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Pete Doherty is certainly not someone you could accuse of working too hard. Taking drugs too hard maybe, but not working, unless you include relentless touring that rarely actually involves turning up either on time or at all. Well this decadent layabout image looks set to take a battering in the coming months, judging by what he's got up those filthy sleeves. With his debut solo album, "Grace/Wastelands", due for release early next month, Pete this week made it clear there is plenty more to come.

At the NME Awards on Wednesday, he told reporters about his future plans which, perhaps inevitably, include finally reforming The Libertines, as well as more work with Babyshambles and without them. "I've written and recorded a solo record. There's probably another on the way, there's an amazing 'Shambles record on the way and The Libertines is gonna happen in the next couple of years, by hook or by crook", he explained. Former partner in crime, Carl Barat, is now shorn of the barely serviceable Dirty Pretty Things, meaning this long mooted reunion, which offers more than most, could be about to happen.

Bosses at the Reading and Leeds Festival are understood to have offered the pair in excess of £1 million to play this year but Barat remains reticent he will not be pushed into anything. "I've just freed myself up so the last thing I wanna do is completely burden my mind. No, not right now", he said recently. However, during an interview alongside Doherty at the NME bash, he also chastised a reporter confused by how to address the pair. "You have got The Libertines in front of you - what are you talking about?", he insisted. None of which should take away from Pete's new solo material, particularly comeback single "The Last Of The English Roses", which sounds like Gorillaz and ends in a provocative gay kiss. Could it be that reports of this man's demise have been greatly exaggerated?