Little, Brown Book Group
Peter Doherty is the last of the great rock 'n' roll stories - maybe even the best ever rock 'n' roll story. Since his band The Libertines rose to international fame, he has proved endlessly fascinating, the subject of numerous books, documentaries, magazine articles, front-page newspaper headlines and TV news reports. This, for the first time, is his version of his story.As an icon Doherty is on a par with the early Rolling Stones and Sid Vicious as a bad boy and public enemy. To his hundreds of thousands of devoted fans he is a cult hero, a modern-day rebel Rimbaud. He divides critics - for every award and accolade (Greatest Hero of Rock or No 1 on the Cool List) there is a scathing review, an objection almost to his very being. Musically, there is no doubt he has defined the past twenty years of British rock 'n' roll with his sound, words, attitude, lifestyle, aesthetic and early buccaneering use of the internet to communicate with fans directly. It is also true that too often...