Pete Doherty has opened up about just how bad his drug addiction got
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)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. You may think you have heard them all (and plenty more fabricated ones too), but the indie rock star is set to lift the lid on his decade-spanning career with the release of a memoir.
The book, entitled A Likely Lad, was ghost-written by music memoir veteran Simon Spence based on lengthy chats between the writer and Doherty. ââA synopsis of the book promises “Doherty’s version of the story – the genuine man behind the fame and infamy. This is a rock memoir like no other.”
Even though it wasn’t personally penned by the musician, the book is still written in first person. "The initial agreement was I would talk to him on the phone and it would be in the third person. But when the book arrived it was all ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’,” revealed the former rockstar about the memoir’s narrative. “It’s completely shocking."
Doherty has since joked that the publishers have “taken all the good bits out” – after the lawyers of ex-girlfriend Kate Moss and former Libertines co-frontman Carl Barât had a good look at it. Still, within the 300-odd pages are major revelations and intimate insights previously unheard of from the performer’s colourful life. Here are some of the biggest...
The beginning of his addiction
Literature played a big role in sowing the seeds of his desire to try heroin. “It was the romantic vision of the dream-inducing state of a drug - like Coleride was said to have - written in these epic narratives such as Kubla Khan’s visions when he was smoking opium,” he writes.
His dad once said it was reading Wilde that first put the idea of taking drugs in his head. “Probably true - Wilde and Keats. But it was such an alien concept, drugs, at the time I was reading these books. But these strange little references in certain books I picked up intrigued me, especially to opium, which was described in a luxurious sense, associated with a sensation of peace and accomplishment and a mystical, magical land.”
Of course, it turns out Keats had a really bad stomach, so that’s why he took it. And Oscar Wilde wasn’t actually that into it.
The first time he tried coke...
...was off his landlord’s ironing board. After dropping out of Queen Mary University, Doherty “got a room in a flat, eight floors up in one of the tower blocks– £80 a week.” 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.
The time he told his mum he was addicted to heroin…
...was at his gran’s funeral. “I just presumed she’d be really understanding about it,” he wrote of the experience. “I was saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve taken it, but it’s all right, it’s quite nice,’ and it all kicked off and went downhill from there, really, with Mum and Dad.”
When Pete met Carl
While their meeting is quite well documented – “I was wearing this red plastic jacket, real Jarvis Cocker style, and he was supposed to be looking after me while AmyJo went to do something.”
What’s not well known is that they then went to an audition together. During this time Barât was studying Drama, with the dream of being an actor. “I think it was an audition for a Harold Pinter play or a Joe Orton play. I did the audition as well for a laugh, and I got the part!” He divulged in the autobiography. “I obviously had to turn it down, but he’s never forgiven me for that – he was absolutely fuming. There was a lot of tension in the air from day one.”
The song Doherty and Barât would busk together
Doherty used to busk at the market on Brick Lane in Shoreditch every Sunday – “often on my own, singing my own songs. Carl was never really that into it, but sometimes I’d persuade him to busk, and we’d do ‘Twist and Shout’ on repeat.”
There was never a suicide pact
It’s been written into Libertines folklore that Doherty and Barât supposedly made a suicide pact. “I still had quite a few books from the auction days, and one I recall knowing about for years in a book about suicide, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez, like a literary poem to Sylvia Plath in a way,” he writes of where the alleged rumour probably came from.
But there was no pact. “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.’ It was like, ‘This time next year Rodders, we’ll be millionaires. It was always like that. I’d say, just hang on, it’s going to be fine, we’ve just got to practice.”
The stories of Doherty being a rent boy are fabricated
Desperate to make fantasy real, Doherty and Barât tried to join an escort agency. “It was called Aristocrats, and we’d got it into our heads that we’d be taking old ladies out to dinner or the opera.” It turned out it wasn’t even called Aristocrats. It was actually Aristocats – like the movie.”
The first assignment was to meet someone at the St George’s Hotel by the BBC. The story they gave to the NME about “shagging old men in hotel rooms,” was later amplified in the tabloids as Doherty being a rent boy, which wasn’t true.
“The end of the real story was we legged it from Aristocats. We did have a laugh with those NME interviews. We probably thought we were being shocking. In actual fact, the escort-agency escapade was another dream that was shattered.”
Kate Moss’ ex-boyfriend Jefferson Hack was there the weekend Doherty met the supermodel
Everyone knows that Doherty met Kate Moss at her 31st birthday party in her countryside mansion. What they don’t know is that her ex-boyfriend (and father of her daughter Lila Moss) was there.
“Jefferson Hack was really concerned about my presence. It turned into a long weekend, and on the morning of the second day, he was just sat there on the stairs with his head in his hands. He looked up at me and said, How could you do this? I wore a ‘What a Waster’ badge for your band. What? I wasn’t really sure who he was.”
Why the couple got matching tattoos the first week of dating
“We got matching tattoos that first week too. I think I insisted on that. I wanted her to prove her love, so I said, You’ve got to get a tattoo with my initials on, you’ve got to get branded – it was more more of an insecurity thing on my part.”
Who he thinks sold the “High as a Kate” photos to The Sun
At the time, Doherty blamed manager James Mullord. “Nothing else made any sense other than Mullord was involved. He’d told me in the past he’d been offered a hundred grand for pictures of me and Kate together.” At the time, it was such a big scandal that Mullord appeared on the front of the Evening Standard claiming he was innocent.
“I’m fairly certain now those photos of Kate in the studio were actually taken by two Bangladeshi crack dealers. They disappeared soon after. I first met them when they were just kids, thirteen or fourteen-year-old shotters. The word on the street in Whitechapel was they’d made a shitload of money somehow overnight and disappeared to Bangladesh to buy some land.”
The last time Doherty and Moss spoke
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. Doherty alleges that the only thing he could think to ask her was whether she still had her matching tattoo.
