Literature was a big thing for Doherty: Orwell, Wilde, Baudelaire, Thompson, Rimbaud, Bukowski, Cocteau, Genet, Doestetevsky, Pushkin, Bolaño. Drugs naturally feature quite prominently in this biography, but Doherty never seems to glorify or glamorize them; quite the opposite in fact.

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”.Having your home raised by the police is even kinda fun at first until it starts to all come on top. 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. There are fist fights and attempts to stalk their idols, the Strokes (all stories from this period also invariably end with the admission that Libertines hanger-on and future Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell “was there too”. 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.

And there are notable omissions: his son (born in 2003), daughter (born in 2011) and wife are barely mentioned. It is a interesting read but you really wanted more in his later years when his off the drugs and with the hotel and how he wasn't paid for gigs so he could be the 6th owner.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. 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.

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. That would have been useful at least , if Pete feels like this, to say a bit more in that he had the chance to survive this drug abuse but more are those who had no chance. 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.One of the more shocking revelations in the memoir is that Doherty has recently found God and appears to be largely of sober mind during recent years, which makes the self-imposed tragedy of his life somewhat more bearable when reading. Doherty made eye contact with a homeless man standing back from the crowd, watching, and a silent understanding passed between them. I think this is the second biography I've read about Pete Doherty but this one is definitely more outspoken. But you can't put an old head in young shoulders and many inevitably had to learn their lesson the hard way too. 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.

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. 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. Towards the end of the book, Pete seems to open up more and takes on a much more optimistic tone with the musician finally seeming to grapple his life, meet a woman he loves, and commit himself to sobriety (sort of).The book is, essentially, a lightly edited transcript of many hours of rambling interviews, and reads like it. 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.