The Libertines' singer Peter Doherty to fulfill teenage ambition by playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Peter Doherty plays his first Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month, two shows that he says will allow him to perform some new music and also dive into the other performances in the city, fulfilling a dream he had when he was young. His summer has been punctuated by larger shows with a resurgent and more disciplined version of The Libertines, contrasting with solo shows that are often in pubs, nightclubs or small theatres. His own stripped-back performances allow space for poetry breaks, the telling of anecdotes and a fluid approach to the set list that he is not afforded within the confines of his band as they return to the peaks of popularity after 25 years that have seen their share of highs and lows.

Peter confesses that he feels the draw of singing at close quarters without the artifice of a big stage show to break the connection with an audience. He loves singers with guitars in pubs. Can’t get enough of them. That’s where he feels comfortable bringing new music and revealing more of his personality. He explains that poetry recitals led to attempts at comedy, and sending off cassettes to venues at the Edinburgh Fringe trying to get a gig. They didn’t reply. His stage persona morphed into what became Pete Doherty of The Libertines, and all the chaos that surrounded that.

He sees performing in small venues as intrinsic to how he writes songs and Edinburgh as part of his aspirations to have a creative output: “The Edinburgh Festival is a thing to be cherished and celebrated because it is a platform. It's like a megaphone, and an international one, for young people” he tells me.

“You’ve got that variety and range of people. It’s not easy to get a shot at the Edinburgh Festival unless you're going to go on the street. I tried it, I remember years ago I sent a cassette and my CV to every venue in Edinburgh when I was doing performance poetry. And I didn't even get a ‘no thank you. Thanks for the offer, but we're fully booked’, you know what I mean? It was competitive out there.

Later there was an opportunity that didn’t quite work out: “Jock Scott, wrote a play a while back, maybe 2004, he wrote a play about two young musicians in red military jackets on a train, and he took it to Edinburgh, performed it. We were supposed to go and do the play ourselves, me and Carl. But we missed it. Something happened, we missed a train or someone got arrested anyway, we didn't make it. Well, he understood why, because he knew what was going on, he never held it against us. But it was gutted to let him down that time.”

Having had teenage ambitions to make it to the Edinburgh Fringe, that has been something at the back of Peter’s mind: “It's one of these unchecked thing. I'm going to perform, but I'm performing because it's an opportunity for me to get there. So I'll be able to go out there and finally revel in that. Because for me, as a young man - 16, 17 - that's how I thought life was. I thought it was just creative souls running amuck, singing and dancing and doing comedy for each other in one big orgy of creative excess. And obviously as you get older you realise life's not quite like that. But there's still a part of me that believes in that idea of Edinburgh. So I'm going to go and I'm just going to go into every show.

“I want to see it all. I love it. I've always loved all that. My unfulfilled original dream really was to be a standup performer. That was what I set out to do. I just couldn't got to that point. I played so many empty rooms that I got so angry and frustrated that I just started screaming down the microphone instead. And that turned into songs and that turned into The Libertines.

“But originally, performance poetry, standup comedy, that was something that I was sort of obsessed with.”

The structure of The Libertine’s show and the demands of their back catalogue leaves little room for experimentation, Peter says: “There’s a hardcore faction that you see at gigs, they are seeing the same set again and again and again. If we throw in something different, it's a rare treat and you can see it in their eyes. But solo, it's carte blanche with me and I don't have a set list, I'll just go, I'll get on the stage and see who's there and what the vibe is, whether or not they kick in with a Libertines song.

“Sometimes I’ll ad lib and do some songs that I’m not even quite sure of myself. For all my faults, I can write a song, so I’m going to use the Edinburgh Festival to try out three or four songs I’ve been working on.”

Doherty has new songs to sing, many of them are a work in progress, and it will be a mix of the old and the new that he will bring to the shows at the Fringe. He seems to be a performer at a stage in his life where he is comfortable with his past and present.

Peter Doherty plays at La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, on August 12th and 13th as part of Big Nights at the Fringe Festival. Tickets available here.