Pete Doherty’s much-hyped memoir, A Likely Lad, is out today, a rollicking rock’n’roll rollercoaster of a yarn.
Tales abound of Indie darlings, dingy clubs, pubs and, naturally, Noughties-era Kate Moss, who dated the former Libertines and Babyshambles frontman on and off from 2005 to 2007. Grazia has approached representatives from Kate Moss for comment.
Kate and Pete were, to put it politely, a hot mess. Pete doesn’t skimp on his own struggles with drug addiction and the trials and tribulations of a love story that coincided with the peak of Cool Britannia. Here is everything we learn from the Can’t Stand Me Now singer’s memoir.
Pete made Kate get a ‘Pete Doherty’ tattoo
The early days of Pete and Kate’s relationship sound quasi-adorable. She was 31, he was 25. The love-struck party animals at first met secretly in dimly-lit backrooms of London restaurants to keep their relationship from the press, a grungy Peter and Wendy, neither keen on growing up.
‘Despite being this multimillionaire, she was saying how she was really just a girl from a council estate in Croydon, so in the first week we were together, I insisted she get on a bus with me,’ writes Pete in A Likely Lad. They romped around London in disguises, pulling on wigs and dodging the paps. A week into dating, they also got matching tattoos.
‘I think I insisted on that,’ writes Pete. ‘I wanted her to prove her love, so I said, you’ve got to get a tattoo with my initials on, you’ve got to get branded – it was more of an insecurity thing on my part.’
Police stormed Kate Moss’s home after Pete set off a panic alarm
The tabloids, naturally, had a field day. Pete recalls the time that he brought London’s finest down on Kate’s house while searching for a piece of crack cocaine, accidentally smacking one of two panic alarms that Kate had installed in her home.
‘She had this panic button by her bed and a panic button in the kitchen. One day, when she was away somewhere and I was scrabbling down by the side of the bed, for a dropped rock probably, I accidentally pressed the panic button and 12 armed police ended up at the cottage in St John’s Wood.’
Pete and Kate’s relationship didn’t survive rehab
Pete says he got on with Kate’s parents, and vice versa. His dad had no idea that she was a supermodel, and asked what she did for a living. But Pete’s chaotic life caught up with them. He writes that Kate stood to lose a £4m-a-year H&M deal after photos purported to show her taking drugs were leaked to the tabloids — Team Kate blamed Pete.
‘I’ve always wondered if the big Kate exposé, where she was photographed appearing to snort cocaine during a Babyshambles session, had something to do with Paul Ro [Doherty’s acquaintance Paul Roundhill],' he writes. ‘The pictures were supposed to be worth £300,000. They were used on the front of the Mirror on 15 September 2005, under the headline “High As a Kate”.’ They both agreed to go to A-list Arizona rehab clinic the Meadows separately, Kate first, Pete second. He ‘got the hump’ when she allegedly didn’t honour a plan to ‘visit me and take me to the Grand Canyon in a helicopter’ after two weeks. So, he ‘did a runner’ without completing his treatment. They broke up shortly afterwards.
Pete and Kate didn’t exactly have a happy ending
Not the way Pete tells it, anyway. There was one final big old kick-off, he writes. ‘Kate desecrated this 1930s Gibson I had, smashed it up. Then she covered this teddy bear of mine, called Pandy, in petrol and set him alight – it’s not funny. I used to carry him round London with me.
‘Deep down in my heart I like to think it’s just a lie and Kate didn’t really destroy him, that she’s still got him, but no, as far as I know, he’s dead, ashes. It still rankles – it was the one thing I’d held on to. The only time I’ve spoken to her since was eight or nine years ago in Paris. She called me up out of the blue. I just said, “Have you still got the tattoo?” That was the only thing I could think of to say.’
A Likely Ladby Pete Doherty and Simon Spence is published by Little, Brown on 16 June