Notorious Babyshambles front man Pete Doherty sat on his bed, pulled out a crack pipe and proceeded to smoke. Sitting opposite on the duvet, with a bold purple cover, in the bedroom of his Hackney home, was music writer Sylvia Patterson.
The 2006 east London encounter is one of the many extraordinary experiences she can share from her 40-year-career Sylvia, 61, says: “I’d never actually seen anybody smoke crack before…certainly not in an interview situation. I didn’t know where to look. There was a used needle in the bathroom, and the whole place was in darkness.”
Sacked from The Libertines in June 2004, by co-frontman Carl Barât, primarily because of his escalating heroin and crack addiction, Doherty, now 47, took out his rehab diary from the time he’d spent in Arizona’s Meadows rehab clinic in 2005.
Sylvia says of Doherty, who dated supermodel Kate Moss from 2005-2007: “He showed me what he’d been writing when he was there, lyrics, poetry. “After he got out, he went straight back to London and got straight back on the gear. After that, his diary entries were just swirls of his own blood, tapering out to absolutely nothing.”
Sylvia, who lives in Hornsey, north London, with her partner Simon Goddard, 54, has worked for a succession of magazines, including Smash Hits, NME, Glamour and Q – interviewing everyone from Sinead O’Connor to Snoop Dogg. And she shares her insights into rockstar behaviour in her new book, I’m Not With The Man.
“They don’t make them like they used to,” she says of the chocolate box of nonconformist characters she’s met. Johnny Marr, who she met in Manchester’s Central Library was ,“physically slight, psychologically robust,” while Adam Ant, who she interviewed in a dingy Camden boozer was “exceptionally attractive.”
Describing the 80s, 90s and Noughties as full of movers, shakers, eccentrics and one-of-a-kinds, she returns to Doherty, adding:“He’s a great talent, but misunderstood. He has always, put it this way, done his own thing on his own terms, at great risk to himself. “He’s very personable, very disarming. He’s really open and he understands the nature of addiction.”
When she met up with him again in 2024, Pete was a changed man. She says: “The pandemic did him a massive favour, because the drug supplies were cut off. “He arrived in the foyer of a hotel with his baby daughter in his arms and his beautiful big dog Gladys was at his feet. He was about three stone heavier than before, but that’s a good thing.”
Sylvia, who grew up in Perth, Scotland, went from school to music magazine Smash Hits. She says: “In the early 80s there were no jobs in Scotland, because of Margaret Thatcher, so I was very lucky to get one. The first big star I interviewed was Diana Ross, and I was beside myself. I couldn’t keep a straight face. This legend from the 60s, sat right in front of me. She was incredibly gracious, as you would imagine.”
But Britpop was one of her most memorable times and Liam Gallagher was a favourite star. She says: “He walked into a room and everyone would look at him. He was strikingly beautiful, and oozed cool, although he still called his mum Peggy every day to keep him grounded.
“Oasis embodied everything that was the spirit of rock and roll. First and foremost, it was the brilliant songs. They wrote music for romantics. As Noel once said to me, ‘Oasis is a celebration of the euphoria of life’. I talked to Liam about that once, and he said, ‘oh, you can tell he reads books’, but replied, ‘to me, Oasis is all about freedom’.”
At a 2010 interview for Q magazine, when Liam was with the band Beady Eye, he dared Sylvia to neck a large glass of red wine in one. She says: “I caved and agreed. He did the same. And five collective down-in-ones later, I walked straight into a glass wall, which Liam found hilarious.”
Another music maverick who made an impression was Nothing Compares to You singer Sinead O’Connor.. Sylvia says: “I met her in the elegant drawing room of a five star hotel in Dublin in 2009, we sat on a white leather sofa suite. Her no-longer shaven head was crowned with a dark, unwashed, shoulder-length bob.
“Because of her look in the late 80s alone, we knew she was a unique individual. Then she opened her mouth to sing. I’ve never heard anything as striking, powerful and bewitching as that.”
Boldly drawing attention to issues such as child abuse, human rights, racism, and women’s rights, the singer spent decades calling out the systemic child abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic Church. In 1992, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television to protest against the Vatican’s alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse.
And she tried to enlist Sylvia’s help in exposing paedophiles – alleging she had evidence of a ring operating at the heart of power. She recalls: “She was convinced she had evidence.”
The star, who died in 2023, aged 56, made a big impression on Sylvia. She continues: “She cared about the bigger picture. She didn’t care if she threw it all away. She wouldn’t have even cared if she had been arrested, and in fact, I think she’d have liked that – it would have made more of a point.”
Another superstar for Sylvia was Marianne Faithfull, who died in 2025, aged 78. She says: “She was an aristocrat who gave it all up and was at the centre of the ’60s counterculture. She rejected everything that everyone really craves now – acclaim, success, fame, beauty – and deliberately went to live in a bomb site in Soho to become a heroin junkie, at major risk to herself. It’s one of the most extreme stories you’ll ever hear. Keith Richards is an extreme character, but what she did was a lot more extreme than anything he ever did.”
When Sylvia met her in Belgravia in 2013, Marianne sipped green tea and smoked Marlboro Lights, by then her only vice. She spoke openly about her much-publicised romance from 1966 to 1970 with Mick Jagger. Slyvia says: “She said ‘I hated being famous with Mick. A lot of people can’t take fame and I’m one of them’.”
By 2010, Sylvia says the naughty Noughties made way for a more mundane music scene. She says: “The stars I interviewed, Nicky Wire from the Manic Street Preachers, Noel Fielding and his pal Serge from Kasabian , without really prompting it, started talking about the flatlining of culture, and how all the intriguing and really eccentric, oddball, maverick, outsider personalities were disappearing from view all of a sudden. And they really were.
“Without casting any aspersions on Ed Sheeran and Adele, it had become more like that world at that point. They were the new massive stars. And, you just know actually, Adele would be the first one to say, ‘where have all the weirdos gone?’”
With the resurgent interest in the 90s, she is hopeful that something a bit crazier will return. She says: “Oasis are back, and arguably bigger than ever. Lady Gaga is a true punk rock spirit. People are clamouring for something real, and raw. So maybe the mavericks will come back too.”
*I’m Not with the Man: A Writer’s Life with the Music Mavericks by Sylvia Patterson is published by Fleet, out now in Hardback and eBook. HB RRP £25
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