And he’s out. I fail to rouse him when we reach the train station, so we return to the house without his “friends,” and I leave him passed out in the car. Later, his tour manager and bandmates attempt to shake him awake. They have a one-off gig tonight in London and must leave immediately. He staggers into the house just as the people we were supposed to meet at the train station show up, on foot, soaking wet and angry. He smiles benignly at them and sings

a line from a 1980s British TV commercial (“If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club”). He disappears into one room, and then another. One by one, his bandmates and assorted friends and hangers-on each exchange complicit looks, grit their teeth, and sigh heavily. It’s Pete being Pete, they seem to be saying to one another, Doherty still convinced his raffish charm won’t run out. En route to the show this evening, he will go missing, the band having to

perform without him. A few days after I leave Albion Towers, it’s reported that Doherty was beaten up by local dealers for not buying drugs from them.

In Manchester three weeks earlier, he had told me that he was desperate to be free from drugs once and for all, as much a show of faith to friends and family as to himself.

“I mean it, I do,” he said. “But it’s really hard.”