by Carl Barat
I’m glad it resonated. It was a really important time and place to remember war and sacrifice. Time set aside for remembrance is important, but I think it’s much more powerful to recall things like that out of context – it shouldn’t just be boxed up and brought out once a year, it should be part of the everyday consciousness. Plus, at those awards, you’re in a room full of young men who have no idea what it would’ve been like to have been that age and in the trenches. It had never occurred to them: they lived in the moment, thought they were the moment, and were happy to sit there and pat themselves on the back while getting wrecked on free Monkey Shoulder whisky.
∗ ∗ ∗
Our world may have been falling apart, but even that provided inescapable moments. I’ll never forget Peter fleeing the stage when we’d sold out three nights at the Brixton Academy. We were playing at a good tilt but our much-touted camaraderie was a sham that night, and underneath we were fighting, fucking it up. Peter and I exchanged glances and then he just took off running. Later he’d tell me that I looked at him funny, and that might have been true, but not enough to cause him to take off into the streets of south London. Our two bodyguards, twin brothers Jeff and Michael, were there in the wings. They’d worked with Biohazard for a while and it showed. Jeff looked a bit like Popeye’s Bluto, which I always found quite reassuring for some reason, and they were both stacked, hugely muscular, massive and wide, both tattooed from their necks to their shins. They were from Oxford, and they were very gentlemanly, very proud to be English, a real oasis of calm backstage, sipping their tea. I think their dad is from Africa and their mum’s a lovely little Geordie lady who I’ve met, and they were terrifyingly good at their jobs. They went with me to Dirty Pretty Things for a while, mainly because I liked having them around.
Jeff and Michael were a great wall between Peter and the world, such an immediate deterrent that usually people didn’t even try to get close. They were incredibly quick, too: more than once someone lunged for Peter (and I include myself in that, but they didn’t try and stop me, thankfully; it would have been like seeing a big dog wrestle a chew-toy), and on one occasion when somebody had a halfhearted go at him, one of the brothers just shot out this mighty fist and, though it was genuinely a blur, it seemed to land almost gently, more like a push, and this guy just went up in the air and over like a well-struck skittle. It was incredible.
So Peter was running headlong into the backstreets of Brixton, all churning legs and porkpie hat, and his security was chasing after him, which must have dazed passers-by, like seeing lights in the sky you can’t explain. I’ve no idea where Peter was going, I doubt he did either, and they rounded a corner and some skanky crackhead, who must have thought Peter had robbed a shop, stuck his foot out, to try to trip Jeff up – honour among thieves and all that – and Jeff, without breaking his stride, gave him a little body check and bounced him off about three walls. I bet he didn’t know what hit him. Literally. It was strange, though: there was no malice or premeditation. Jeff was just protecting his charge. In Peter’s case there was a lot of protecting to do.
While Jeff and Peter were doing circuits of south London’s least salubrious neighbourhood and the crackhead was rolling around in the gutter, we, the remaining Libertines, were debating going back on stage. We were getting increasingly used to making shitty, agonizing decisions such as whether to go back on stage a man down or not. Even if he had run off, and was disappearing more and more, Peter was still an integral part of the band. Eventually, we decided to get it together and go back on, reasoning that the gig was sold out and that, until Peter scarpered, we were having a suitable degree of fun. Back on stage, we were playing the songs, hoping the audience was appreciating what we were doing, and how difficult it must have been for us, and suddenly there was this big roar. We were made up. Then I turn around and Peter’s back on stage. He must have tired himself out running – we were hardly in our prime physically – then heard over Jeff’s radio that we were about to go back on and decided that he wanted to be there, too. I was pretty crestfallen if I’m honest. There we were, trying to hold it all together, maintain what little dignity The Libertines had left, and the biggest cheer of the night is Peter deigning to come back and play with us. Someone told me later that they thought it was funny, but it wasn’t funny.
When Peter disappeared, most times we bore the brunt of it, were blamed as if we’d tied him up and locked him in his bunk, as if we were the ones who wouldn’t let him join us on stage. Later, I’d insist he left the band for a while in a wretched attempt to save us, but before then we’d have to troop on without him, guessing at where he might be. John and Gary locked into place, me out at the front alone. We got chased out of one gig in Spain because we were a man light. By that stage in the band, we’d factored in that this might happen, and we’d employed a guitar tech who we knew could play and we told him to learn a few of the songs. I think our survival instincts were kicking in. Nick was from Clacton-on-Sea, and he was very much a Clacton-on-Sea boy. Fish and chips and pills; pills and fish and chips. We rather liked him. Then, sure enough, Peter didn’t come and I remember being petrified going round Spain. I felt as if I was carrying the weight of the world as we travelled through these little towns, and then came that show where they literally chased us into the street. The new guitar player could only play six songs, and I was too scared to perform up there on my own – it just wasn’t an option – and so the crowd began to boo us. We left the stage, were packing up to leave, and there was what pretty much amounted to a lynch mob waiting for us after the gig out at the back of the venue. They looked mad as hell, ready for serious violence, and I had to pacify them – my heart beating out of my chest – by playing our songs on an acoustic guitar standing out there in the street. They were like a football crowd, pushing up in my face, goading and shouting, until their fury began slowly to flatten out, and turn to enjoyment. It changed from being booed and chased out of the venue by a screaming, spitting mob angry at being ripped off, to the same mob telling us what a really special thing we’d done. And, when it had all calmed down, they asked us quite sincerely what we’d done to Peter, as if we’d chosen to take our life in our hands and play with a roadie in his stead. It felt like they thought that if they asked enough times I’d bring him out from behind the bus to rapturous applause, like some magician unveiling his latest trick. It was so sad: people really liked us, and the album was doing plenty of business, but during those gigs in Spain without Peter we didn’t have a future.
I never got past being terrified about being on stage in The Libertines without Peter. I needed him on stage with me, missed the physical aspect of it, the charging into each other, having that second voice, that person you could fall back on. I was just so miserable touring without him, and felt duty bound to feel that way because all I was getting, all I was seeing, were the super-fans at the front, the ones who came to fill my brain with questions before the gig. It wasn’t their fault, but they didn’t have a clue what was going on. When I got off the bus they’d be there, at the venue they’d be there, and I was scared, ashamed and guilty, when I hadn’t actually done anything. I was fighting to make it work, paper over the cracks and do the right thing by holding it together. But I would barely have stepped off the bus and someone would ask, ‘Why have you kicked Pete out?’ You should do this and you should do that. You should give him a second chance.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was odd that, even though we were suffering the slings and bloody arrows, we were actually getting really good as a band around that time, and especially when Anthony Rossomando joined. I mean no disrespect to Nick, but Anthony was one of us, and it felt more like a gang again when he came along. I’d had to go to New York to find him, because we needed an American, or someone who could work in America, for our US shows. Three people showed up, two of whom were absolute fruit loops. One started crying before he’d even played; the other was a ginger chap, who said he’d do it but actually seemed reluctant even t
o pick up the guitar. Then he said he could only play ‘math guitar’, so I asked him to show me what math guitar was, and he started diddling around on the fretboard. I began to lose the will to live. Neither of them knew any of the songs I’d asked them to audition with; I don’t think they even knew who or what The Libertines were, so by the time Anthony came in I didn’t care.
‘You just play the song, I’m going to play the drums,’ I said, though I can’t actually play the drums to save my life. Nevertheless, we jammed like that for a while, and I thought, This is actually working. Then Anthony switched over to play the drums and a deep friendship was born. As with any audition I’ve ever done, there was only one real contender, though I do still wonder what the other two guys are doing now.
Anthony, known to many as Stan, is tall and slender, spidery and louche, with a classic Italian American pallor. He became a good sidekick through troubled times, ever willing to defend me in my absence or contest me in my presence. He was part of the band for some pretty memorable gigs, including one with Primal Scream on the support bill in an enormous aerodrome near São Paulo. Our luxury hotel in the city was an island of international money set on a building site, in its own compound, the abutting poverty kept at bay by high fences and bulldozers. We weren’t looking out of the window, though: we’d worked out from the menu that the mini-bar’s entire contents came to something like two quid, so we cleared it out in twenty minutes – it was as if we’d never seen a half-bottle of wine before. I think we failed to notice the irony that we’d been talking about the plight of the country’s poor mere moments before. Gunshots rang out all night, but we paid them no heed. We could barely even speak, so off our faces were we on the local produce. After the gig, we got back to our dressing room and some poor women had made masses of food, like a wedding spread, the centrepiece being a great tower block of sandwiches, made out of bread coloured and shaped into the Brazilian flag. And it was all a little bit dry because it had been out for a while, but because of the state we were in none of us could eat a thing; we felt so guilty about the waste, given the poverty around us, and unpatriotic, but there was nothing we could do.
I’d been to Brazil before with The Libertines, staying and playing in Rio near Copacabana Beach. I remember John attempting to cross the beach to get a hamburger – we were playing football near there, just next to the hotel – and he was about to walk over when a guy in the hamburger stall says: ‘No, no, no, they will cut your throat!’ We thought maybe he was playing with us, these lobster-pink English boys obviously a bit out of their depth, but only for a brief moment. We caught his eye and you could see he wasn’t kidding at all. Suddenly, I felt cold, the kind of chill you can take into a hot shower and you still can’t shift.
∗ ∗ ∗
I can’t pretend I didn’t miss Peter, and the band was never going to feel the same, but after Anthony joined I actually managed to enjoy a few shows. I liked Glastonbury, because my mum was there and we were on one of the main stages, and we did a Forum show where Noel Gallagher came and said he liked it. I should qualify that: he was said to have been there and liked it, but I grabbed on to that with both hands, regardless. It helped me to realize that if the crowd are chanting things like ‘We want Pete’ it helps not to get miserable and feel ashamed, as if it’s your fault Peter’s not there. I wasn’t the one who’d let them down. And, later on, people knew what they were getting when they bought the tickets. Why come if it isn’t what you want to see? It made no sense. Fair enough, if you were expecting Jefferson Airplane and you got us. I’d have started chanting then, too, and probably rounded up my own lynch mob and chased myself out into the street. Facing a crowd shouting ‘We want Pete’ made being on stage an uncomfortable, sometimes horrific place to be. Given that I was trying to hold things together for the fans, it was becoming increasingly hard not to think, Why am I bothering? I wanted Pete, too. Yet our options were narrowing until there seemed only one way out.
FIVE
Montmartre
I was standing in Montmartre, underneath the huge white dome of the Sacré-Coeur basilica, and I was telling Peter I didn’t want him to come and play with us. I gazed over Paris, over some of the most beautiful architecture I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I could feel that I was breaking my own heart. From what I could hear over the phone, Peter’s heart was breaking, too. He was in Kentish Town, throwing himself at passing cabs and into shop windows, just smashing himself up. How had it got to this? I reflected. Peter had failed to turn up for the tour and then there was a will-he-won’t-he moment, but in the end we’d made the decision that, for his own sake and ours, at least in the short term, he needed to be out of the band. Something died for me on the hill of Montmartre that day, though it hasn’t destroyed my love of Paris, or of France. After visiting the Vendée with my grandparents as a kid, I returned to France at fourteen, ostensibly as an exchange student to learn the language, though it was the thought of getting off with French girls that was driving me at the time. I was a bundle of hormones cased in a prickly skin.
The next time I crossed the Channel – my third ever trip to France – I found myself in Paris, and in Montmartre, for the first time. I’d had an eventful first night in the City of Lights; now, on my second, I was preparing to bed down in the street. I’d run out of money and had nowhere to go, so I made myself into a ball in a futile attempt to ward off the freezing night. Above me Sacré-Coeur in all its luminescent glory, below me the lights of downtown Paris. All I could hear was the sound of my teeth chattering and the whistling of a wind best described as cruel, and thought that now I’d been down and out in Paris and London I could justifiably claim one point of reference with George Orwell. It was cold comfort at best, and I began to picture Rose’s Café, a greasy spoon on Bermondsey High Street, where the lights glowed warmly and the door tinkled whenever it was opened. I could smell the bacon and feel a mug of tea in my hands as I opened one eye and pulled my coat tightly around myself. Paris was still there, standing defiantly before me, reaching towards the horizon. I sat up and shivered and lit my last cigarette. I felt like I was out there alone against the universe, but somehow I felt safe.
I’d been working in the Haymarket Theatre as an usher, sleeping on other people’s floors and occasionally out on the streets. It’s the lowest feeling, getting to the end of the day and having absolutely nowhere to go. No mates to crash out with and you can’t go back to your parents because that means you’re a complete and utter failure. I remember one night near Hoxton Square attempting to bed down behind some bins, though bedding down without an actual bed is a bit of an anomaly. The Eurostar had just begun operating out of London and they’d been giving away promotional tickets in the Evening Standard. Someone I worked with at the Haymarket had won a pair and offered them to me, and my thinking was, Well, I’m homeless here; I may as well be homeless there instead. I took my friend Phil, scraping together enough money for one night in a hotel even though we were staying in Paris for two. The hotel room provided a single bed for the two of us, but then I met a girl and Phil didn’t. I suggested to him that he give up the bed for the night so that my new female friend could stay – a brilliant idea to my mind, though the look Phil gave me suggested he thought otherwise. We had a minor stand-off at the top of the stairs and then my new friend and I took off on an adventure. I can still see us with our hands linked running into the Parisian night. I’m nothing if not a slightly clichéd romantic, even in retrospect.
That night moved quickly, a brilliant blur. We met dozens of people and, as everyone else faded away, she said she wouldn’t give herself to me without protection – which only added to my illusion that I was playing a part on a grand Parisian film set and my life was a movie. Off we went, two would-be lovers with no money trying to blag a free condom. I’ve touted lone cigarettes a hundred times, but trying to raise a prophylactic is a whole other ball game, if you’ll excuse the pun. Eventually, after a fruitless search, she decided to go home and I walked with her t
o an alien neighbourhood. It was late as she slipped through the door and suddenly there was a lot of shouting coming through the walls, absolute uproar, and I heard heavy footfalls coming down towards me. I turned and ran hard down the street, did a quick left and right and stood panting in an alleyway trying to stop my heart hammering, worried that it would somehow be heard by my pursuers. There was a sliver of starlight above me visible through the buildings and when I stepped back into the small, cobbled street I realized I was hopelessly lost.
I took off in a randomly selected direction, wandering around trying to find my bearings, and I was stealing fruit from outside a corner shop when I reached around into my pocket and discovered I’d lost my passport. My stomach flipped over and I dropped to my knees and squatted there, wishing myself home, wishing that such a place even existed. After a moment, I got up again and began to try to retrace my steps. I figured out roughly where I was, and decided to head for the hot-air risers from the Metro, where all the city’s tramps congregate to sleep. There I met a French American, a hulking black guy who was truly out there. I was impressionable and young and open to the idea of meeting new people, new characters, and he was straight out of Full Metal Jacket. He kept saying things like, ‘They’re just sleeping out here, it’s like ‘Nam!’ and I was entranced, but still had the deeply niggling fear about my passport and had no idea where Phil was either. Then, huddled in the warm, musty air stream, I remembered a park that I’d found absurdly romantic, where the girl and I had sat on a bench kissing. Somehow, I made my way back to it, but the quiet of the place had been shattered. The park was filled with raucous Algerian teenagers, who were shouting and hitting each other, and couldn’t have been more intimidating to a drunk, confused Englishman. As if on cue, the heavens opened and my trainers, which I’d stolen from a lifeguard at the ponds on Hampstead Heath, slowly filled with rain. The kids had graduated to trying to smash bottles on each other, so I stood there, behind some rather lofty wrought-iron railings, with a fleur-de-lis motif at the top, watching, with rain dripping down my face. Eventually they opened a few bottles of beer, and it was like mother’s milk to them. They instantly settled down and moved away from the bench where I’d been sitting earlier. And then I saw it, my passport, there on the bench, almost glowing in the gloom, five hours after I’d unwittingly left it on that spot. It was moments before daybreak, and suddenly it seemed important to get to it quickly, before it got too light and something bad happened, so I clambered over the fence, slipped and fell, and caught my trainer on one of the fleur-de-lis flourishes. I threw out my hands to save myself, straight into a puddle of piss, and so I hung there upside down, inert and stinking of piss, with a stolen trainer the only thing keeping me from cracking my head open, thinking: What the fuck am I doing? Somehow, I managed to get down, grab the passport and clear the railings again without either falling in dog shit or suspending myself like a piñata. Then I managed to find Phil, too, and, with a few hours still paid for at our hotel, I flopped down on to that single bed. It felt like feather-down pillows and a dozen quilts. I didn’t deserve it, but for the rest of that morning I slept the sleep of the just.