How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  At the band’s first London concert in the Monarch pub in Camden, the air of anticipation was unlike anything that had been witnessed since Oasis had made their debut at the Water Rats six years earlier, as the assembled crowd witnessed the return of sharply dressed three-minute rock ’n’ roll. ‘At the end of the set Jeff Barrett from Heavenly was walking round shouting … “It’s year zero … It’s year zero … It’s year zero.”’ says Endeacott. ‘We all thought, this is something happening, this band is really going to be enormous.’

  Geoff Travis had witnessed the highs and lows of hype many times in his career. While the rest of the industry and the media started to become obsessive about the potential of the Strokes, he took a more guarded view as he began to negotiate a long-term relationship for Rough Trade and the band. ‘It actually makes me really anxious when people say, “This is going to be huge,” he says. ‘It heralded the end of our Blanco y Negro relationship. When Rob Dickins left Warners he was replaced by a guy called John Reid, who couldn’t cope with the fact that bands might want to go elsewhere.’

  Under Travis’s arrangement with Warners, any band he wanted to sign to Rough Trade was asked to consider signing to Blanco y Negro as an option as well. It was a situation that the new generation of Warners executives were uneasy with. ‘John Reid, because he didn’t know what he was doing basically, couldn’t handle it. So when we wanted to sign the Strokes, John Reid said, “I’ll come and see them.” That was the last thing any of us wanted. We went through this whole song and dance where he sent his American people to go and see them and talk to them. And they were all crap, just stupid absolutely bog-standard major-label A&R people, no vision, no ideas, no interest in anything other than their careers.’

  Rough Trade had provoked worldwide interest in the Strokes and, with perfect timing, re-established itself as a label that was once more synonymous with a cutting edge. As the negotiations continued it looked unlikely that Rough Trade would reap the benefits of their A&R instincts, as the opportunity of working with the Strokes internationally started to recede. The band signed to Rough Trade for the UK only, where the label was at least able to profit from the breakneck success they helped generate. For Travis it was an insidious reminder that, despite Rough Trade’s peerless A&R instincts, the industry remained a flawed and intransigent environment. ‘The White Stripes was exactly the same,’ he says. ‘We wanted to sign the Whites Stripes. Jack [White] said, “We’d love to be on Rough Trade,” but we had to go through this process again, lawyers, Warners, nonsense. Basically we’d lost the two best bands of that decade because of this ridiculous Warners structure. Up until that point it hadn’t been a problem but we needed to walk away. It pulled all our energies together.’

  Whatever the disappointment of failing to secure an international deal for the Strokes, Rough Trade was enjoying one of its most successful-ever periods. It was once more a label that bands wanted to work with and Endeacott was a much in demand A&R man, as a succession of managers and lawyers beat a hopeful path to his door. The presence of entertainment lawyers was symbolic of the changes that the music business had undergone in the Nineties, as corporate governance and top-heavy deals had superseded the age of the independent maverick. ‘Bands had done half a gig and suddenly got a lawyer,’ says Endeacott. ‘When I was in a band, I didn’t know what a lawyer was and I certainly didn’t care. The amount of demos we were getting was going crazy. I got a phone call from a woman called Bani, a lawyer at East West Records and she said, “Look, I’ve got this band I really want you to see. They’re called the Libertines … I’ll come round and pick you up and we’ll go over to this rehearsal space in Old Street. It’s like Mick and Keith or John and Paul, they’re as important as that.” … I was going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever, heard it all a million times.” But I agreed to go, so I wait for her to turn up, and it’s a Lincoln car with a driver with a fucking hat on in the front.’

  Even by his not-easily-shocked standards, Endeacott was taken aback by the scene that awaited him as he took his seat in the back of the car. Having been told he was off to see the future of rock ’n’ roll he found himself in a rather unusual environment. ‘Bani has two plastic bags,’ he says, ‘and pulls out an assortment of nuts, crisps, Coca-Cola, Fanta, beer – just in case – lots of nibbles and soft drinks. This is how rock ’n’ roll it was. Then she starts telling me how I’m just about to meet Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, how these two people are going to change the face of music, but there’s a problem. “There are four of them but the bass player hasn’t turned up, so it’s just going to be Pete and Carl at the front on bass and guitar. And the thing is, they haven’t got a drummer, but this guy Gary, my PA’s boyfriend, he plays in Eddie Grant’s touring band, he’ll stand in.” I’m thinking, what the fuck am I going into? The whole thing’s a shambles and you’re just feeding me with nuts and crisps. It can’t get any weirder than this, but, of course, it does get weirder.’

  In the two years of concentrated, and at times very ugly, chaos that followed, it was the Libertines’ and particularly Peter Doherty’s behaviour, rather than their music that received the coverage – coverage that reached the unenviable position of being a mainstay in the tabloids. When Rough Trade signed the band, no one could have predicted the vortex of drug abuse, criminality and acrimony that was to follow. Once he had negotiated his first improbable encounter with the band in a rehearsal studio, Endeacott went to see the band in their natural habitat, the Rhythm Factory in Bethnal Green, a dive venue in a part of town then rarely visited by the music industry. ‘I walked in to the Rhythm Factory,’ he says. ‘It was like a freak show. Everybody was in their late teens or early twenties. It was full of middle-class dropouts having a year out of doing whatever. It was full of artists, full of poets, film-makers and actors, all people with big hats and all people snorting and cavorting and everything else. The Libertines were part of this scene and they came on at about two in the morning and it was absolutely electrifying.’

  Endeacott had encountered a gap-year trust-fund version of Paris-in-the-Thirties bohemia, in which the Libertines occupied the role of dissolute musicians, playing scratchy songs to a self-consciously roué crowd. ‘They were, like, the centre of this whole scene and what it took – it took someone like me or whoever it would’ve been, but it would’ve happened eventually – to take them out of that scene, to make them realise what they were. The first few gigs they did, that scene followed them everywhere, then slowly but surely that scene drifted away and carried on without them and then they became the Libertines.’

  The Libertines recorded their debut with Mick Jones, a friend of Lee’s since Acme Attractions, who had been suggested as a producer as much for his experience of wayward behaviour in the studio as for his technical ability behind the mixing desk. Jones’s first encounter with the band was enough to convince him that he was starting a colourful working relationship. ‘Mick was talking to Carl,’ says Lee, ‘then Peter comes into the studio on a moped with a six-pack, that was his first introduction, and everything was like that with them. They’d play at people’s houses as an easy way to make pocket money. They used to charge people ten quid a head to get into those things and made quite a lot of money – enough for a good night out.’

  The music press, who perceived the band as an English riff on the Strokes, broadly welcomed the Libertines album. Where the New Yorkers had a louche, whip-crack attitude to playing their instruments that suggested they had digested the ennui of The Andy Warhol Diaries, the Libertines played with more of a busking shuffle that was redolent of the clatter of Steptoe’s yard. Once stories started to emerge from Bethnal Green, of the band playing hastily arranged gigs in their own flat and sharing demos online with fans, media interest started to grow. ‘All around the first album there was no tabloids not at all,’ says Endeacott. ‘It was only after the first album all that started to happen – the album had been out but the reception was pretty lukewarm.’

  The id
ea of hosting gigs in their own front room and posting their music on the Internet for free connected the band to their fast-growing audience instantly. It also allowed the Libertines to become a sensation without recourse to the traditional press. In an age of what was starting to be called peer-to-peer media, the Libertines were becoming a peer-to-peer band, a position they used to project an image of devil-may-care lawlessness. Doherty in particular had no interest in the protocols of the music business and he would soon display a similar attitude towards the law.

  Part of the inspiration for the ad hoc Libertines concerts came from their agent, Russell Warby. The band had initially smarted from accusations that they couldn’t play, so had asked him to book them a run of concerts which they would play anonymously to sharpen up their act. ‘Early on, when they allegedly couldn’t play,’ says Warby, ‘they needed to do some gigs and I booked them out at weekends and they went out as Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel, which had been the names on their neighbours’ doorbells, and that was how they were billed. I told the promoters, “Look, it’s going to be the next big thing,” and people were like, “Oh, he’s just done the Strokes,” so we booked them out at weekends and they supported Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in Harlow and all this sort of stuff, four days a week for three or four weeks.’

  By the end of the tour the Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel shows were being labelled ‘guerrilla gigs’ and had become part of the band’s myth; a profile was developing of a London band that was rejecting all the industry conventions and doing whatever it liked. To a young audience growing up with the Internet, this was one of the most invigorating things to happen to guitar music; to the press, it was a story that was turning into a saga, one that would keep their news pages lively with gossip for a year. Though still largely a music-press phenomenon, the Libertines were starting to draw the attention of famous faces and the band became a beacon for decadent, elegantly wasted behaviour and, where celebrity and drugs led, the tabloids and furore followed. ‘I knew it was going to go quite far down a road but I wasn’t sure how far,’ says Lee. ‘Pretty soon I realised that it was going to go all the way, but in the beginning it’s very exciting to meet somebody that’s got a full picture of what they want to do, but absolutely no barriers either. I realised Peter was going to go down any road he wanted, and to go as far as he can.’

  The extent of Peter Doherty’s problems started to reveal themselves at Rough Trade when the singer would arrive at the Golborne Road offices in varying states of consciousness and disarray. ‘There were knocks on the door from Pete turning up at quarter past ten in the morning,’ says Endeacott. ‘Pete walking in with just a pair of jeans on and his body all cut, saying, “I want £180, can you lend me £180?” and me going outside to talk to him and going to my own bank and getting money out to just give to him and never getting it back.’

  As a member of PiL and as an initiate of the paranoid goings on at John Lydon’s Gunter Grove house in the early Eighties, Lee had witnessed more extreme behaviour than either Travis or Endeacott. She had also experienced the effects and fall-out of hard drugs on some of her friends, but was nevertheless astonished by the escalation of chaos round Doherty, once crack consumption became a feature of his behaviour. ‘It was probably one of the hardest situations ever’, she says. ‘It was very exciting for a while, for a long time really, but it did get to a point where it was a completely unmanageable situation on every level. You couldn’t deal with the manager, you couldn’t deal with anyone, and it was sad to watch them throwing it all away.’

  As Doherty became a one-man cause célèbre, in and out of courts and the newspapers, the Libertines’ career was suspended. His side project, Babyshambles, became his main focus, although the group was little more than a vehicle for his erratic behaviour. ‘He was careering round London in a stolen car with someone else’s money,’ says Warby, ‘ringing me up saying, “Can you book a Babyshambles tour? I’ve got this mate, he’s got an Evening Standard van,” and I’m thinking, that guy’s a drug dealer … so you’re going to tour in that … so I say, “Come to the office Peter, come to the office and we’ll talk about it,” and I’d try and talk him into handing the car keys back to this geezer who’s going to kill him. It wasn’t long after that he entered his first stint of rehabilitation.’

  Lee, Endeacott and Travis decided to intervene and attempted to place Doherty in a drug recovery programme. As an indication of how out of control the situation was, the only way in which they could manage to get him to enter the clinic was to kidnap him. ‘We kidnapped him one day and drove him to a rehab clinic,’ says Lee, ‘but he wasn’t ready. It was emotionally exhausting and you realise that all that potential is just going to fizzle away … that’s very hard, that’s hard to deal with and it’s hard on so many levels.’

  Endeacott was as entangled in Doherty’s self-destructive conduct as Lee, but had also experienced life on the road with the band in the States. There, he had been thrown into the uncontrollable chaos of their behaviour at all hours of the day. As someone whose A&R working methods involved becoming a surrogate member of the band, he had become submerged in their recklessness. Once Doherty was placed in rehab, Endeacott took him some clothes for his stay, a moment in which the extent of the turmoil finally hit home. ‘I went, “You need help.” He said, “I know, but I don’t want to be here,”’ says Endeacott. ‘I was holding all these clothes I’d bought from Primark and I remember getting in my car and crying halfway up the road. It was awful but I was just so emotionally involved with them.’

  The stint in rehab was a failure and Rough Trade reached a point where they felt unable to continue working with Doherty. By releasing his music and trying to maintain a dialogue with whoever, on any given day, he had decided to call his manager, the label was in effect contributing to his problems. ‘We’d written him a letter saying “We’re not going to finance your drug habit, don’t come and ask us for any more money. We’re not going to make a record with you until you get some kind of help,”’ says Lee. ‘“We’ve taken you to rehab that didn’t work, we don’t know what else to do,” and the three of us signed it and we took it round. We had a meeting with him and we gave him this letter, and I think at that point he realised that everyone was shutting down. Until that point he was able to get people to do what he wanted, pretty much, with charm alone.’

  Throughout the period of Doherty’s waywardness, Rough Trade managed to sustain the reputation it had regained as a label since its relaunch. A run of critical and commercial releases by Arcade Fire, Antony and the Johnsons, Sufjan Stevens and the Hidden Cameras, to name a few, saw Rough Trade operating at a creative peak and one to rival its Ladbroke Grove heyday. The fact remained that the Libertines had become a constant drain on their resources, and Lee and Endeacott in particular were suffering from exhaustion. ‘Collectively, we’d done whatever we can,’ says Lee. ‘It’s taking up every minute, trying to sort out dodgy deals, every day for whatever reason, taking up everybody’s time and we’re not able to function.’

  A new figure entered the Libertines saga, someone whom Doherty hoped had had enough experience of drugs and the industry to piece the band back together. ‘I think everyone at Rough Trade was being knackered,’ says Warby. ‘Then, at some point, you’ve got Alan McGee getting involved as the manager. He rang me up and said, “I want to manage the Libertines.” and I was like, “Are you fucking crazy?” and he was like, “We’re going to do two Brixton Academies and prove to the radio programmes they’re a really big band,” and I’m like, “OK.” Anyway, he worked out subsequently that I wasn’t lying.’

  McGee’s episode as the Libertines manager was brief and miserable. While he had seen all manner of bad behaviour and debauchery done in the name of spindly rock ’n’ roll, the true extent of the suffering caused by the various addictions, in around the band, especially Doherty’s, dissuaded him from getting involved in the long term. ‘It was an incredibly unhappy experience,’ says McGee. ‘I’d been through my own
drug wars. I’m not being judgemental, it’s just hard for me personally, to watch that, and I eventually couldn’t really be around him, because it was really difficult watching.’ McGee had ambitions for the Libertines in which he saw them turning into a big-selling people’s band. If the attention around them could be harnessed into a narrative that would work to their favour in the tabloids, then there was every chance that, with the right song, the band could connect with a wider audience. A few weeks into working with them he realised they would be lucky to spend even a few hours in a recording studio together. ‘A whole team of people helped make them big, James Endeacott, Jeannette and Russell Warby,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I was any more important than anybody else or anything but it was just that it was a very hard time.’

  It became inevitable that whatever support structure had been put in place, Doherty’s behaviour, the endless brushes with the law and the constant tabloid intrusion made the situation unmanageable. As Doherty began spending more time in prison, so his behaviour became determined by his experiences inside. During a spell in Pentonville he had befriended a man known as ‘the General’, whom Doherty, upon his release, appointed as his manager.

  ‘When he got out he told the General that the General could be on his record,’ says Lee, ‘so there was that going on. Then the General was hoping that he would get a deal, so he was coming to the office looking for his own deal. Peter had a whole collection of Jaguars, cheap ones that he was buying for, like, 600 quid. He’d drive them and then leave them places, and the General was always coming in, speaking in a really broad Jamaican accent, saying, “You have to give us money, Peter’s Jaguar’s broken down on the M11 and it’s gone to a garage.” It was like that every day. Every day it was something, this has happened, that’s happened.’