopily in his direction. To his left is his wife of two years, Katia de Vidas, nursing their three-month-old daughter, Billie-May; to his right, the de Vidas family home where they’re currently staying, and where guitars, baby clothes, massive dog bones and domestic detritus cover every surface and corner.
