Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

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  After I dropped out of Brunel and Peter came to town, we set sail together around London, moving from squat to flat, to mates’ houses and then back again. Peter found the first important place: DeLaney Mansions, 360 Camden Road. Our landlord was just like Del Boy, had Del Boy been Greek and fond of shell suits and gaudy chains heavy enough to sink him if he fell in the Thames. It was a sixties bedsit that time forgot. The front door didn’t work, so we had to exit and enter via the window, which we half-heartedly secured with a bicycle chain. Not that we had anything worth stealing. We had so little, in fact, that we shared a mattress on the floor and a kitchenette, and that was it. We had two cyberpunks for upstairs neighbours, a couple who looked like characters from a William Gibson novel: plastic straws in their hair, huge shoes, multiple unappealing piercings. They practically lived on speed. He was a computer programmer (ironic, given that he looked like he belonged in Tron ) from Philadelphia; she was an Israeli, quite mad, and with a rather strange sideline. People would pay her cash to go into their houses and beat them up, which I found both creepy and enterprising. The cyberpunks would clomp around above our heads all day, but if we made the slightest sound on our acoustic guitars they’d start screaming and banging the floor. One night a brick came through the window. We looked out through the jagged hole and it was the Israeli, screaming in at us, shouting, ‘Fuck you!’

  We called the police, the first and only time we ever called them, I think. But nothing much could be done about it and the upshot was that we had a broken window for the next four months. It was winter, naturally.

  We then moved along Camden Road to number 236, where Peter sweet-talked a family who had bought a big house there who we helped move in. The house was a mix of old bedsits and small flats and sat atop a huge basement. The basement was a real mess, but you could see the potential in it, and they gave it to us to live in while they made the place into a home. So we had this glorious subterranean Victorian expanse with a garden, and a grand old toilet cistern; it reminded me of ringing a church bell every time I pulled the heavy chain to flush it. That was where we began to forge our legend, where we started throwing impromptu gigs and parties. We’d flyer Camden and invite people back there and play for them, revelling in the randomness and the unexpected that this brought. At the first ever gig there, we’d decorated the place with lots of candles, and Peter had been to visit his parents in Germany and come back with lots of beer and cigarettes, which we’d put out for people. Everyone sat expectantly around, waiting for us to begin and, as soon as we played the first chord, all the lights went out. We had to ask around for a pound for the meter, but got things going again eventually and it turned into a very long, debauched party. Irish Paul shagged someone in the bathroom, which at the time we thought was particularly impressive, and that first night created the template for all the gigs there to come. The locust swarm would descend, we’d play, and they’d leave us, sometimes days later, with only debris and hazy recollections to show for it. The flat would be wrecked, but we’d be happy. Later, after we were signed, the so-called ‘guerrilla’ gigs would take over the mantle. They came about because, by that time, the internet was becoming a force in everyone’s lives, and we were knocked sideways by the way you could post ‘Gig tomorrow night’ on a forum somewhere and, as if by magic, people would turn up. The guerrilla gigs were chaotic and disorganized because there was no time to sort anything out, and precious little money, too, but the fact that people would turn up was a real buzz. They were a continuation of the impromptu gigs at 236 Camden Road, in the same mi casa es su casa spirit. They were about anyone being able to reach out and touch the people in the pictures on their wall, the musicians they were listening to at the time, about pushing all the boundaries, seeing how far that was possible. It was the best fun imaginable, and everyone was invited.

  Remarkably, the family upstairs at 236 Camden Road looked on us as some kind of novelty. They never batted an eyelid even when we serenaded up to seventy people at a time below them. Then we hit upon the idea of sub-letting the space under the stairwell to a French conceptual artist who we charged twenty pounds a week. He was happy there in our basement. And so was I, for a while.

  I was always much happier on Camden Road than I was later, living on the top floor of a townhouse in Holloway, which, looking back, was an exercise in making myself feel edgy. Some nights I even slept in a cage, in the spare room of a prostitute we’d made friends with, a woman we’ll call Natasha. Natasha worked from home, I suppose you could say; she ran it as a sort of brothel and, when she wasn’t working, she hung around Camden a lot, a face at our shows. Someone said she knew one of the guys in Blur, but I don’t know. What I do know was we needed somewhere to sleep, and she had the space, so we took her up on her offer, despite its pitfalls. Natasha looked like a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy: skinny, emaciated and striking, and she was an enigma. She thought it would age her being outside too long, took cabs everywhere, and wouldn’t leave the house without applying sun block – a very paranoid girl, and quite lonely as far as I could tell. The bedroom I was allocated had a big iron cage in it, halfway between an outsize birdcage and a medieval torture device, which I often ended up sleeping in. I think her clients used to spend their hours in there paying to suffer, but it afforded me a degree of security I enjoyed. Natasha was our drummer for a few hours; we liked the notion, but she really couldn’t drum.

  When she had a client, Peter and I would sit in the next room holding pellet guns and talk in gruff voices so that, through the wall, one might think that she had muscle to look after her in case a client freaked out. As a thank-you she’d usually take us to the café across the road and feed us, which seemed a fair exchange. Peter and I used to spy on her and her clients, sometimes, crawling quietly around on our knees to peep through the keyhole. I remember seeing her with a Hassidic Jew and, surprisingly, the drummer from a band we knew. Not at the same time, of course. We sat back dumbfounded when we caught sight of him on the other side of the door.

  However, the boarding arrangement couldn’t, and didn’t, last. A few months in, Peter found a new girlfriend, which Natasha didn’t like at all. She could be quite possessive and paranoid, and she used to have these fits and attacks that she seemed totally convinced by, but which we never quite fully believed in. We used to take her to hospital and she’d always rally and make a recovery, a little miracle every time. She claimed to be able to see auras around people, and know high-ups in government, clients, she said, who were in positions of terrible power. One night she left a note to say goodbye and perched out on the window ledge feigning a suicide attempt. There was another suicide note pinned on the door one day when we got back from somewhere, and we ran into the kitchen where she had her head in the electric oven. I’m not sure she enjoyed the sound of our laughter, and I don’t think we were laughing because we thought the situation funny. Fundamentally, we were pretty scared of her. In the end I took the coward’s way out and fled to Manchester in the middle of the night. Peter had already gone, and I was getting the fear alone in my cage. Someone told me Natasha has since moved to Ireland, but if ever I’m on the Holloway Road I still tread lightly.

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  They were lazy days on the whole, though, and when there was no wind to fill our sails Peter and I would drift in slow circles, becalmed, waiting for the currents to bear us away. After we left Holloway, we moved to Dalston, where Peter had a room and I was sort of squatting. Also there was Don, whose place it was, who was eccentric at best, and another guy, Mad Mick, who lived up to his name and was always hanging around. Nothing much moved on those long hot days, cars hummed in and out of sight, and we lay listlessly in sunlit windows trying to feel the world turn. Downstairs there were a couple of French girls who spent their spare time attempting to make ketamine out of rose-water that they’d bought at the chemist. They’d spend afternoons boiling all sorts of ingredients in rose-water, because one night at a club someone had giv
en them a bum tip that that was how you made the stuff, but they were having about as much luck with that as most alchemists have conjuring up gold. Mad Mick was from Brooklyn, and I liked him. He was quiet and self-contained, but a lunatic with it, and it was as if he lived in the shadows: you’d only see him at very strange times, like six in the morning at Dalston Kingsland train station when he really lived over in Kentish Town. We’d always meet him at the most odd, out-of-the-way places with the oddest people. We’d show up at a random squat party in Deptford and he’d be there. I was in a Jobcentre in Hackney once in an interminable wait to see someone and I suggested we start breakdancing and, without another word, he did. He was a damn good breakdancer, and it made the surly staff feel uncomfortable, which was a bonus.

  During those early days we got a gig in a nursing home in East Ham because our drummer at the time knew one of the nurses there and we’d been promised £50 if we did this gig for the old people. So we trooped down and were confronted by a room of very fragile and vulnerable old people, the kind of old people, shockingly old, you don’t see on the street any more because they can’t really get around. I feel quite bad about it now. About the most suitable song in our repertoire was a cover of ‘Anything But Love’, the old jazz standard, and we tried to be quiet, but we weren’t especially good at that, and there were a lot of fingers in ears and a lot of confusion. People kept getting up and walking around, as if they weren’t quite sure what was going on, or where the door was. One of the patients there was called Margie, and she took rather a shine to us; the poor lady had alcoholic dementia and kept asking if we’d brought a pint with us. We persisted, though, and by the end of our set a few people seemed into it. Then a couple of nurses came in and quietly drew a curtain around one of the beds. It transpired that its occupant had died during our performance of ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. It was a pretty incomprehensible moment for us, but the nurses took it entirely in their stride. It might sound cold, but I suppose that’s just how it is in a hospice. It was terribly tragic, but what a pertinent song to go out on. There are, I imagine, worse ways to go.

  To add to the surreal turn that the day had taken, before the gig we’d told Mad Mick that he could be our manager. We didn’t really want him to be, and of course there wasn’t a job because we didn’t really need a manager back then, but it was just a cool thing to tell people none the less. We’d said to Mick that if he ran to the gig from Dalston then the job was his. As we left the hospice after this terrible confusion, just as we were driving off, we saw Mick at the end of the road, huffing and puffing. He had just arrived, had run all the way, but there wasn’t room in the car to give him a lift back so we had to leave him there. I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and there was Mad Mick, confused and red-faced, sweating in his jeans, getting smaller and smaller until he was only a speck.

  Gigs like that were clearly not going to pay, so I had a series of other, mostly crap, jobs that I sometimes enjoyed but mostly resented. Waterloo had been my gateway to the world, but the altogether less lovely Hammersmith was my gateway to the world of work. The temp agency there saw something in me that I’m not all too sure I saw in myself, dispatching me across London to push paper around like a clerk in the background in an Ealing comedy. For a while, I was at the BBC, and I looked out over west London from my office at Television Centre, a network of endless corridors and boxy rooms that held about as much charm as pleurisy. I was twenty-one, and an easily distracted employee at best. The wages were criminal and, feeling hard done by, I spent my days roaming the corridors wearing a suit and a trilby, which wasn’t really done back then, and flirting with random BBC employees, ambitious girls who really didn’t care if I lived or died, though the hat piqued their interest. I was a purchase ledger clerk, which mean paying the BBC employees, though I can’t quite remember ever paying anyone or not. At the same time, I was performing in the house band at a place called Jazz After Dark on Greek Street in Soho. The four of us played for four hours a night for the princely sum of £20 (between us, not each) and a bottle of beer apiece. Which, considering that none of us could actually play jazz, was probably fair enough. My undoing was oversleeping one morning after a gig and missing my shift. The BBC drafted in another temp to do my job, a temp who accomplished, I was reliably informed, my whole eight hours’ work in the first five minutes of the day. It was fair to say that they were on to me.

  After that, I worked at Cobb’s Hall in Hammersmith, which wasn’t a place for a suit or trilby. I was on the front desk, or the front line as I came to think of it, for a building full of social workers. A lot of their clients were mental health patients, a good portion of them schizophrenics, who came in to get their injections to offset their psychosis. I won’t pretend to understand what went on in the clinic or what disorders some of the people were struggling with, but I was pretty much the first face they saw when they came in. So I had people who were overdue their injections, very interesting people, very angry people, some telling me they’re the Son of God and they need to kill me, and there’s no security. Just me sitting there in splendid isolation. I had a little black alarm cord that, when you pulled it, made a sound that I can only describe as inoffensive, and that was my only protection. All for £5 an hour. I never got hurt, although came close to it, but there was an impreciseness to their plans, so when they loomed up it wasn’t too difficult to get out of the way. In quieter moments I used to go through the computer system and see who was on file. I found a few people I knew.

  Far more pleasant were the three years I spent off and on as an usher in London’s theatres. The job excited me if only because it let me in on the periphery of the glittering world I’d imagined London to be. I was still outside its walls, but I could finally see in at the windows. Before I moved to London, I’d get home from a day trip to the West End, turn on the TV and there was the city again, and it seemed fantastic to me that I’d been somewhere that was on the box, that it actually existed. When I moved there, I’d go back to places again and again, and remember standing in the cobbled square in Covent Garden early one morning with a light mist on the streets and no one around. I fancied I heard the flower market starting up across the way, blooms brought on trestle tables. I imagined Oscar Wilde, the comings and goings of My Fair Lady, I romanticized it out of all proportion and it took me a long time to realize that it was a modern-day tourist trap. When I was working at the theatres I used to go down to the Piazza in my lunch hours and watch the performers, and I’d see people in sleeping bags waiting to perform for the tourists and people a little too drunk for lunchtime, and I realized that the only place that the romantic Covent Garden lived on in was in the hearts of people like me. And, little by little, the lustre faded. The world inside the theatre, however, still held some magic, and I particularly liked working at the Old Vic. It was near my spiritual home of Waterloo – the portal to this new world for a country boy like me – and I loved its tradition and its history; it signified something and felt real to me. I had one pair of blue trousers and a horrible matching waistcoat that I wore for all my theatre work; the trousers were a pair of flares that were so worn that they shone. They never got washed because I had nowhere to wash them, and at one point I had impetigo on my legs that I couldn’t help rubbing, and the trousers eventually blended with the scab. But those trousers carried me through, from my initial days among shadowy aisles pointing patrons to their seats to the day our Rough Trade deal finally allowed me to fold them neatly along their thinning creases and put them away for good.

  That might make everything sound very purposeful, but the truth was that I didn’t have any sense of where we were going while I was at the Old Vic, though Peter and I were increasingly inseparable and working more and more intensely on our lyrics. Peter was always very optimistic but somehow – and this is probably indicative of the insecurities that would dog me all the way through my performing career – I never thought I’d make it in a band. For me, it was an impenetrable world, and play
ing in front of a small audience was already intimidating enough. Peter’s attitude was different: We can do this, you can be that. He was full of faith, life and vitality, and that sustained me; it was a real part of the magic of the time. Peter surprised me at work at the Old Vic one night, when we were meant to be rehearsing but I’d taken the paying job instead. Separate worlds – music and theatre – colliding momentarily, almost causing one to spin helplessly out of orbit. I was in my trusty trousers, probably gleaming in the theatre lights, serving a platter of vol-au-vents as part of a reception for Marcel Marceau. It was an after-show as far as I can remember – as much as great mime artists have after-shows, anyway. Then Peter just appeared, lumbering into sight, red-faced with tears in his eyes. I can’t imagine what the guests must have thought as a stranger button-holed one of the waiters, and the quiet of the theatre bar is shattered as he screams: ‘What are you doing here? Can’t you see these people are cunts? We’re meant to be writing songs!’

  The room screeched to a halt, a hundred heads turning towards us, now centre stage in the encroaching silence. I was livid. How I kept my job there is still a mystery.

  As well as the Old Vic, I did stints at the Aldwych, the Apollo and the Lyric. Ushering is a funny job, mostly populated by hopeful actors and musicians, a lot of whom fall by the wayside and get stuck in that routine. The idea is that it’ll subsidize your earnings and allow you to pursue your dreams during the daylight hours, but the reality is that you all end up going to the same cliquey bars after the show, spend all your money and then sleep all day. Many people get stuck in that for years. It wasn’t entirely without merit: I got to meet Harold Pinter and Michael Gambon, an impressive man who seemed to have a glow about him. I even had a chance to speak with him too, and he gave me some advice.