Pete Doherty’s son Astile announces gig as Liam Gallagher tribute act

Pete Doherty’s son Astile has announced that he is going to debut his tribute act to Liam Gallagher tonight (January 5).

• READ MORE: Remember when little Pete Doherty queued up to get ‘Be Here Now’

The 20-year-old is not just the son of the Libertines star, but has a very personal connection to Liam too, as the former Oasis singer is also the father of Astile’s half-sister.

Doherty met Astile’s mother Lisa Moorish, the singer in the band Kill City, in the early 2000s, with Astile being born in 2003. Prior to this, Moorish had been in a relationship with Liam, and their daughter Molly Moorish-Gallagher was born in 1998.

Astile’s performance is set to take place at The Boatyard in Leigh-on-Sea, with the official Facebook post reading: ‘Astile Doherty sings Liam Gallagher’.

The connections between Pete Doherty and Liam Gallagher go back many years.

In 2005, Gallagher slammed Doherty – telling NME: “What does the word Libertine mean? Freedom! He’s in the corner doing smack with a helmet on his head. There’s nothing free about that. It’s nasty.”

Twelve years later, Doherty’s fellow Babyshambles member Drew McConnell left the band to join Liam’s solo backing band, which caused Doherty to say that he had experienced “stressification on the band front”.

Asked at that point about whether he’d had any contact with Doherty, Gallagher replied: “No, I’ve only met him once, but that was years ago at the Forum when he was with…what are they called.. fucking, Libertines. It was just ‘hello, you’re really tall and that’. He looked like my mic stand.”

In another 2017 interview, Gallagher took the opportunity to hit out at Doherty again, using him as an example of an artist who would rather be a ‘poet’ than a ‘ real rock star’.

“He’s not a rock star though is he?” Gallagher said. “I don’t know what he is, but he shied away from all that. There’s a lot of people that think ‘rock star’ is a dirty word these days. ‘Ooh, I’m not rock n’ roll, I’m a poet’. Fuck off mate, when you joined a band when you were 17/18, you wanted to be like Keith Moon or Keith Richards.”

In 2019, Doherty resuscitated the grudge by suggesting that he and Liam should settle it in the ring. “I think we should have a sponsored boxing match and the loser gets Drew,” Doherty said.

Reminded of Gallagher’s fitness levels, Doherty replied: “Listen, I weigh him in mate, I weigh him in.”

“We would make a fortune for ourselves and for good causes. I’d have to find myself a sparring partner. Where am I gonna find a Mancunian with size three feet to spar with?”

On Gallagher’s previous verbal attacks against him, Doherty replied: “I’m not sat here giving it the biggun. Nine out of 10 of my friends laugh at me when I tell them this, but at the V Festival there was a big cock in the crowd, and he said to the crowd ‘glad to see Pete Doherty could make it today,’ so I owe him one.”

“He needs a slap”.

A clip of Doherty queuing outside HMV in 1997 to buy a copy of Oasis’ ‘Be Here Now’ surfaced online several years ago, although Doherty claimed in a 2019 interview that in fact he was more interested in being photographed and appearing on TV than he was in buying the album.

“I just wanted to get on the telly. Joined the queue, grabbed the cardboard cutouts, was doing these stupid ‘please photograph me’ things, jumping on the back of an open top bus with these cardboard cut-outs and then the next morning running to the newsagents thinking I was gonna be on the front of the newspaper with these cardboard cut-outs.”

He continued: “I wasn’t queuing for an Oasis album. My sister was a big Oasis fan, and I later tuned into them and decided they were brilliant, but at the time I was far more interested in getting photographed on the back of a bus with a cardboard cut-out.”

In the clip from 1997 which you can see above, Doherty says: “I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel Gallagher’s a poet and Liam’s a town crier.”

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