A Likely Lad

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It sounds like he has the love of a very good woman on his side, and he's managed to find a way to access his creativity without the need for substances.

Hard drugs, tiny gigs on the hoof, huge stadium shows, collaborations, gangsters, and groupies, Doherty has led a life of huge highs and incredible lows. Elsewhere, the singer “fell asleep on the motorway hard shoulder on my way to Heathrow in my Jag… I was woken up, with a crack pipe in mouth, by a policeman banging on the window.Doherty describes the well-documented incident in which he burgled Barât’s home, which led to his first prison sentence and first exile from the Libertines, as “a bit naughty, really”. At the end of the day though, you're not going to get a thorough, non-biased review out of me because I love Peter, and The Libertines, and Babyshambles.

Like his friend Amy Winehouse, he was a fixture on tabloid front pages, whether in disrepair or ducking out of a courtroom. 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. 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. As a somewhat lonely “army brat” – born in Northumberland but raised in Belfast, Cyprus, Germany, Dorset and Warwickshire – Doherty read Percy Shelley, Oscar Wilde and George Orwell.

This memoir, dictated but not written by Doherty, follows him from highly intelligent and relatively sheltered boy, to university drop out, to drug addled singer in defining early noughties indie outfit The Libertines. Unfortunately this book lacks the poetic warmth Doherty is known for speaking in, and forgoes a lot of talk of the relationship between him and Carl in exchange for tedious goings on about drug binges and the like. Pete relates his life through the people in it, and tells it very well through the excellent narration. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that for much of Pete’s adult life, and thus for much of the book, he was in active addiction, so the repetitiveness and mundaneness mirrors this reality.