A Likely Lad

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There are the years when Doherty worked as a gravedigger or pulling pints, stealing from the cash register. Coke and speed were nice little additions, and benzodiazepines for the come-down were really just a way of helping to get to sleep after being up partying and munching "disco-biscuits" for 3 or 4 days at a time. Richards also took into seriously his responsibility somehow to those who are dead and were influenced by his use of drugs.

I’d see his silhouette at the window, and he’d do little claw signs with his hands… I had about six in the end… I didn’t really know how to cook ’em. There were some real tragedies along the way as drugs and excess just took people down a very dark route. 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”.It is a interesting read but you really wanted more in his later years when his off the drugs and with the hotel and how he wasn't paid for gigs so he could be the 6th owner. Maybe it opens doors to an elevated level of consciousness, and once those doors are open, they're hard to shut.

But just as he approaches a moment of insight, or self-reflection, he veers away again, choosing instead to focus on an irrelevant detail. There is not much of a redemptive narrative arc, very little contrition, and Pete seems to indicate that it's everybody else's intolerance that is the issue and not his Herculian drug hoovering.So what follows, Spence explains, is actually an “authorised biography” – but this descriptor isn’t accurate either. Perhaps this shows the effect such an enormous amount of hard drugs can have on a person – inviting all manner of chaos into their orbit, but diminishing their ability to find meaning outside their addiction, in their passions, their loved ones, or their selves. At the time, it was such a big scandal that Mullord appeared on the front of the Evening Standard claiming he was innocent. It turned into a long weekend, and on the morning of the second day, he was just sat there on the stairs with his head in his hands. At one point Doherty admits he “wanted to be the most fucked up person in the world”; at another he says he thought he was “going to die any minute”.