A Likely Lad

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Like his friend Amy Winehouse, he was a fixture on tabloid front pages, whether in disrepair or ducking out of a courtroom. 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.

Phil the landlord was an East End fella who used to clean windows in the morning and introduced The Libertines co-frontman to the drug which would plague him the rest of his life.But when the book arrived it was all ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’,” revealed the former rockstar about the memoir’s narrative. Not everyone who gets entangled in a life of drug addiction is lucky enough to come out the other side, and I think Doherty is careful not to simply assume that he's now completely out of the woods. 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. Doherty paints his drive to introduce chaos to the Libertines as an anti-capitalism kick – though that’s not the only reason why they played cash-in-hand shows. And there are notable omissions: his son (born in 2003), daughter (born in 2011) and wife are barely mentioned.

I enjoy a debauched music memoir and enjoyed Pete's musical output with The Libertines, as well as some of his shambolic side projects.Fans of the Libertines – who formed in 1997 – may hope for a work rivalling the literary merit of Patti Smith’s Just Kids or Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. 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.