He admits to having romanticized the idea of opiates being something beautiful and a part of the creative lifestyle he read about many of his literary heroes using. Pete Doherty is perhaps best remembered as the drug-addled frontman of seminal British indie-rock band, The Libertines. Don't get me wrong, Doherty has definitely been the architect of his own misfortune, but he's also been hounded out of multiple places, just because his "bad-boy" behaviour marked him out as fair game. Ten years ago after her divorce from Jamie Hince, the supermodel phoned her ex-boyfriend to check in on him and see whether he was still doing drugs. I love the constant references to British film and TV, books and poetry, especially as someone who also lives an imaginary existence.

With his trademark wit and humour, Doherty also details his childhood years, key influences, pre-fame London shenanigans, and reflects on his era-defining relationship with Libertines co-founder Carl Barât and other significant people in his life. With astonishing frankness - and his trademark wit and humour - he takes us inside decadent parties, substance-fuelled nights, prison and his self-destruction. I enjoyed the book nonetheless, and it nips along at a pace, albeit with a superficiality and fundamental lack of substance. It was more like me talking him out of it, saying,’ No, I’ll tell you what, if we’re still not signed in a year, then we’ll do it. But hearing Pete speak now with a calm persona, a rational outlook, and no longer that wandering maelstrom of chaos, it sounds like he's finally figured out who he is and what he wants to be.The long-awaited, candid memoir from Peter Doherty, whose talent as a musician has more often been eclipsed by a Herculean appetite for self destruction: drugs, prison, prostitution, court, murder, death, robbery, car crashes and hospital emergencies. There's nothing glamorous about finding oneself living alone in a run-down bed-sit, spending all day laying on a filthy mattress on the floor with your only thoughts focused on scoring gear and shooting up. But just as he approaches a moment of insight, or self-reflection, he veers away again, choosing instead to focus on an irrelevant detail. 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. It's not the huge, salacious reveals that I'm necessarily interested in, it's the day to day mundanities, interspersed with random and unusual events that fascinate me.

He doesn’t emerge well from the death of Mark Blanco – who fell to his death from the balcony of a east London flat at a party in 2006 – maintaining he fled the scene to protect himself and the teenager he was with. By the end of the parched expanse of The Likely Lad, the reader will not be shocked to learn that the title of his biggest hit is Can’t Stand Me Now. But then that was always part of Doherty’s appeal, the last of the great romantics, and man out of his time, positioned as the final epithet to a dying tradition of addict as artist. It’s a perfectly normal biography all the info is in there but the whole time I’m waiting for the romanticism and fantasy and lyricism with which the same events are described in the Books of Albion etc. I think this is the second biography I've read about Pete Doherty but this one is definitely more outspoken.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.