The Blackest Lips

This is Pete Doherty holding one of our Scandinavian editor's Sonics albums this weekend in Stockholm. If you live in the region you've probably already seen this picture to death, but for those of you outside the Swedish tabloids' sphere of influence here's what they've been gabbin' about. After playing at the Hultsfred Festival in Sweden last Friday and getting slightly busted for some coke he was carrying around in his bloodstream, Doherty and crew beat feet for Stockholm, met up with the Black Lips, and convinced them to let Babyshambles open at their gig the next night. Accounts are pretty sketchy across the board, but we can be reasonably sure at least a couple of the following things occurred:

-halfway through Pete's set, the club management cut power to the stage and told the house DJ to "get the disco going;"
-amid the din of a couple hundred angry Babyshambles fans and his own bassist tearing around the club in search of a mic input, Pete cruised over to the DJ booth, stuck his hand blindly into the crate, and came up with "Who's Got the Crack?"
-once the Black Lips went on, Pete stuck around to do a couple songs with them, then was pulled off stage by a security guard and the owner of, according to our Scandi editor, the best illegal bar in Sweden (see photo below);
-once the Black Lips went on, Pete stuck around to do a couple songs with them, then made off with a pair of girls from the sidestage and one of the Lips' guitars;
-after either being kicked out of the club or leaving of his own volition with a stolen guitar, Pete spent the evening terrorizing girls in Stockholm's Old Town like one of the drunken robots from the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World.

Only time will tell which bullets deserve smiley "truth" faces next to them and which warrant frownies, but, then again maybe it won't. Maybe the cover of tomorrow's Expressen will have Doherty and the Lips on its cover shaking hands with the mayor in Helsinki with all their guitars visible and a timestamp for Saturday night. It's sort of hard to keep any item from turning into fucking Rashoman when its central players include a guy who may have ripped out his own naltrexone implant, four guys whose signature stage move is pissing in each other's mouths and who have an axe to grind with stolen equipment in Scandinavia, and about 30 rabid paparazzos in one of the most press-starved regions of Europe. Then again, it's also pretty hard when you're kind of like, "Eh, whatever."

To see a moving picture of this co-mingling of fucked up minds, click here!