But I know that when you choose your poison, you have to understand what you're getting yourself in for. The real disappointment is anyone who's seen an interview with Peter Doherty knows there's a beautiful natural poetry to the way he speaks and that is missing. Maybe it opens doors to an elevated level of consciousness, and once those doors are open, they're hard to shut. The most vivid and descriptive section of the book covers his childhood, where the reader does get a sense of his time spent of various military barracks, and his brutish father.

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). In his foreword he says he “can’t really admit defeat” and, despite a few near misses, he hasn’t had to. He describes one infamously terrible Babyshambles gig – a bandmate had attempted suicide just beforehand and arrived wearing “his long woollen scarf that he’d used to hang himself still connected to the branch that had snapped”. Deep down I know I never wanted to end up a hopeless junkie, with an addiction that I became a slave too.

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.

He comes across as an intelligent person, but someone who has carried the monkey of addiction on his back for so long. But when the book arrived it was all ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’,” revealed the former rockstar about the memoir’s narrative.But getting to learn about Doherty's very normal love of antique hunting, collecting military memorabilia, enjoying walks on the beach with his dogs, and having a lifelong love of "Hancock's Half Hour" all helped to round out the very two-dimensional caricature of him that was always portrayed in the media. I did pick up from an interview that it's been heavily edited and some of the true revelations removed but worth read. The subject comes across as completely lacking in accountability at times and oblivious, or unwilling to confront, the issues his lifestyle caused for so long. There are the years when Doherty worked as a gravedigger or pulling pints, stealing from the cash register. 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.

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. The way that the juxtaposition of public personas and private lives almost show two totally different people, is fascinating to me. As the singer notes in the foreword, he’d been clean of drugs for more than a year when they began the process and he’s a lucid, honest presence, admitting at one stage part of him had wanted to be “the most fucked-up person in the world”. I think this is the second biography I've read about Pete Doherty but this one is definitely more outspoken.Having your home raised by the police is even kinda fun at first until it starts to all come on top. 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.