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Posted 20 hours ago

A Likely Lad

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It felt like a very literal recount of Pete's life, with a rather flat style, that didn't really convey the wonderful poetry of Pete's lyrics and outstanding songwriting.

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.The issue is not that the book is lacking in salacious stories – there are plenty – it’s just that Doherty doesn’t seem to have much to say about them. But all the while Doherty and Barât are committed to the sound and aesthetic that would define them – intricate, overlapping guitar riffs, muddy production and knowing, kitchen-sink lyrics, anchored by two charismatic frontmen competing for the spotlight. I’d expect more of Pete’s writing or at least the feeling it conjures in a book billed as an autobiography.

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. Peter Doherty had, for a period in the mid 00s, the kind of fame that made him recognisable even in silhouette. 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 the main he offers a fairly unvarnished recounting of his life, and if some of the exploits are carnivalesque, his narration, at least, is free from self-pity.

Doherty’s drug use left him unable to perform the role of professional musician – when the band went on without him, he was wounded, railing against “the industrialisation of the Libertines”. I did pick up from an interview that it's been heavily edited and some of the true revelations removed but worth read. Maybe it opens doors to an elevated level of consciousness, and once those doors are open, they're hard to shut.Doherty used to busk at the market on Brick Lane in Shoreditch every Sunday – “often on my own, singing my own songs. I can still see the pictures of sweaty Pete and Carl in those bedroom concerts posted to livejournal by Finnish math students.

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