![]() When I was a kid we were always moving around, changing schools and I remember winding up in the Nicholas Chamberlaine comprehensive in Bedford, and I just stood up one day in class and it was like, 'Doherty! Doherty! What you doing? Sit down!' And I just walked out, up through the estate, up the hill, and just sat in the cemetery. How did he come to be pick-pocketing Emily Dickinson? "Dunno how it came about! Just stumbled into it. To hear the ramblings of Doherty in person is like listening to a badly-tuned radio: inaudible murmurings peppered by silence and bursts of song, and then sometimes a voice of pure lucidity. It was like, 'Dad's in uniform, barbed wire and go off to war'." He mumbles: "What passing bells." "My old man was in the army and it was just in my blood so strongly. He says his fervour for war poetry came about almost by osmosis. 'What passing bells for these who die as cattle?'" he quotes, from Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth. " his gaze ambles into the middle distance. When you've known the hell where youth and laughter go, sometimes repeating it yourself can. ![]() It may sound quite strange, maybe clinical, but I dunno. ![]() What appealed about this poem? His eyes blink open. "I knew a simple soldier boy," he begins, eyes half-shut, voice drifting over the lines before clinging to the last couplet: "Sneak home and pray you'll never know/ The hell where youth and laughter go." The frontman of Babyshambles and formerly the Libertines is often championed as a poet as much as a songwriter, and this Thursday, in a TV show to mark National Poetry Day, he will be reading the Siegfried Sassoon poem Suicide in the Trenches.
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