Kate the singer?

While the rest of the fashion world is still busy debating whether models look too thin, Kate Moss has been busy with more important matters: jumping on stage and trilling along with her boyfriend and his pop group, Babyshambles.

Moss has joined Pete Doherty for a run through La Belle et la Bête on his tour. Readers who have not heard the Babyshambles album may be disappointed to hear that this is not the same La Belle et la Bête that Charles Aznavour recorded for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but Moss’s live performance has, by all accounts, been well received. Still, she wouldn’t take to singing for a living. Would she?
With Moss having operated on the fringes of the rock world for years, there is a certain inevitability to these Babyshambles collaborations, which are not an example — or not only an example — of a misguided frontman making the ill-advised decision to rope in a girlfriend. In fact they seem like the latest steps in a campaign. Her first foray into music was a Nico-esque recording with Primal Scream, in which she assumed the Nancy Sinatra/Lydia Lunch role on Some Velvet Morning.
The temptation of a singing career presents a common dilemma for today’s modern, multi-tasking A-lister, and there have been well-documented blunders. Can Kate Moss sing? Well, on the Primal Scream track she sounds a bit like Rachel Stevens or, to put a slightly finer point on it, like a session singer pondering what she might have for dinner. Not a problem for a future pop career — they can call it “icy nonchalance” on the Press releases and nobody will mind.
The fact is that almost everyone wants to be a successful musician, except almost everyone who actually is a successful musician. It’s far better simply to hang out with them and clamber on stage once or twice a year, because at least then there is nobody asking you when the next album will be ready.

Peter Robinson