In 2003, shortly after he realized that he had become a full-blown heroin addict, Pete Doherty was playing the Coachella festival in California with his fractious, fractured band the Libertines. On a mission to be “the most f***ed-up person in the world”, he was lying in a bush with a bottle of whiskey when Iggy Pop, once notoriously drug-fueled, ran past sipping water. “He stopped and said something like, ‘I’ve been there, but now I’m into jogging,’ ” Doherty recalls forlornly. “Even Iggy Pop had abandoned me.”
In a Hollywood biopic, this might have been the great redemptive epiphany, but, as anyone who has read a tabloid in the past 20 years will know, that’s not how it panned out. Instead Doherty’s unhappy dedication to the old-fashioned ideals of rock ’n’ roll turned him into the headline-grabbing “junkie lover” of Kate Moss, a convict with a ticker-tape rap sheet and a magnet for scandal and tragedy.
