A Likely Lad

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But I saw heroin ruin the lives of so many people - many of whom you'd never have expected to get mixed up in such things. You wouldn't not want to live his life or be even close to it but observing it from distance it makes for a proper adventure. But all the while Doherty and Barât are committed to the sound and aesthetic that would define them – intricate, overlapping guitar riffs, muddy production and knowing, kitchen-sink lyrics, anchored by two charismatic frontmen competing for the spotlight. The real disappointment is anyone who's seen an interview with Peter Doherty knows there's a beautiful natural poetry to the way he speaks and that is missing.

In addition, there isn't any insight into why Pete was driven to such olympian levels of self-destruction. There are the Kate Moss years, from the start of 2005 to the end of 2007, when he was all over the papers, in and out of rehab (“I wasn’t into it – you have to stop taking drugs for a start”) and moved to a country pile, “a mashed-up, skaggy version of Graceland”, where Amy Winehouse, Peaches Geldof and others would come and get high.There is a sense of reckoning, too, a well of sorrow over friends lost, such as Winehouse and sometime collaborator Alan Wass. Their music reminds me of nights out with my mates at indie club nights and so many other nostalgic memories of my late teens/early twenties. Pete Doherty is perhaps best remembered as the drug-addled frontman of seminal British indie-rock band, The Libertines. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

With astonishing frankness - and his trademark wit and humour - he takes us inside decadent parties, substance-fuelled nights, prison and his self-destruction. Self-mythology was always part of Doherty’s approach and you sense at times a weakness for a fanciful thought, such as the one about imagining Morrissey in intensive care with him, suffering from “suspended melancholy”. Doherty reveals that beyond the tabloid hoopla, it wasn’t all brinksmanship and squalor; there was joy too, in the excess, in his relationship with Moss – at times “an Evelyn Waugh scene”, we learn, all secret rendezvous and four-poster beds – and in the camaraderie among bands, especially in the Libertines’ more ramshackle days. Drugs naturally feature quite prominently in this biography, but Doherty never seems to glorify or glamorize them; quite the opposite in fact.There are the years when Doherty worked as a gravedigger or pulling pints, stealing from the cash register. Perhaps this shows the effect such an enormous amount of hard drugs can have on a person – inviting all manner of chaos into their orbit, but diminishing their ability to find meaning outside their addiction, in their passions, their loved ones, or their selves. But that was before he found his drug use move from recreational dabbling, to crippling dependency and an addiction that took many attempts at recovery before finally getting clean. His friendship with Carl was so pure and powerful, but perhaps the complex emotions Pete attaches to it are best borne out in his/their music. Whatever you think of Pete, I think he's incredibly charismatic, stylish and he definitely has a strong X-factor and is a modern day poet (sure enough a real asshole too only mentioning his daughter's birth with two sentences).

He's finally happy with the direction his music is now going, and after reading this book I truly couldn't be happier for the guy.This despite a trail of death, squandered money, a kid he barely saw, unreliability, prison sentences and so on.

For a chap who spent the majority of his adult life zombified on Class A drugs, its understandable that Doherty's memories are hazy and discombobulated, but more tellingly it gives an insight into his priorities. I was so excited to discover that Peter had finally written an autobiography, disappointed that I didn't manage to score a signed copy (although I have plenty of other signed bits), and further disappointed that it's ghost written. The story they gave to the NME about “shagging old men in hotel rooms,” was later amplified in the tabloids as Doherty being a rent boy, which wasn’t true. Was really looking forward to this one given The Libertines are one of my favourite bands, and Doherty’s story is very poignant. His family and friends’ response to his addiction is summed up as: “Everyone was a bit on a knife’s edge about the drug thing, really.He discusses poetry, Paris, philosophy, politics, the music business and his key influences (from Hancock to Baudelaire). Doherty’s drug use left him unable to perform the role of professional musician – when the band went on without him, he was wounded, railing against “the industrialisation of the Libertines”. I miss something what Keith Richards said in Life ,that he didn’t advice to follow him in the hell of the drugs because his case is somehow unique . Coke and speed were nice little additions, and benzodiazepines for the come-down were really just a way of helping to get to sleep after being up partying and munching "disco-biscuits" for 3 or 4 days at a time. To me it paints a very accurate and important picture of drug abuse and addiction and to talk about it so openly isn’t to glorify it.