Pete Doherty has a few regrets, but his biggest is not recording music with Amy Winehouse. The two were fast friends back in the mid-2000s as Winehouse rose to superstardom. Unfortunately, that bond was more rooted in drug addiction than music. The Libertines frontman recently talked about his friend, who died in 2011, and his new song about the iconic pop singer, "Flags of the Old Regime."
"She was quite a harsh critic," he said about Winehouse in a video that was taken off YouTube (via NME). "Sometimes we'd get together to write songs and she'd say, 'Come on then, play us what you've got,' and I'd play a particular chord progression and she'd be like, 'Nah, it's not really good is it Pete?' So I was determined to use that particular chord progression."
Toward the end of Winehouse's life, Doherty saw a change in the singer's personality. He said she went from being a mellow person to someone who was always trying to start a fight. Her heroin addiction worsened, but in the end, the singer drank herself to death.
"We'd get together to make some music but we never really did, not properly," he added. "That will haunt me to my dying day, the fact that she was a little girl, she didn't know anything. I had to stay away from her in the end, because she was like me, she wanted more of everything."
Doherty had a difficult time trying to put his feelings into the new song for his pal. The Libertines frontman finished a stint in rehab recently, so he's clean now, but he remembered the words to the song as "almost impossible" to sing when he first performed it. Listen to it below.
Back in 2012, Doherty recalled what it was like immediately following Winehouse's death. Mitch Winehouse, Amy's father, did not permit him to attend his daughter's funeral.
"When Amy died I was sat in a matchbox room in Camden Town, not able to leave, basically wallowing in my own filth," Doherty said. "Literally knee-deep in shit. Literally not able to move. I couldn't speak, I couldn't see anyone, I couldn't pick up the guitar and when I did pick up the guitar it was woeful ballads about how Amy wouldn't be coming round tonight. It wasn't a very inspiring time."
