Blur: No distance left to run (well, a little bit)

John Harris catches up with Damon Albarn for the Guardian, and discovers that we might just about be at the end of the Blur reunion period:

So no more Blur records?

"No, I don't think so."

And will you play live again after Hyde Park?

"No, not really."

This is even bigger news. So that's it?

"I think so, yeah," he says. A little later, he goes on: "And I hope that's the truth: that that's how we end it. I don't know: you can write scripts, and they always end up going… [pause]… well, one thing I've learned, and I'm sure you're exactly the same, is that everything I think I've got totally sorted out, and I know exactly what's going to happen – it never works out that way…"

So how should I put it? That in all likelihood, this is the end of Blur?

"In all likelihood, I would say. [pause] Oh, God…"

This isn't a very clean declaration of an ending - it's a 'ooh, footsteps going near the waterfall'-cum-'well, we never saw the body fall into the canal' conclusion, with a door clearly left open. Albarn is too shrewd - perhaps too realistic - to say 'never again'.

Harris is also very, very good at getting Albarn to talk about drugs, and in particular the extent to which 13 is Blur's smack album. John's honest enough to admit that there's a massive spoon of hindsight to his insight:

But even though Frischmann's drug problems were becoming well known, nobody who wrote about Blur – myself included – seemed to cotton on (much like, perhaps, when Britain averted its eyes from the fact that YMCA by the Village People was a joyous hymn to the gay lifestyle).

Read the full piece, though, it's an excellent interview in a lovely piece of writing - and it explains why Albarn is now friends with Noel Gallagher, but less so with Jamie Hewlett/

Pete Doherty gets away with a fine

So you'll recall Pete Doherty turning up for court on a driving charge last month only for him to turn out to have a coat made out of drugs?

In fact, he had thirteen wraps of heroin on him. In court.

Here's a funny thing, though: his defence was going to be that he owns so many coats, he simply forgot the one he pulled on was stuffed with smack.

I mean: as if any court is going to fall for that, right?

It turns out the court fell for that:

On Wednesday, he was fined 750 pounds (865 euros, 1,210 dollars) with 85 pounds costs after the court heard he had simply forgotten the drugs were in one of his many coats.

Judge Joti Boparai told Doherty at Gloucester Magistrates' Court: "Either this was sheer stupidity or a ploy to get more publicity."

Or, quite possibly, both.

[Defence lawyer Bruce] Clark said Doherty's faltering career was now going from strength to strength, with a concert in Moscow on the horizon and even a part in a forthcoming film.

A date somewhere in deepest Europe and a part in a movie? Oh, yes, that puts him somewhere between Stephen Baldwin and Jim Bowen on the career success stakes, doesn't it?

[Clark said] "This (the offence) was an accident. This was the ghost of past offending, not the resurrection."

"It was a headless horseman of criminality, not a Lazarus. Don't call it a comeback, call in Derek Acorah."

A man walks into court with thirteen wraps of heroin in his pockets. There is no punchline, just the sound of one man laughing.

Showbiz Zoe peeks at The Brits

Zoe - the self-appointed youngest and coolest of the Fleet Street tattlers - is excited by the prospects of the Brits. First, she claims that Winehouse is going to be dosed up on Methadone for her Brits performance:

Medics decided not to put crack and heroin addict Amy through cold turkey - and have chosen to prop her up on pills and potions instead.

It's only a short term solution to her drug demons. But at least it's working for now.

Of course, if it's true, a half-decent journalist might actually do a little more than dismiss this as "pills and potions". They might, for example, ask if dosing someone up with a class A drug and pushing them onstage at a music business event on live television is fair to anyone; they might point to the piss-poor effectiveness of methadone and wonder if it's entirely ethical to provide someone with a quick fix purely so that she can go and sell some records on ITV rather than embarking on a slower approach that might have better chance of success.

Zoe also "reveals" that Paul McCartney is going on last at the prizegiving.

Biggest star? Closing the show? Whoeverwouldevthought, eh?

Winehouse: health risk

Amy Winehouse and Blake Empty-Suit aren't just slowly whittling their own lives away; it turns out they're health risks to just be around. Tour manager Thom Stone quit after doctors found heroin in bis bloodstream. As the Sun points out, he was suffering from passive smacking.

Naturally, there's someone in the Winehouse camp who tries to spin this, too, to make it sound like a positive:

[A] pal of Amy’s said: “When he produced this note Blake and Amy thought it was a joke.

“They didn’t get on with Thom and were taking the piss when he tried to pull that excuse to leave. They wanted rid of him anyway.”

Stone's probably lucky they didn't try and make him pay for his share of the heroin.

Pete jacks back on smack, gets a Vicky attack

Oddly, Victoria Newton's cameraphone footage of Pete Doherty doing heroin "last Friday" got pushed down the Bizarre pecking order this morning; so far down, in fact, that we only just spotted it was there.

Handily, the paper provides a transcript:

The grim video — shot on a mobile phone and lasting 1min 14secs — shows Doherty crouched on the floor, holding a needle in his mouth.

He stares into the camera, “cooks up” the heroin on a spoon, and fills the syringe.

His head slumps forward as he injects it into his tattooed right arm.

Of course, The Sun has always got a bit uppity in the past when the BBC has shown people shooting up in news and drama, because it's seen as providing some sort of e-learning course. The Sun, though, has only good motives for publishing the film:

The Sun is well aware of the sickening nature of the images — and prints them only to show Doherty is not cured and is a terrible role model.

Yes. You need a one minute fourteen second video of Doherty on his knees with a head full of junk to discover that he's a terrible role model. Without that, he'd have been a shoo-in to be Chief Scout when Peter Duncan steps down.

It's not just the Pete's let the courts down, of course. It's not that he's let his friends down. More importantly, he's let Victoria Newton down:

I commended him for his lengthy stint in rehab and for his latest album, which is actually quite good.

Like others I genuinely believed, or rather hoped, that after six weeks off smack he could continue to stay on the straight and narrow.

But he had us all fooled. He is still a cliched old junkie.

You can hear her trying to undelete the obituary column she wrote, can't you?

And unless he gets serious help soon, I wonder if he will be around to provide us with another album — or whether we’ll be talking about another young talent lost.

We're not quite sure how Doherty can be a young talent but an old junkie. We're also not sure if a "young talent" would produce an "actually quite good" album, come to that.

Adams gets clean

Ryan Adams has quit drink and drugs, possibly through a 2-for-1 cleaning deal at Bollom. He's quite proud:

"I'd wake up, work, go for a drink or two and be exhausted," he told Rolling Stone magazine about his former habits. "I would have drugs to keep my physical being going in order to never have to stop working in the night."

"Think about falling off a bicycle and smashing your nuts on that bar, or the most horrible sports accident you can think of," he continued. "That doesn't cover what it would be like for me to imagine drinking or doing drugs again."

This proves that there is scientific need for you to have an implant provided for you by the money earned from your girlfriend's supermodelling jobs.

It's not clear if Adams will now release fewer records, although the smart money is on him no longer churning out six or seven records at a time.

Talking of implants...

According to the 3AM Girls, with all that implies, Kate Moss is still underwriting the cost of Doherty's heroin implants. They cost a small fortune, so Pete will be in with a shout at the moocher of the year awards.

"Dead fat guy in a bath" might have been "dead fat guy in a toilet cubicle"

In a surprising and somewhat late development in the death of Jim Morrison, a former vice-president of Eurodisney has remembered that, actually, Jim Morrison died in his nightclub. Sam Bernett has written a book about it. Now, 35 years on:

In a new book Sam Bernett claims Morrison died in a toilet cubicle in his Paris club in 1971 after what he believed was a heroin overdose.

Two drug dealers then took Morrison's body back to his apartment and dropped it in his bath in an unsuccessful bid to revive him, according to Mr Bernett.

In his book The End: Jim Morrison, Bernett says he asked a doctor to examine the 27-year-old singer in the toilet of his Rock and Roll Circus nightclub on 3 July 1971.

He writes: "When we found him dead, he had a little foam on his nose, and some blood too, and the doctor said, 'That must be an overdose of heroin.'"

Right: so a doctor comes into contact with an illustrious corpse in a Paris nightclub, wipes the heroin bubbling out the end of his nose off, pronounces him dead and then wanders off, leaving two drug dealers who are so unfamiliar with death to carry the corpse back home and try to pull a Lazarus by putting the body in water.

Of course, Morrison's girlfriend maintains that he ODed in the bath after a night out - which would seem an odd lie to tell to cover up for two drug dealers who apparently rolled the body of Jim through the streets of Paris.

Not to mention how nobody would have seen the somewhat hefty corpse of Morrison being shunted about hither-and-dither, nor why a nightclub owner would have chosen to give the dead Morrison into the custody of two drug dealers. Nor, come to that, why the doctor who apparently saw the ODed pop star never reported that to the police, or even came forward during the inquest into his death. Nor how this unlikely story has kept hidden for thirty-five years. But we're sure all that will be explained in the book. Aliens, probably. Or something to do with Opus Dei.

Apparently, heroin screws you up: Why weren't we warned?

The Sunday People shows why it's doing so very very well in the modern world by reproducing online a story from the paper. It's about a photo it's got of Pete Doherty showing the way his drug habit has ruined his looks. Trouble is, the paper doesn't bother to scan the photo onto the website, so it's kind of like reading a transcript of a radio programme. Try and picture this in your mind's eye:

A HORRIFIC new close-up of crack head Pete Doherty proves how years of drug abuse have taken their toll.

His teeth are now little more than ROTTEN pegs and his nose is ravaged by unsightly SORES.

It's the teeth that seems to bother the paper the most - they even called in an expert:

A Harley Street cosmetic dentist yesterday explained how hard drugs including heroin ruined Pete's teeth.

Dr Anthony Zybutz said: "One of the biggest problems with heroin addicts is not looking after themselves. Their focus is on the drug rather than looking after their teeth."

There's one for the next government campaign: "Taking heroin may make you forget to floss." The risk of dying in a pool of your own shit is one thing; but imagine a drug which leaves you sometimes skipping the second brushing of the day. Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?

Country singer charged with ID theft

But what with the prescription fudging, heroin and assorted other drugs, at least Carlene Carter must have enough material for a new album by now.