The curious case of Pete Doherty’s kidnapping in Russia: “It was a bunker, there was no windows”
John Cooper Clarke was once kidnapped by a mega-fan named Dr Müller in Switzerland. He was driven to a château amid the alpine mountains, where he was introduced to a larder of the finest Merck laboratory-manufactured substances the world has never seen. Unfortunately, Pete Doherty had no such luck.
When the forlorn Libertines frontman wound up temporarily kidnapped in Russia, his fate was far less Bond-like.
The future indie rock star was born in the quaint town of Hexham, Northumberland, on the outskirts of Newcastle, but owing to his father’s role in the military, he was forced to move around a lot as a child. Art often provided company while he nestled in as the perpetual new kid in school, and when he was 16, he won a poetry competition and headed off to Russia as part of a British Council tour.
This opened his eyes to the bohemian comforts of culture, and when he finally wound up in his grandmother’s flat in London, he felt that he had found his place in the world. He would, as they say in Russia, ‘Жить на широкую ногу’.
Back in Blighty, he quickly looked to surround himself with like-minded folks, and a surefire way to go about this was to spawn an art collective akin to those he had read about in New York in the 1960s. Like some sort of indie Edgar Alan Poe character, by day, he worked as a gravedigger, but by night, he curated a poetry evening at a bar called The Foundry. An assortment of artists began to congregate, and soon, a collective formed.
In 1997, as part of a cultural exchange, The Foundry’s collective headed over to meet with a Russian counterpart group in Moscow. The two contrasting groups would entertain each other with a varied of performances. “Very strange times, lots of chickens everywhere,” Doherty recalled when recounting the story on The Last Leg.
The frontman’s act was essentially to look cool and perform The Pogues classic ‘Dirty Old Town’ but in Russian. Meanwhile, his friends would form a cabaret of other acts, including one Scottish actor who would simply set off ‘sound bombs’ in confined spaces.
But not everything would go to plan for poor old Pete. “There were these two Russian artists who were part of it. They did like some dance thing and did something to do with lights and radars. When they were in London, I put them up, and so they were supposed to put me up,” he continued. “But they basically locked me in their flat, and that was part of their installation, but they didn’t tell me.”
So, you had a young Doherty, bored and afraid, confined to a small flat in a brutalist housing estate in Moscow, worrying that both the end was nigh and about how on earth he would perform ‘Dirty Old Town’ in a foreign tongue should the moment ever arise. Imaginations of this scene vary from him frantically slamming his shirtless frame against the door to simply raiding their cupboards and trying to decipher what was happening in a Russian soap opera.
What Doherty didn’t know, however, was that he was being filmed. “It was a bunker and there was no windows. I couldn’t get out, and yeah, they filmed it all and then transmitted it to the gallery and that was their installation: me freaking out in a flat,” he says, the victim of false imprisonment and an invasion of privacy.
The whole thing sounds utterly harrowing for the average human, but all the hairline-impacting horror of the whole ordeal was suddenly forgotten when Doherty happened to be crowned the star of the two collectives when he became the best-reviewed act of the whole show. He now looks back on it rather fondly, just maybe not quite as fondly as his fellow poet Dr Clarke looks back on his ordeal at the hands of artistic kidnappers. It’s seemingly a recurring issue when it comes to inebriated bohos in foreign lands.
