Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

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  The first plane I boarded was to go to Greece with a girlfriend, on a Ceefax holiday. That will probably go over the heads of a lot of people reading this, but Ceefax was like the internet before the internet, coming through your telly in blocky primary colours. The pages took ages to load, but for £110 each, Ceefax got my girlfriend and me to Greece for seven days of island hopping. You’d be hard pushed to Google that nowadays. It was amazingly exciting that first flight. Like a lot of those bargain-bucket trips, take-off was in the wee small hours, and I was still drunk because I hadn’t been to bed. We’d stayed up drinking, dreaming of clambering on a flight before sunrise and arriving in Greece, a new, alien world. I’m romanticizing it out of all proportion, but it was my first time in the air. I can’t imagine taking that for granted. My hangover was just kicking in as we came in to land, and the pressure on my ears as we descended felt like a spike behind my eye. I remember seriously considering never going home again if that’s what you had to contend with on every flight. Oh, to be so innocent …

  The island hopping was short-lived. We woke up one morning to learn that a ferry had sunk off the island we were staying on, Paros, and watched as all the town’s families came out in mourning, and the buildings were swathed in black. Almost everyone there had lost somebody they knew, a relation or friend, and the beautiful, colourful island closed down, the bells stopped ringing, everything stilled. We were marooned, two tourists sticking out like sore thumbs. Nobody paid us any attention, but it suddenly felt very Wicker Man. When we finally got a boat out of there we had to sail over the wreckage.

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  I’d stopped using Ceefax by the time travel became a big part of my life with the band. Sitting on a bus all locked and loaded and ready to go, on tour with a proper budget and support from your label, was quite a feeling. And a tour bus takes you on a journey to a strange environment. All you see of every town you visit is the bus, the back of the venue and a concentrated adoration in a room. Then there’s loads of snogging and whatnot and writing on jeans, everyone’s on stage hugging you, and every bit of press you read and every picture you see is of yourself, and you begin to feel like the centre of the universe. It’s easy to see how people get remote and arrogant. I’d like to think that we learnt quickly. You do things on your first tour that you never do again, only throw the proverbial TV out of the Travelodge window the once. After you’ve finished the initial tour, you’re kind of over it, you know you’re not Keith Richards and so you stop trying to pretend you are. We did manage to get banned from the Ibis in Swansea (I think it was, at least – how rock ‘n’ roll) on that tour, though we were acting like idiots and I don’t blame them.

  I first flew with The Libertines to Sweden, and then we rolled through Europe on our own tour bus. It was as if my feet didn’t touch the ground, just a succession of wonders. It’s hard to explain how exciting your first times abroad on a tour bus are; you really feel like you’ve stepped up in the world. We were out supporting Supergrass after our first album, and their crew hated us and their fans hated us, but our record was galloping up the charts for the first time and Europe was rolling through the tour bus window. I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt so happy or fulfilled. It felt like we were making our mark in the world, planting our flag on the bloody horizon.

  People say that if you’re touring in a band you don’t see places – you know, telling Montreal they’ve been a great audience when you’re actually in Milan – but that’s only if you choose not to. I was keen to soak up as much of the atmosphere of all the new places as I could. We always made sure to meet the savviest, nicest, smartest locals, and let them take us on a whistle-stop night out after the gig, or go to somebody’s house and party. There were proper adventures everywhere we went. Barcelona and Madrid were particularly cool. We made the video for ‘Time For Heroes’ in Madrid completely drunk, and there’s one bit in there on a metro platform where the train’s pulling through the station and I jump against it. I leapt into it, and I could easily have gone between the carriages: I could have died, never been seen again, but I sort of staggered around, dusted myself off, then I was back in the game. That’s how we were living; we felt indestructible. The warmth of the people in Spain was amazing – friendly, beautiful people – but we had a great reception the world over. We found the same intimacy with our fans that we’d created in London all over the world, which was a beautiful thing. We effervesced, and the audiences fed on that and the buzz was bounced straight back. We’d arrive at the venues and find fans waiting, ready to embrace the spirit of Libertinism we brought.

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  We came back from that first tour more worldly wise, more used to other countries, but nothing we’d met could prepare us for our first visit to Japan. It seemed like a different universe. Our debut offering was out and selling well: we were officially big in Japan (though thankfully no one in the band actually said that out loud) and we’d been booked for a headline tour. The first thing that happened when we landed was that a little dog came and sat down next to me. We’d all been drinking for the duration of the flight, and I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world – one of the special welcome dogs had taken a shine to me. Of course, it was the drugs dog, and they sit next to you to indicate they can smell something on you. There must have been some residue of something or other on my clothes because suddenly I’m off in a room, they’ve shut and locked the door and they’re stripping me down. The speed at which my clothes left my body was jaw-dropping. They sat me at a table in my pants and put a big laminated folder in front of me. Inside, on the first page, there were several pictures of pills, a whole spectrum of uppers and downers that I’d never seen before.

  ‘You have?’ asked the customs officer.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  More pills: ‘You have?’

  LSD: ‘You have?’

  Crumbling lumps of hash, mounds and mounds of coke, a page full of syringes, it goes on for absolutely ages. Then it stops. And they smile, and I smile, and everyone seems pleased. Then the officer interviewing me stands up, slides the folder off the desk, and returns with another one, which he pushes towards me. It’s full of pictures of automatic weapons. He starts in again: ‘You have?’

  During it all, I was absolutely petrified. Even without any illegal drugs or automatic weapons, it was scary simply sitting there in my pants in a foreign country, being questioned by customs officials.

  Though my initial welcome could have been better, Japan was a revelation. I can be something of an anorak, so in a new country light years from my own my eyes were popping out of my head at the smallest things. We’d stop at a petrol station, for instance, and I’d be out in the shrubs looking for weird poisonous spiders and things. Admittedly, it’s not the way David Attenborough goes about things, and I’m hardly likely to find rare specimens in the road, sadly, but it was all new to me and I wanted to see as much as I possibly could.

  It was the little things that were different. We’d cross the road when there was no traffic, as you would in London, and the girls following us around would be in hysterics because we’d crossed the road illegally. And even though we only had one record out, the reception we got was intense, like Beatlemania as soon as we got into town. In fact, we stayed at the Capitol Hotel Tokyu in Tokyo, once, for a festival, which is where the Beatles had stayed, though the original building has now been razed to the ground, and there were different tribes of groupies camping in the lobby around the clock, sort of hissing at each other, quietly hating each other, while they waited. When the band that they were waiting for came down in the lift, they would just shoot up and rush towards them, different sections of the lobby rising up in ordered blocks when the lift doors parted and a band stepped into sight. While we were there, Peter bagged a girl who ended up staying with us for three days. He set her the task of doing his laundry, while we were out playing and doing promo work, and of finding some fighting beetles. I thought the bee
tles were a stretch, but when he returned to his room the laundry was still in a heap on the floor. As far as we could tell, she’d sat on the bed for three days, watching TV and enjoying room service. She had a nice tour.

  By the time we took the famed bullet train, our first Japanese tour was grinding us down. We’d started drinking on the plane out of London and I wasn’t sure we’d stopped. Somebody had recommended Berocca to us, so we started overdosing on it, hoping the fizzy coloured water would offset damage we were otherwise doing to our bodies. We were strangely optimistic in this and equally, for all our combined cynicism, the bullet train took our collective breath away. It looked alive even sitting there under the station’s blue stone awning, and the glorious engineering would have made Isambard Kingdom Brunel proud. As we glided off into the Japanese countryside, I felt nature call, so I went to find the toilet in the hypermodern train. I arrived at the bathroom to find something resembling the inside of the cockpit of a Formula One car. It was completely incomprehensible. It had a thing shaped like a funnel at one end, and I worked out that you could squat over it and then relieve yourself into what appeared to be an opening. I was very wide of the mark in so many ways. The bright green pee ran down the side of my foot and out under the door. I steadied myself, shook myself off and, embarrassed, spent a little longer than necessary tidying up. As I stepped out of the door, everybody stared at me, as if I was a vigilante walking through the saloon doors in an old western. I hadn’t factored in that we were travelling at three hundred miles an hour. The glowing green Berocca piss had gone streaking along the aisle and terrified the entire carriage. I could have had someone’s eye out; it was like having a very poor superpower.

  Somewhere out on the road, we bought some exotic looking fireworks, but when we got back to the city we realized we had nowhere to set them off. Band logic quickly dictated that they be let off in the hotel room. They made an amazing sound and the colours were quite beautiful, until one of them shot out of the open window and straight into this pond full of koi carp, which are sacred in Japan. There was a godawful sound as the firework fizzed and exploded in the pond, the water boiled and hissed, and all these wonderful looking fish were suddenly still. One by one they began to float, belly up, to the surface. We pressed our faces against the glass and wondered what the sentence was for killing a pond full of protected fish. Then, very slowly, they started moving, stirring a little in the water. The firework had just stunned them, thank God. As my awareness returned to my immediate surroundings, I heard a crackling sound. We turned as one and realized that another errant rocket had got stuck in the ceiling tile, and was happily fizzing away. We hit the floor just as it exploded. We only had a few rockets left, so we thought it a good idea to fire one off along one of the Capitol’s very long, straight corridors. As it hared out of sight, a chambermaid stepped into view. She had just enough time to mouth a silent ‘oh’ before it crashed into the door only feet away.

  We stopped lighting fireworks after that and just sat waiting for management to come pounding on our door; but no one ever came. I miss the Capitol.

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  Miniatures pile up on your seat-back table, films start and finish, duty free, lights dim as you descend. Luggage carousels revolve, air miles accrue, taxi doors slam. Wake up, sir, please put your seat upright, we’re landing. We were out at the Coachella Festival, on our first American trip, and there was already a bit of a problem with the brown. Peter had turned up at the airport with some, which he’d had to flush away before we went through to the gate. I remember he came back and he was looking very red-eyed, and I don’t know if that’s because he was crying because he’d had to flush his stash, or if he’d taken a little something before we flew. It was an emotional time for us all, and I pretty much sedated myself, too. I’m not a good flyer. I hate the lack of control you have when you’re in the air. I’m not sure what I can do about it – it’s not as if they’re going to let me into the cockpit to take over for a bit – so I have to try hard to zone myself out.

  Coachella was a bittersweet experience. We drove out through the desert, and I remember the feeling of the air as we travelled into the night, a heavy, humid blast that buffeted the rustling palms. It was the first time I’d ever felt anything like it. We arrived in Palm Springs, and I was sitting on the veranda, jet-lagged, taking it all in, when the storm broke and the rain belted down into the dust. I awoke the next morning to fresh air, crystal light and a hummingbird floating effortlessly outside my window. I was so excited that I phoned my dad to tell him about it. Well, he said, it’s raining here, and I’ve got to go to work. When we got to the site, it was a completely different world from the Reading Festival or anywhere like that, all movie trailers and Winnebagos, and Cameron Diaz playing crazy golf backstage; for a moment I guess we all thought we were going to Hollywood to be living the life that Russell Brand is now enjoying.

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  That was a dream that quickly died, as Groove Armada, or whoever it was on stage before us, ran over time, leaving us, as the last band on, no time to play before the strictly enforced lights-out cut-off time. Some of the organizers told us not to, but we went on stage regardless, and about half a song in, they turned all the power off. We carried on playing acoustically in the dark, with thousands of people in front of us singing along. I remember somebody asking me at the time why we didn’t just leave, and the answer to that was simple: it was our fucking turn to play. The security guards who came to escort us off were all armed, and I remember we were given another gig the next day to make up for it but, of course, we then created even more of a fucking stir. Suddenly we’d become those bad boys from London again. It was all a long way from the Dublin Castle.

  We were painted as hellraisers, and we did have our ponds-full-of-stunned-koi moments, but Coachella was one of only three times I can remember that we were escorted off stage for bad behaviour. Much later, I was kicked off the stage for smoking at the SXSW Festival, playing with Dirty Pretty Things, and the guards there, like at Coachella, were also armed. That should have been no surprise, though – they like their guns in Texas. Another time, at CBGBs in New York, a cigarette got me wrestled off stage – no wonder they say it’s bad for you. I was physically dragged off the stage in a headlock with a ciggie in my mouth, off the stage and out the back, and – this will tell you something about The Libertines – the band just kept playing. Thanks, lads. Then I came back on rather sheepishly with a red face and ruffled hair, no cigarette, and carried on, too. David Letterman also told me to put my cigarette out once, just after we did ‘I Get Along’ on his show. Marilyn Manson, whose real name is Brian, was on, too. We were ordered not to talk to him, but Brian got into the lift with us, so we got out, ran down the stairs and, as the lift doors opened and Brian got out, we were playing and singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. He thought it was simply hilarious at the time. He gave us his exasperated face, which I imagine he gives to a lot of people, and just pushed past us. Johnny Knoxville was on, too, but he was smart and handsome, which hurt more than Manson’s rebuke.

  I had a thing about the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Letterman was being filmed, because it was where The Doors originally sang ‘Light My Fire’ for Ed Sullivan, and Jim Morrison had refused to change the lyrics, resulting in a lifetime ban from the show. I first fell for The Doors when I was fourteen and a friend gave me a cassette of the first Doors album, a summer otherwise marked by Rage Against the Machine and a school exchange trip to France (the start of another love affair). Fourteen’s the perfect age to fall for The Doors: you fail to see the pomposity in the music, and you’re not yet cynical about Jim Morrison and how bloated and over the top he would become. I fell for his lyrics, liked how he sounded and how he looked, brooding on the LP covers. Then I heard ‘The End’ and it scared me a little bit. Years later I watched a buffalo sacrificed and Coppola’s jungle burn while that song played and it all made perfect sense: it’s the right sound for a world that’s coming to an end. Discov
ering that album at that age chimed perfectly with owning my first guitar, and realizing that I was my own person and not necessarily just a product of my family and upbringing. The magic would wane for me over the years, but I fell for Morrison’s lyrics, and, for a while, my interest reached the level of a minor obsession. Later still, I had an ear problem and had to visit a doctor in LA, and the doctor I was sent to, Dr Sugerman, was the brother of Danny Sugerman, The Doors’ manager, whose books I’d pored over as a teenager. Doctor Sugerman’s waiting room was covered with gold and platinum discs, interspersed with framed black-and-white shots of the good doctor glad-handing the great and the good. It would have been easy to sneer, but I felt my jaw dropping at the sight of Sugerman, MD, pumping Frank Sinatra’s fist.

  The Doors lead me to Huxley, Huxley to William Blake. I was a sponge soaking it all up. I devoured Brave New World, The Doors of Perception and Eyeless in Gaza, and then collections of Blake’s poems, but it was Blake’s paintings of heaven and hell that haunted my dreams. I finally got to see some of his work on a day trip to London, off the train at Waterloo, the familiar thrill of the city running through my skinny chest, and up to Trafalgar Square, the pigeons grey blurs against the National Gallery. Inside it was as quiet as a library, the bustle of school parties a distant din, and there were Blake’s heavens rent asunder, life and death streaming through. How could you not love that? How could you not be marked forever by it?

  But back to LA and Letterman: it meant a lot to me to be there at the Ed Sullivan Theater, preparing myself as best I could to take that stage. Not even The Rolling Stones had followed in Jim’s footsteps and stood up there and sworn on TV: Mick was forced to sanitize the lyrics to ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’, and I thought, before I went on that night, I might be able to make a mark in history, too. In ‘I Get Along’ I have to say ‘Fuck ‘em’ but, just as we were standing in the wings, the floor manager pulled me aside: ‘You’re aware there’s no swearing, right?’ he said. ‘Because if you do we’re just going to cut it, you’re going to look stupid.’ I ended up substituting it for ‘Your mama’, being as it was a Mothers’ Day edition of the Letterman show.