HE was addicted to crack and heroin, once burgled his band-mate’s flat and has done more than one stint in prison.
Libertines singer Pete Doherty has lived a wild life — but he says that when he fell for supermodel Kate Moss, things got even crazier
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In his new book, A Likely Lad, the 43-year-old writes: “I’d been pretty debauched before I met Kate, but this was a whole new thing.”
Their romance began when Pete played for the star’s 31st birthday at her Cotswolds mansion in 2005.
The party ended up lasting the whole weekend.
Pete, who had brought with him a shoebox full of drugs, found himself rubbing shoulders with a host of “random celebrities”.
Some guests, including Kate’s ex, Jefferson Hack, were not pleased to see him, though.
Pete writes: “I had half the party trying to score crack off me and the other half trying to chase me out saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
But he and Kate, 48, fell for each other straight away.
Pete recalls: “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a bit of me, big country house with a pool and fancy carpets and strange artwork’ and this girl I fell head over heels in love with.
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“Kate was like, look, you may as well move in if we’re going to be in love.”
Within a week, they had got matching tattoos.
Soon after, they met each other’s parents, with Pete’s dad asking world-famous Kate: “What do you do?”
But from the beginning, their romance was marred by Pete’s addiction to Class A drugs.
Kate was horrified by incidents such as his 2005 time on remand in Pentonville, North London, on charges of robbery and blackmail after a bust-up with a former friend.
The charges were later dropped.
He also admits selling stories to newspapers to settle drug debts and to raise funds for bail.
He writes: “That was the running battle for the next two and a half years, really, the drugs and her obsession with the tabloids and her image.
‘I really loved her and knew she loved me’
“Kate’s big thing was ‘not taking her for a c****. It was her favourite expression.”
On Kate’s insistence, Pete got a naltrexone implant — used to reduce the effects of heroin — but he found it “f***ed my head right up”.
And it did not stop him using.
When Kate was on modelling jobs around the world, he would be in her mansion “tripping my balls off in the midst of luxury” — only for Kate to ring him in a fury because the housekeeper had told her he’d had some “scumbags round”.
Pete, who formed his band Babyshambles in 2003 after getting sacked from The Libertines due to his drug addiction and deteriorating relationship with co-frontman Carl Barat, says: “With Kate, sometimes I’d be like, what the f*** is going on?”
On one occasion, they lost a car in Ibiza — after Pete accidentally drove it off a cliff — and ended up having to walk through the hills to a fashion party in the pitch darkness.
He also recalls scrapping with Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood while Kate was asleep and getting chucked off actress Sadie Frost’s yacht because they said he was smoking crack in the engine room.
Things came to a head when photographs of Kate appearing to snort cocaine at a Babyshambles recording session were splashed on the front page of a newspaper in September 2005.
The scandal lost her a host of modelling contracts, including a £4million deal with H&M, and she blamed Pete.
He writes: “She said, ‘If you didn’t sell the photos, how did they get in the papers?’ “
“And I couldn’t say. I just presumed a friend of mine must have done it.”
Kate flew to rehab in Arizona and said she had broken up with Pete, though he says they were still in touch.
She insisted he do a stint in rehab too, but when she discovered he had checked out early, she broke up with him for real.
It was not the end of their romance, however. Pete says a mutual friend would contact him with a codeword when she wanted to meet secretly in a flat.
He says: “We were attracted to each other. I really loved her and I knew she loved me — there was just all this messiness in between us, with all her chaos and my chaos.
“Sometimes we just needed to see each other. Basically, she’d click her fingers and I’d come running.”
By October 2006, they were engaged, with Pete spending £14,000 on a ring in Florence.
‘Our worlds were not really compatible in the end’
During a holiday in Thailand in January 2007 — bizarrely accompanied by hotel tycoon Sir David Tang and Sarah Ferguson — the pair had a quasi-wedding ceremony on a beach, which saw them wrap snakes around each other’s necks.
But things turned sour when Pete went missing and ended up getting arrested after doing drugs with some random backpackers he’d met.
Pete writes: “Kate and David Tang came to bail me out of the police station, and I was so out of my head I called Kate a pr**k and did a flying kick at her, then ran off down a motorway.
“The next thing I woke up at Heathrow in a pair of Thai policeman’s shorts — didn’t even have my passport.”
It was not until later that year, however, that the pair split for good.
Pete says there was “not really one specific incident that finished the relationship. Our worlds were not really compatible in the end.”
Kate was furious when her London mansion got raided by armed police after Pete accidentally pressed the panic button while searching for drugs.
A final showdown saw Kate wreck a precious guitar and attack his beloved teddy bear.
He writes: “There was one final big old kick-off. She desecrated this 1930s Gibson, smashed it up.
“Kate then had Pandy, my teddy bear, covered in petrol and set him alight — it’s not funny. I used to carry him round London with me.
“It still rankles — it was the one thing I’d held on to.”
In the book, Pete is honest about the chaos of his life and says: “Part of me wanted to be the most fed-up person in the world.”
Numerous stints in rehab did not help, mostly because he either smuggled drugs in or checked out early — or both.
He also believes police had a “league table” for the amount of times they could arrest him — he once got nicked three times within 24 hours.
On another occasion, 13 wraps of heroin fell out of his pocket while he was in court on driving offences.
One of his lowest moments was snatching phones from cyclists at traffic lights to try to impress a new drug dealer.
He adds: “I wouldn’t say I consciously made myself seedy, but I always felt I was existing in some sort of defiance of my own personal health.”
Sadly, he found a kindred spirit in fellow singer and drug addict Amy Winehouse.
The two tried to collaborate musically, but Pete says “trying to do music with her was like a running battle between her excesses and her musical genius”.
He insists he did not lead her astray, always refusing her demands to inject her with heroin, but “it was almost like her being with me was a chance for her to be completely out of her nut”.
The pair almost hooked up on a tour bus at V Festival in 2009 but Pete writes: “We were getting it on when her security turned up and literally pulled her off me.”
Amy died at the age of 27 in 2011. An inquest found her blood alcohol content was five times the legal drink-drive limit.
Another lost soul was model Peaches Geldof. He says they “helped each other score quite a lot”.
He adds: “She was pretty f***ing wild. She made me feel like an old man . . . talking about the black arts and unimaginable sexual positions.”
Peaches died aged 25 in 2014 after taking drugs. But Pete survived his crippling addiction and has managed to put it behind him.
An incident in Paris in late 2019 — which saw him arrested twice in 24 hours, first for buying crack, then for beating up a motorcyclist — was the catalyst for getting clean.
About being at the police station, he writes: “I pulled my pants down and p***ed all over the counter, was shouting stuff about the war.
When they came to interview me, I was just in my QPR shirt and my pants and a p**s-soaked blanket.”
After getting away with a suspended sentence, he started on heroin blocker Buvidal. He has now been clean for three years.
Pete credits wife Katia de Vidas, who he married last year and now lives with in France, for helping him stay off drugs.
He says: “She saved my life — the most incredible woman.” But the scars of his old life will stay with him forever.
He writes: “The open sores were never a good look. My arm is weird even now. The track mark is never going to go away.”
- A Likely Lad by Pete Doherty and Simon Spence (Little, Brown, £20) is out now.
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EATS IN BEATS
NOW clean of drugs, Pete has a new passion – the cheese produced in his adopted home of Normandy in France.
He can’t get enough of the Brie and Camembert, telling an interviewer: “There’s something special in the grass.”
He has long had a reputation for a big appetite and was christened Pigman by bandmate Carl.
So it was little wonder that when he was living in Margate, Kent, in 2018, Pete took on the big breakfast challenge at the town’s Dalby Cafe.
The gigantic plate includes four bacon rashers, four eggs, four sausages, a burger and chips, hash browns, mushrooms, onion rings, bubble and squeak, two thick slices of bread and a choice of beans or tomatoes.
Pete ate it all in just 20 minutes.
These days, however, he does not want to be known as Pigman.
He writes: “I’m trying to watch my weight.
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