Pete Doherty and collaborator Frédéric Lo have shared the single ‘You Can’t Keep It From Me Forever’ as well as announcing details of their new album ‘The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime’. Having previously shared the title track, now The Libertines/Babyshambles man and the French musician, musical director, composer, arranger, music producer and singer-songwriter preview their upcoming album (due for release in March) with the summer-ready track ‘You Can’t Keep It From Me Forever’ – which Doherty said was inspired by his now drug-free lifestyle and the pair’s love of classic indie-pop.
“It reminded me a little bit of early Morrissey or some of the early Suede stuff, with an old-school catchy guitar,” Doherty said. “I never get bored of singing this song. I’m really going to enjoy singing it live. There’s just something so uplifting about it.”
Peter Doherty & Frédéric Lo “You Can’t Keep It From Me Forever” taken from the forthcoming album “The Fantasy Life of Poetry & Crime.’
Asked about the lyrical inspiration, Doherty replied: “I suppose it’s a not-even subconscious yearning for things. I’ve been clean since December 2019, so at the time of writing this I was really white-knuckling it with the drugs and feeling like would only be a matter of time before I went back to it. It hasn’t turned out to be that way, but there was that kind of kicking out at the new way of being clean and feeling like it was temporary. You can apply that to any kind of yearning, but to me it was specifically about that. Time passed, and I’ve managed to somehow keep on the straight and narrow, if it is indeed straight and narrow.
“That’s the honest answer, but it seems silly to give that answer now, though. If it really was such a necessity then I would have just gone out and used. I suppose this is just a smarmy, self-sabotaging sort of thing, but just in the role of a narrator.”
Lo, most notably known for his work with Pony Pony Run Run, Stephan Eicher, Maxime Le Forestier, Christophe Honoré and Alex Beaupain, first met Doherty in the summer of 2020 when he asked him to record a cover for a tribute album to his late collaborator, the acclaimed French singer-songwriter Daniel Darc.
From there, Doherty said that he naturally found himself writing lyrics for pieces of music that Lo had written. Within six months, a whole album had been written during lockdown before being recorded at Cateuil in Étretat in Normandy and Studio Water Music in Paris.
“It was really natural,” said Lo . “It was the end of summer in beautiful sun, and we worked in a beautiful house in Normandy. We just kept writing songs until we had a whole album. Peter didn’t want to play guitar, so I played guitar, bass and keyboard and recorded a French drummer with one of the biggest orchestras in Paris. It really was something special.”
The Fat Angel Sings 