Pete Doherty with his friend and fellow addict Pete Wolfe. Photograph: Andrew Kendall (www.andrewkendall.com)
In 2008, Jake Fior received a phone call from a woman he didn't know. "Her voice was a sort of husky velvet," says Fior. "She said her name was Robin Whitehead and she wanted to speak to me as she was making a film about Pete Doherty. I said, 'Oh dear, that's bad luck.' She laughed, and it started from there."
Fior hadn't been joking. The musician and bookseller, now 47, had known the Libertines' singer since 2001. Fior had rewritten and produced Doherty's first top 10 hit, "For Lovers", but by 2005 he'd "had enough of all this chaos in my life", as Doherty's drug-fuelled lifestyle took its toll on everybody around him. Fior returned in 2008, to try to record a solo album with Doherty, before walking away for good.
Whitehead never got that chance. On Sunday 24 January 2010, she died from a suspected drug overdose in the Hackney flat where she had been filming Doherty and his friend, another musician, Pete Wolfe, whom Fior had previously managed. Last month, Doherty was sentenced to six months in prison for possession of class A drugs, and Wolfe 12 months, for possession and supply of class A drugs, a conviction secured by damning evidence filmed by Whitehead on the weekend of her death. It is Doherty's third prison sentence since 2003, and follows multiple fines, court appearances, spells in rehab and broken promises to clean up his act. "The media are calling this a tragedy," says Fior, speaking before the pair received their sentence. "But for a brilliant, beautiful, vibrant 27-year-old girl to have gone into that flat and not come out, it is not a tragedy, it's an obscenity."
Whitehead and Fior had a relationship for nearly a year, but at the time of her death they were just friends. "She was as bright as a button and hilariously funny," he says. "She was really unusual – very, very talented. I couldn't quite work out how Doherty had managed to get her involved [in the film], she seemed too sophisticated… but I think she was first approached when Doherty was still with Kate Moss and she hadn't envisaged that he'd make the film so difficult for her to complete."
The Friday before her death, Fior had dropped Whitehead outside the flat in east London. "I rang her up the next day," he says. "They had reduced her to tears over this film. I was going to go over there, but it would have resulted in a serious confrontation, and Robin didn't want that. But of course, I should have gone all the same."
Film-maker Robin Whitehead. Photograph: Family Handout/PA
Whitehead was the daughter of film-maker Peter Whitehead and his former wife Dido Goldsmith, a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith. "Had they known that she was related to the Goldsmiths, I think it would have made a big difference with them," says Fior. "Despite his public persona, Pete [Doherty] isn't immune to being impressed by that sort of thing. They are just bullies really, and like most bullies they are cowardly enough to know who they can and can't pick on."Fior should know. His first contact with Peter Wolfe came in 2001. "Everybody said I shouldn't go near Wolfe, but Carole – my girlfriend at the time – was living in the same flat, so avoiding him proved difficult. She asked if I could help Wolfe with his music career."
Wolfe, a "failed plumber from Maidstone", was born Peter Randall. He had already made several unsuccessful attempts to become a singer but Fior was sufficiently impressed by Wolfe's writing skills to offer to help. "Even then it was clear that he was a drug addict and quite dishevelled," says Fior. "I told him that if he got himself sorted out I'd try and do something. At the time I thought it was a win-win because he'd never sort himself out and I'd look good for offering. Unfortunately, he went to America and got off drugs for a bit. I wish he hadn't bothered."
Fior put together a band, eventually renamed Wolfman and the Side-Effects. A buzz began to build, partly thanks to their biggest fan. "Even at the height [of our fame], we didn't have much of a fanbase," says Fior. "We had hit records, but only about 100 people at our gigs – but the number one fan was Pete Doherty. I knew Doherty well, I had employed him to hand out wine at private views when I was running a gallery – he did a good job. He is capable of being quite charming."
At the time, Doherty was a singer with indie group the Libertines, the band he had formed with Carl Barât in 1997. Doherty was also hooked on heroin and crack, and partly because of this shared addiction, Doherty and Wolfe were virtually inseparable. Doherty regularly used lines written by Wolfe in his songs and borrowed aspects of his personality. "With his kitchen-sink romanticism, Doherty assumes the existential position of the outsider," say Fior. "But in reality he is an extrovert. Wolfe is the outsider, and for good reason." Wolfe was also getting back into drugs. "We played a show at the Sundance film festival in the US. Afterwards, the bass player told me Wolfe had smuggled some heroin over, up his bum. From then, it just became a case of trying to manage his dependency and make a joke out of it. I approached Special Brew for sponsorship but they declined. Maybe they were worried about the image of their beer?"...
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Peter Watts @'The Guardian'
