Pete relates his life through the people in it, and tells it very well through the excellent narration. A classic example is when he mentions the birth of his daughter in passing, the way someone would mention eating a Mars bar: 'Oh yeah, my daughter was born around then.

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. Drugs naturally feature quite prominently in this biography, but Doherty never seems to glorify or glamorize them; quite the opposite in fact. Apart from having a huge ego, and unremarkable talent, Doherty appears to be totally lacking in self awareness. It’s completely shocking,” he complained, adding that, after being read by Carl Barât, Kate Moss’s lawyers and his wife, “all the good bits” were taken out.As one of The Libertines frontmen and one half of the most written about couples of the Noughties thanks to his tempestuous relationship with Kate Moss, Pete Doherty has quite a few stories up his sleeves. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

and an addict) and loved gaining a deeper insight into his genius/sources of inspiration, and learning the real timeline of events of his life. He comes across as very honest and matter of fact when it comes to drug use, and talks candidly about some of the murkier accusations attached to that side of his life. Despite the admission that “it was tricky, really, thinking about how you get a band to function at the same time as being in active addiction”, the defiant revelation that the singer believed himself to be “in a raging war against the industry to prove… I could get music out there and make a living from it and not have to play by their rules of having to go to rehab” implies that his deranged dependency was not so much an illness as an ideology.

Doherty comes across as a loveable rogue at heart, who just made the mistake of staring too deeply into the void for too long, only for the void to then hold him in its death-grip for nearly two decades. He is one of the frontmen for the rock band, the Libertines, and previously formed Babyshambles and the Puta Madres. Hard drugs, tiny gigs on the hoof, huge stadium shows, collaborations, obliterations, gangsters and groupies—Doherty has led a life of huge highs and incredible lows.

In an incident that saw him imprisoned for burglary, he “started shouting and then booted the door in” of a flat in which he mistakenly believed band mate Carl Barat was hiding. Constable also boasts a strong non-fiction section, publishing the likes of HRH Princess Michael of Kent and bestselling parody We?

The latter is perhaps the most apt, but it lacks the reflective quality I look for in a memoir; much of the book feels like standard biographical information that one could find on Wikipedia. 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. I think this is the second biography I've read about Pete Doherty but this one is definitely more outspoken. There are eccentric, shady characters, altercations with celebrities, tabloid dramas, and, of course, copious quantities of hard drugs. The musician Pete Doherty has often been described as a “poet” – by fans, breathless NME journalists and, of course, himself.