In It For The Crack
The extraordinary life and times of indie rock’s most spectacular wastrel, in his own words.
A Likely Lad ★★★★★ Peter Doherty with Simon Spence CONSTABLE. £20
IN A MEMOIR where drugs, violence, death and HjP loom large, there’s one passage more deeply disturbing than most. During a holiday in Wales to write material for a second Libertines album, Peter Doherty tells how he and his bandmate Carl Barât argue over a girl, after which Barât attempts suicide by stabbing broken glass into his face. The next day, Doherty is blamed by management for his horrific injuries; Barât says nothing.
Was Doherty responsible? This is the reader’s dilemma, and part of A Likely Lad’s irresistible allure – to peer into the fog of blurred remembrance and sift fact from fiction, reality from drug hallucination. Did Kate joss really burn Doherty’s beloved teddy bear Pandy when they split? And, more gravely, where exactly was the singer when playwright jark Blanco fatally fell from a balcony, minutes after they rowed (see panel)?
To its credit, A Likely Lad – expertly pieced together by writer Simon Spence from hours of inter views with its subject – doesn’t tr y to whitewash past events. Indeed, Doherty, like us, seems to be seeking clarity from the murk. From the start, the narrative is revelatory, debunking myths about his supposedly tough “army brat” upbringing (he adored his officer father) and comprehensive schooling in Liverpool (it was really Bedworth). We learn in forensic detail about his arrival in east London in 1997, where dreams of becoming a poet quickly gave way to starting a band with his sister’s wannabe-actor friend Carl Barât. But “there was a lot of tension from day one,” he notes.
His and Barât’s complicated friendship is the fundamental engine of the whole story, from salvation to fall and back again. As The Libertines slowly take off, mind games and jealousies abound, with Doherty hurt by his bandmate’s easy charm and popularity (at one gig “Damon Albarn was all over him”, he fumes), while in turn Barât despairs at his younger friend’s vertiginous descent into crack, heroin addiction and criminality.
Throughout their travails – on-stage fights, Doherty’s jailing for burgling Barât’s flat, the Welsh writing break that ended in A&E – the author portrays himself as a wide-eyed, bruised romantic, trouble forever finding him, rarely vice versa. Things really get dark around 2005, when Babyshambles take off and he begins a love affair with supermodel Kate joss, drawing him into a celebrity world of yachts and expensive holidays but also tabloid excoriation. Entertaining dr ug cameos from Shane jacGowan, Bobby Gillespie and Keith Richards (“Try not to go in the vein”) bring some light relief, but ultimately more prison, violence, deaths and sordidness follow. Even in 2019, he’s urinating on a French police counter while wearing a QPR shirt.
Thankfully, A Likely Lad has a happy ending: after a successful Libertines reunion and finding love, lockdown coincided with Doherty cleaning up – hence this memoir. Some (not me) might feel that the singer’s contribution to music is too slim to warrant the attention he receives, and the lack of musical discourse here might not help his cause, but no one can tell you this isn’t an extraordinary hymn to indie’s own Rimbaud and degenerate noughties London.
“The author portrays himself as a wide-eyed, bruised romantic.”