by Carl Barat
Aside from The Doors connection, it had always been an ambition of mine to play a full Broadway ‘theater’. And those things, combined with the fact that the performance went out to many millions of people, made it one of the defining moments for me, definitely a high point of The Libertines. For once, it wasn’t just about having a riot: we did something that was going to endure. I watch that clip on YouTube every now and again, when I’m drunk, and you can see my fag burning on the drum riser. And, as I go to put it out when we finish, I unintentionally blank David Letterman. I leave him hanging. From seminal rock ‘n’ roll rebellion through blanking Letterman, to being told off for smoking a fag: oh, the highs and the lows. The Libertines were always a bit like that for me. And I will always enjoy the memory of him telling the audience that we looked like the guys on the Quality Street tin. In our matching red jackets how could we argue?
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Even on later trips to the US, the magic of the place didn’t wear off. May 2003: Marilyn Monroe is hanging on the wall in our apartment at the Off Soho Suites on Rivington Street in New York. Like every skinny white boy from the countryside I’d romanticized New York out of all proportion, but having driven into the city, to see downtown laid out before us like a Woody Allen film set, Gershwin trumpeting in my head as the orchestra swelled and steam rose in the city streets, I thought it might fulfil my fantasies like no other destination I’d ever seen. We craned our necks like tourists, taking everything in; then there we were on our own little Manhattan street, in a building where Marilyn had once stayed. What made the dream for me (aside from thinking that Marilyn had slept in my bed, which was, admittedly, unlikely) was the air-con unit, which was of the sort you see rattling away in movies, sticking out of the window, fizzing and dripping icy water onto the carpet. I couldn’t have been more in the moment. The first thing I did after I arrived was take a fistful of dollars over to the store to buy Coca-Cola to put in the fridge. It just felt right. We were in New York for press promos and a few live shows at the Bowery Ballroom, which sold out, and one in Brooklyn at a place called Lux, which barely lasted longer than we did. Spin and a few other magazines came to interview us, and the reception was great, but what really elated me was that I felt like I had my own apartment in New York, with a little sofa and a telly, a bed and a kitchenette. The only thing that spoilt it was that I’d picked up a Vanilla Coke by accident, which really pissed me off and ruined everything a little. That’s how important it was that the moment was absolutely right. Peter and I had a month to immerse ourselves in the city, and there’s a photo of me swinging off a lamp-post on Broadway that for me sums up our optimism. We really felt we could make things happen; but, us being us, being in town for a month simply meant we had plenty of time for things to go really tits up.
There are moments like these in the history of The Libertines when even I can see the car crash coming. It looms so vivid and dense that there’s no denying it. Peter was floating away from me and I was there, remote and useless, tethered to the ground. Peter had the brainwave that you could get crack off any homeless person anywhere in New York City. I was trying to point out that, inspired as it was, his thinking was a little flawed, given the situation these people found themselves in. Peter, however, shrugged when I mentioned it and scanned the street for people who looked like piles of old clothes because that was where happiness lay, I suppose, for Peter at that time.
Then there was a girl Peter had met in England before we flew out to the States, one of those ghouls and goblins that he brought flocking out of the shadows. Although she scrubbed up pretty well if she had to, I found her pretty grotesque, given the situation. Naturally, I was delighted when she turned up in New York. She always had a camera with her, filming everything all of the time, always in your face. Later on I realized it was our camera, the band’s camera, that she had decided to commandeer after she shacked up with Peter. It started out as a chronicle of our time there, though eventually, inevitably, she simply stole it, which endeared her to me just that little bit more.
In a matter of days, Peter had random homeless guys coming up to our apartment and she’s there circling around this camera, filming constantly, whirring away like some fucking vulture. I could feel the whole situation building, my anxiety rising that I was losing Peter, and I just wanted to pull my best friend out of there, and say, ‘Look, can we just get on with what we’re doing?’ We were trying to work on demos, but things eroded and fell apart and I’d lose him, literally; he was just disappearing all the time. One day, I was looking for Peter and I went upstairs to the roof, and the pair of them were up there playing one of my songs that I’d been working on. The girl was making up lyrics, ad-libbing and doing a nauseating freeform dance; then she turned to me and said, ‘Peter and I are writing songs, come and join us.’ This has gone very wrong, I thought, as I imagined pushing her off the roof, her thin frame falling to the street below, still talking all the way down. Instead I said, ‘Pete, can I have a word?’ But he just ignored me. Not long after, he started not to want to do anything at all. All the obvious symptoms of his drug use were showing themselves.
There was the occasional respite, the sense of trying to claw something back. We got our Libertines tattoos in the city, my spidery handwriting on both our arms in some sort of attempt to bind us together, although we didn’t even have them done in the same place. Peter went to Chinatown for his, and I got mine down in the Bowery. And, later, he came to me for help at the apartment when he couldn’t clear out the junkies who had gathered in his room. I remember his face at my door. He looked scared, wide-eyed and a bit lost. It had all got a bit hairy by this point: money had started to be owed because he’d go out and meet people to score, then everyone would share and the dealers were putting it all on Peter’s tab. It hadn’t got heavy, there was no muscle turning up, just these weasel-faced junkies moaning and bitching and doing anything to try and get a hit. For no good reason other than he’s my best friend I went down there – while he sat it out in my room – and there were about six of them sitting in a circle with the lights out. It was like going into a squalid cave, and they’re just sitting, absolutely useless, wallowing in their own filth. I’d just had it by this point, and, it sounds strange to say, as I told them to get out I felt as if I had a white light around me. It felt like opening the curtains on a summer morning: the light just went through them, these horrible black shadows, and they dispersed. I can’t remember if Peter thanked me or not. Let’s say he did.
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I’d travelled to New York full of hope, and I was to return home with a heavy, heavy heart. I was realizing that I was at the beginning of the end of my band, my best mate was becoming unreachable and that, though we had the world at our feet, all the things we’d ever dreamed of, we were just pissing all over it, throwing it all away. We were the hot ticket in town, albeit briefly: Damon Albarn turned up to one of our shows, acting oddly, and I remember him telling us to be more horrible to our crowd, that we needed to be nastier to them. One of Bananarama also came by and told me, and this felt like a dream, that we weren’t punk, but they, Bananarama, were. Bananarama were punk. I remember someone saying backstage that we’d got some pretty eminent musicians in to see us so we must have been doing something right. We were creating a buzz in New York, we were actually in demand there, and not just with other British bands. It felt that we were on the verge of something big – if we could only keep ourselves together long enough to get there.
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Even after I chucked all of the junkies out for Peter, his days didn’t return to normal. He went into lockdown with his girl, and we weren’t getting anything done so, eventually, I sort of gave in to it all and turned tourist. I took to the streets, if only to dispel the sick feeling sitting at the base of my stomach. I remember standing on the Staten Island Ferry and taking in the Statue of Liberty in the distance, and travelling to the top of the Empire State Building, looking out over the city and feeling utte
rly deflated. We’d come all this way, metaphorically and physically, and for what? For my best friend to crouch down in his fucking room with a pipe and a bunch of strangers? The thin, fragile raft we’d built was starting to take on water, and our beautiful gathering of friends was slowly disintegrating. I’ve always found it difficult to live in the moment, always been scared about losing what I’ve got, often to the point of not enjoying it. And now it seemed as if my fears were being realized.
FOUR
Can’t Stand Me Now
Another year – 2003 – another NME Awards. This time around they’ve moved to the Hammersmith Palais, the venue that inspired one of The Clash’s greatest songs, a venue that’s now been turned into luxury flats – London’s good at papering over its own history. We were nominated for Best Newcomer, and I remember being very nervous, even though we’d been told that we’d won already. I knew we had the award in the bag, but, typically, a part of me was telling myself, No, they’re just saying that so we’ll turn up, we haven’t really won. Sometimes I’d give anything for my nerves to take a back seat. All the band were there, as well as Irish Paul, who was sitting across from me dressed in military garb. And, to stop my aforementioned nerves having their way with me completely, I was getting very drunk. There were silver buckets filled with booze in the middle of all the tables, which we were doing a good job of emptying, and I remember feeling so proud and scared when our award was announced. We walked up to the stage and, just as we were stepping on to it, Peter turned round and gave me a mocking, horrified look and said, ‘What are you wearing?’
I had a leather jacket over the top of my suit, which, due to a combination of nerves and booze, I hadn’t thought to take off. It was a terrible moment: my dreams were coming true, and being dashed by Peter in exactly the same instant. I still find it hard to say how I felt, but it was crushing, as if he’d just leant over and gobbed in my fucking coffee. I thought he must have done it simply to be nasty and it just totally floored me. While we were getting the award all I felt was twitchy and very self-conscious.
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Regardless of those circumstances, I loved that leather jacket. It was a motorbike jacket that my dad had owned since he was the age I am now, and which at some point along the line he’d managed to dye black from its original red. When we were young my sister wore it to school and then, when she’d had her fill, I inherited it. My dad also owned a guitar, but that I wasn’t allowed to touch. It was a prized thing that he didn’t want anyone breaking; he didn’t like us touching his stuff generally. I understand his attitude, now. Years later I used to be skittish when we were playing at the Albion Rooms and people came careering towards one of my guitars: who wants to own a broken guitar? Even so, when I was a kid I’d still sneak downstairs at night, when the house was quiet and the others were asleep, and I’d practise ‘riffs’. I’d feel my way around songs I liked, trying to work out bridges and how the music flowed. I’d practise Nirvana songs: they were pretty simple in their setup and a good place to start, and I bought a Hendrix Made Easy guitar book, which was very weird. In it, all his songs were stripped back to their most basic form, but the thing with Hendrix is that you don’t want it to be easy. His songs don’t work without his flair, so they just sounded alien and obtuse.
It took me ages to learn to play, much longer than it takes the average person. I taught myself, made myself do it, even though it yielded so little for so long. I had some friends who’d been at it and they were suddenly fluid in a week, bloody junior Eddie Van Halens all of them. Someone once asked me how long it took me to learn, and, without being pat in my response, I told them that I still was learning – I still am. Learning to play guitar filled the space that had grown inside me. I couldn’t play enough.
I wasn’t just a slow learner at the guitar; girls eluded me, too. My friends were learning fast by the time they were thirteen, but my shyness could be crippling, and I was quite the oddball, the outsider. I had no emotional intelligence whatsoever. I’m not sure if that came from my parents’ divorce, but it took me years to bloom, to come into myself. One of my half-brothers had a similar thing, but with a very different upbringing, so it could be that it was a genetic thing. I had a fragility about me that made everything very difficult, but then a liberal mother, and a new home with an extension, opened the world up for me. When my mother moved back to Whitchurch from the communes it was with her new man, a man who more or less became my stepdad. Their liberal attitude (my mother once impressed my mates by showing one of them how to skin up) combined with a wood-and-glass conservatory that they had built on to the back of the house, suddenly meant I could spend hours with my friends, drinking and smoking dope and playing guitar. This helped my social life no end, even made me cool in some people’s eyes, and, all the while, I was practising on her new man’s guitars. He didn’t mind me playing them, and even started to give me some pointers. He was also very encouraging about my playing and about my ambition to get out of town and see the world, to find myself. I’m very indebted to him for that still. I think back now to those summers and my homes either on my dad’s estate or in the English countryside with my mother and her friends and I know my parents did the best they could with my sister and me, but we’d both fled a long time before we actually left.
∗ ∗ ∗
Back to the jacket, though. Some triple-faced rat nicked it when we were playing a gig in Leeds. Every time I go to Leeds to play now there’s a rumour: I know someone who knows someone who’s got your jacket. It just drives me potty. What I want to say is ‘Fuck off’, but I desperately want the jacket back. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a family heirloom. The first few times I was up there and looking for it, I ended up on a stupid wild-goose chase, an utter waste of my time. I’m still really angry about it, which is hardly likely to help my cause or ensure I’ll see my jacket any time soon.
It was strange, the cult of The Libertines: it was romance and poetry, a vehicle for this ragtag gang with guitars, something that people often desperately wanted to be a part of. We were the kind of band who let people in. We wanted to pull those barriers down between them and us, and we engaged with our fans, in a true, direct, way, long before such engagement – using the internet and social media – became a tool of the record industry. And I’m not sure if we invited it, or deserved it, but people did take our stuff. It’s sad, in a way, but it wasn’t ever malicious. They wanted mementos, things like our mobile phones, and really mundane objects: little bits of paper, items of clothing, foreign coins, plectrums, packs of guitar strings; sometimes they took the food on our rider. I enjoyed their enthusiasm, but it wore thin and we quickly realized that there comes a point where there has to be some order. Suddenly we’re hungry and we can’t make phone calls. Most bands would have thrown their hangers-on out on their ear, but we were trying to prove a point, often haplessly as it turned out.
∗ ∗ ∗
It had been quite the turbulent year when we returned to the NME Awards in 2004. That might explain why we were so drunk. However, by then it seemed as if we were always drunk so the reasons behind it were pretty hard to fathom. We were to play ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ that night, but the reason we sent a ripple through the room was that Peter and I didn’t accept our Best British Band award by spouting platitudes or gurning happily into the cameras. Instead, we recited Siegfried Sassoon’s war poem, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, which had a bit more impact than the usual monkeys thanking their labels, or saying, ‘Cheers, yeah’, and punching the air.
My relationship with that poem and the way we read it that night began, really, when I was at school, and studying war poetry. Everyone had to read a poem and my nerves were such that, in order to read the passage without having to deal with myself, I played a backing tune then just half sang the words over it instead. It was sort of hillbilly style, and it was actually quite effective; if it sounded comic, then it was only the comedy of nervousness, and it stuck with me. I kept reciting
the poem like that for years, and I taught it to Peter. Sometimes when we were warming up we’d play it, just the two of us together.
At the NME Awards, however, even the old routine could not act as a sticking plaster over our differences. There was a lot of tension between us because that time was the beginning of us really falling apart. Peter had wanted to hide in the wings and then bounce out on to the stage, to make a whole ‘Where’s Peter?’ joke to make light of his increasing absences that year. That was what I was prepared for but then he just strolled out on stage and spontaneously started to recite the first line. So I followed with the second and we went from there. I was annoyed at the time, but in retrospect it made sense to me. It’s an incredible poem and when we got the final stanza you could see people at the front really listening, eyes wide open:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye,
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know,
The hell where youth and laughter go.
It caused a stir when we did it, and in the papers the next day, but really it highlighted how incidental and minute what we were actually doing was in the grand scheme of things. And how all of the bullshit, the big balloon of music industry egos, can be burst with a sliver of truth. Then we just walked off, and I’m pleased that we did: it was impossible to follow.