On Tuesday, luck smiled on him. A failure to bring 27-year-old Doherty before the court in time meant the bail conditions weren't technically violated. That evening, the musician, addicted to crack cocaine and heroin and with hardly a bob to his name, went to Claridges Hotel to be reunited with his girlfriend, supermodel Kate Moss. They are staying there at the moment in a �1,500-a-night suite. Moss has decided that despite the frantic warnings of everybody around her, she wants to be with her man. For now, at any rate.

The week also brought news about Doherty's cat. The little critter expired due to cocaine poisoning, a death that is being investigated by London police.

Was the cat coked? Who coked the cat?

Did the cat have a coke problem, or was she just a party girl? The most compelling theory is that the cat couldn't take the sight of its owner anymore, slowly wasting away his life and talent.

Doherty is, general consensus has it, a car crash waiting to happen. His own retort to that is: "They don't realise the car's already crashed.

And there's been a nuclear explosion. And we're the last people alive on earth."

As a songwriter and performer, he has considerable talent. Or, at least, he had talent. Whether it has survived his addictions is difficult to make out. These days, it is his celebrity that keeps him in the headlines, as he plays out the doomed role of elegantly wasted rock star, en route to join his forebears, who lived fast and died young.

For a certain constituency, he appears to be having a ball. His lifestyle informs fantasies to which some young men can be partial. This guy can sing, play music, get twisted with his mates and then scoot off to meet Kate Moss in Claridges. Where's the problem?

Reality happens on a different planet. "History has shown there's only one conclusion [to sustained drug use], " he told the BBC in 2005. "And that's the blackout. The great void. I'm not a nihilist, and I don't want to die."

If it wasn't for Moss, being repeatedly "drawn to the flame like a moth" as one of her friends put it, Doherty's wattage would rapidly fade, allowing him to retreat anonymously to the squalor of crack houses and the mortal dangers inherent in addiction to hard drugs.

Some in the British press compare him to Sid Vicious, the bass player with the Sex Pistols who murdered his girlfriend and overdosed before he could be put on trial. But the likeness doesn't go beyond their respective addictions. Vicious was wholly without talent, and not a very nice man.

A more realistic comparison is with Doherty's pal Shane McGowan, who has, against all the odds, survived decades of chronic alcoholism to arrive at middleage still in one physical piece. McGowan also had talent that could have been better spent.

And both men have in common a propensity to celebrate rather than tackle their addictions.

Doherty has made a few half-hearted attempts to get off smack. On one occasion he signed up for rehab in a Thai monastery, an ultra harsh regime that has had some success.

Former clients had said the programme there would either kill or cure him.

Doherty escaped after three days.

He seems to view his lifestyle as living as he sees fit, a libertine, freed from the earthly concerns of the rest of us, preferring the purity of bliss to grubby reality. As an existential position, it is the cat's pyjamas, conveniently relegating concerns for anybody else as secondary to the tempestuous relationship between himself and his brain.

Doherty had a fairly stable upbringing as the second of three children born to an Irish major in the British army and his Liverpudlian wife. His father's work brought the family to different parts of Britain and Europe as he was growing up. At 17, he went to live with his grandmother in north London, where he says he felt really at home.

He was an excellent student, particularly of English, winning poetry prizes at school. After one year studying English in college he dropped out and began playing music with his friend, Carl Barat. The pair went on to form The Libertines, a punk band that drew comparisons with The Clash and The Sex Pistols.

The band came along at the right time for the press, offering an edgier take on British music than that presented by the likes of safe-as-houses Coldplay.

Their debut album in 2002 received rave reviews, with a few excitable voices comparing the pair to Lennon and McCartney.

By then, Pete had already begun horsing into hard drugs. His addictions led to problems in the band. In 2003, he got the bullet.

That same year, he was arrested for robbing Barat's flat while the rest of the band were on tour. He did the first of a number of short stints in jail. On one of these occasions, he penned a diary for the Guardian, in which his facility with language was obvious.

"Stone me what a life. Hear, hear. . .

Still waiting for the jingle jangle of the gaoler's bangle. . . Even life without drugs has gotta be betta than this malarkey.

Babyshambles all set to take over as well. Won't do it again honest guv. . . Oh yes you will Doherty and you know it."

Babyshambles was at the time his new band. In the last few years, you could drop the baby to reveal a shambles, little more than a parttime vehicle designed to garner Doherty enough cash for his next score. Last year, they played at a Carlow arts festival, which is many miles from Madison Square Gardens.

Along the way, Moss brought glamour to the party. She was caught on camera powdering her nose at a recording studio, which prompted her hangers-on to redouble efforts to prise her away from Doherty. Nothing doing. She keeps coming back.

And so do the headlines. Doherty's output has been reduced to a trickle, but the story has long shifted from his talent to make music. He turned 27 this year, the age when many of contemporary music's bigger talents reached a creative peak. Choirboys many of them were not, but they retained the capacity to create through the madness.

For Doherty, it would appear the madness is the be all and the end all at this stage of his journey.

CV

Occupation: Drug addict, part-time musician and Kate Moss's boyfriend
Age: 27
In the news because. . .Another drugs bust, Kate has come crawling back and his cat died from too much cocaine.