By the swimming pool is a ruined piano, left out all winter in the rain. There are teepees in the grounds, a classic American caravan in the drive, where weekending friends can stay while they make music in a mini-recording studio built into the pool house. As Blur famously sang, “a very big house in the country” is the clichéd final act of celebrity, when the delights of fame and partying pall and a rock star turns to aristocratic pretensions and organic fowl.

But Pearl Lowe had a more pressing reason to leave London: her friends were killing her. Beautiful, rich, spoilt rock-chick junkies rarely elicit much sympathy. Yet there is a moment in Lowe’s new memoir, All That Glitters, when you feel the intense loneliness of her predicament.

Three years ago, finally clean of heroin and cocaine after years of lurid excess, Lowe is at a Christmas party where the centrepiece is a mound of cocaine. She declines, tries not to look the spoilsport, but is egged on until a man cuts her a line of the drug, another hands her a rolled-up note and, after she relents, the whole party cheers. “Pearl’s back!” they cry, not caring that what ensues is a catastrophic two-month binge, reversing all her rehab and counselling.

Pearl Lowe’s circle of friends included the gilded, eternally photographed Primrose Hill set of the late Nineties – Jude & Sadie, Kate Moss, the Gallagher brothers, Patsy Kensit, Johnny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee and Lowe’s partner Danny Goffey, the drummer in Supergrass. And for her, hedonism had no bounds. “There were no evening trips to the cinema or theatre, no quiet home-cooked dinners,” she writes. “In the world I moved in, it was about deriving as much fun and pleasure as you could from life, and to do that it was almost a prerequisite to be off your head.”

In London, she was, in drug parlance, “white-knuckling”: clinging to sobriety without changing her life. So two years ago, Lowe, 37, and Goffey, 33, moved to a 14th-century manor house in a village outside Haslemere. A stream runs through an 18-acre garden littered with kids’ toys. Her elder daughter Daisy, 18, the product of a teenage pregnancy, lives here when not modelling. Pearl and Danny’s two sons, Alfie, 10, and Frankie, 7, are at local private schools and their 19-month-old baby Betty is today at her childminder’s.

So princessy are Lowe’s requirements – her choice of photographer, etc – that I’m quite ready to loathe her. And in All That Glitters she comes over as a self-indulgent, vacuous, work-shy woman, who careens carelessly through life grabbing the fun and trinkets while others clear up behind. But in person, she has a vulnerability and a frankness that cuts through her rehab-speak of “spiritual paths” and “rebirthing”. She has been sober for more than two years and now doesn’t even smoke or eat meat. She is no longer the chronic junkie who would wander her London house smoking smack while her kids were at school, using scented candles to mask the smell, who was nicknamed “Dyson” for her hoovering of cocaine, who took drugs during her third pregnancy, celebrated that birth with a line and, more times even than she recounts in her book, almost died.

For Lowe, the party always came first. Describing her time at the centre of Britpop, as lead singer of Powder, she writes little of the music or the thrill of performance: she could barely wait for the gig to be over, so the party could begin. Lowe loved – still does – to be surrounded by a gang of friends. And parties meant drugs: marijuana at 13, coke at 15, Ecstasy at 18, then heroin.

Such was her notoriety that 12 years ago when she met Goffey, his manager warned him she was “a nutter”. In the rock world that must be saying something? “Oh God, yeah,” Lowe laughs. “I had a terrible reputation. I was just out every night. I was in a band. I was such an exhibitionist, I’d think nothing of dancing on the table, wearing see-through dresses with my knickers showing. I don’t really like the person I was then.”

At that point, Supergrass were the knaves of Britpop, Oasis and Blur the kings. Powder, though a minor act, played all the festivals and Lowe was an indie pin-up. Goffey loved to party hard, too, but could withstand sleepless nights and still deal with the day. Lowe, now going at his pace, started to suffer, slept in, turned up late for rehearsals, screwed up gigs, until, she writes, “as Danny’s star continued to ascend, mine began to wane. I was no longer a rock act, but relegated to the lowly and degrading status of rock chick”.

I suggest, after footballer, rock musician is the fantasy husband for today’s celeb-crazed Grazia and heat readers. Pearl shakes her head sadly.

“I’d never go out with another rock star. Or anyone in the entertainment world. Let’s talk about bands. They are away the majority of the time. And it’s not like you can join them in exotic places, they’re only there one night, then they’re on a tour bus or a plane. When they’re in the studio for five weeks, working 24 hours per day, they don’t want you around.

“They get one day off per week. Danny misses birthdays: he just missed Frankie’s, he’s missed Alfie’s twice. Most of the time you go to functions on your own. I bet people think he is a figment of my imagination.”

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