Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

  It was a real pleasure working with Sadie, who is a sweet and generous person. Somehow, I felt instantly comfortable with her on stage. Before rehearsals started, I knew nothing about Shepard, until someone told me he was America’s Shakespeare. At which point I started to tremble, and redoubled my efforts. When we opened, the reviews accused me of not knowing the script, but I don’t think that was the problem. I knew the lines, but didn’t understand the words sufficiently to convey them convincingly. I could perform them parrot fashion, but I wrestled with the subtext, and didn’t make real sense of it until we were well into our three-month run. I’d sit backstage waiting to go on and the phrase ‘baptism of fire’ would run around the walls of my head until the bell rang and someone called me to the stage.

  All in all, I think the theatre was more frightening that my first film experience, which had happened some time earlier. I’d been to see Telstar when the play was on its West End run, and had thought it remarkable – a play that, in fact, I must have talked up in the press because, in the same unexpected manner as Sadie would later call, I received a surprise letter from Nick Moran, who co-wrote the play, thanking me for saying such lovely things about it and asking me if I’d be interested in playing Gene Vincent in the movie version he was to be directing. I went to meet Nick and was instantly mesmerized by Shepperton Studios, a true, childlike awe, then went away and immersed myself in Gene Vincent’s world. I sat up nights, a bottle of red wine at my side, watching the flickering images of him driving the young women of his generation wild. He looked like a hero, and I practised and practised his style. I even had his limp down.

  In the film world everyone jumps up out of bed and is on set at 6 a.m., where they then stand around for hours while the doors of static caravans open and close and a few select people walk about purposefully. The waiting process did nothing for my nervousness. I remember pulling Nick aside to outline my approach and voice some dramatic concerns; he levelled his gaze at me and told me to get on set, say my one line and then get off again. When the time came, I stood there like a rabbit in the headlights and mumbled something about looking for the toilet, repeated it once, and that was it. I don’t think I did the best job I could have done but it was certainly an eye-opener. You spend a quarter or a third of a year working on a play and, by its close, really understand what you’re doing – at which point, the performance is lost in the annals of memory. On the other hand, my grandchildren will be able to look up Telstar online and no doubt marvel at my dodgy clip.

  Later, in the darkness of the Leicester Square cinema, I peered up at my face, six feet wide on the screen, my only thought something banal about how my hair had fallen down. My lustrous Gene Vincent quiff looked little more than an inglorious bowl cut. I looked like a redneck, I thought, all buck teeth and pudding basin hairdo. I glanced along the row of seats at the rest of the cast and sunk progressively lower into the plush velvet, until, when the lights came up, I realized that it was all right, that no one was staring at me. I’d got away with it – how I feel about a lot of my gigs. Overall, I was more pleased with the performance bits than I was with my lines. Even if I did only mime (and, to be honest, I hadn’t been sure of the words), I did that whole Vincent thing: the hand obscuring the mouth, over the microphone. If I ever act again, I’ll be sure not to read the reviews, because, even though they were mainly positive, every now and again a line floats back to me, something some no-mark said about ruining Gene Vincent for him. But then everyone’s a critic, aren’t they?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Gradually, as I put some distance between me and my bands, as I challenged and extended myself into new areas, my songwriting began to blossom once again. I’d kept on writing all the way through, automatically, because that’s what I did and I didn’t know anything else.

  I found the freedom to write on my own liberating. You kid yourself that you can do what you like with your songs in a band, but for me at least that wasn’t true. On my own, I began to write about the things that were important which never tied in with any band I’ve been in. And after a while, the songs had started to coalesce, to take shape around certain ideas. I tried a different palate, things I never would have got away with in a band – and gave myself the opportunity to play some fairly patchy piano, for starters. Sitting there, looking out over the leafy suburbs of north London, trilling away at the keys, I felt a sense of calm, that I’d connected to something I hadn’t before. I took a lot of the guitars away just to see what I might come up with, without reverting to the same old crash, bang, wallop format. A part of me needed to be naked I guess, but try walking into a rehearsal room and telling these expectant faces that you’ve been working on some new material and then plonking yourself down at a piano and start a profound lament about the dark beauty of human frailty.

  I jest, or at least in part, because I think there’s a lot more humour in my songs now. My songwriting lost its humour during The Libertines – suddenly an early song like ‘The Boys In The Band’ was frowned upon because The Libertines became such a serious thing. From a certain point on, in The Libertines, or in Dirty Pretty Things, I tried to keep it all lofty, to hide the truth away. It was almost as if humour wasn’t allowed, only anger and bitterness – which was a tragedy, given where we’d come from. I think the first song I wrote that appears on the album is a ballad called ‘So Long My Lover, It’s Over’, which for me is pretty much the only link to the past. Elsewhere, there’s a bit of lightness back with this record.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It took me a while to find my voice solo, to realize what it was I was writing about, and I still find it much easier to write for other people. I did two songs for Get Him to the Greek, Russell Brand’s film, and took a short trip to LA to play in his live band. For the soundtrack work the brief simply said one was to be about love, and the other was a party song. That set me on the back foot a bit – I like a bit of direction – and the party song’s chorus (‘Let’s get fucked, let’s get fucked, let’s get fucked up …’) won’t be winning me an Ivor Novello Award any time soon.

  It was during that soundtrack work that Edie came along and saved me. I was working on a session in south London, and had been keeping my eye out for a cellist for Russell Brand’s songs. I liked the way she looked through the control room glass, I liked the way she played, and she told me she sang, too, though she also told me about her boyfriend. She played on the recordings I did for Get Him to the Greek, and I sent the demos over, as a first sketch, and, despite their simplicity, the film-makers loved them – at which point I did, too. What was odd was that I’d only sent them over as a prototype, simply to ask ‘Is this the right direction?’ It had always been the intention to re-record them in LA, and both songs, in spruced-up versions, made the final cut. I was touched.

  Edie and I became friends, and I used her for a gig up in Scotland – it was a solo gig I’d been planning for a while, my first in the UK, and suddenly it seemed important to factor in some strings to make it work. She was a person who, just by her presence, would make me happy, though I also felt a magnetic attraction. I thought about her a lot during my seven days awake, the longest week of my life, and she was undoubtedly a beacon who helped me make it through that, but all the while we remained friends and friends only. She was very loyal to her boyfriend, which I respected, and was surprised at myself for doing so. Given my past history with women, during which I’d often shown scant regard for any of the proprieties of normal relationships, I wouldn’t have paid his feelings – or hers, for that matter – a second thought. But even to have her in my life, as a friend, seemed to quieten something in me, and keep my trust issues and fear of abandonment at bay. When they separated, finally, she came round to watch a DVD, and we had our first kiss over popcorn. From then on, everything else just faded into the background, and all the noise that had surrounded me for so long was suddenly silent.

  Life with Edie had a purpose. She didn’t like me being too wrecked, and I found that I didn’t
like myself like that either. Also, as I’ve said, I’ve never been truly creative in that state, so thanks to her I began to be able to work and write again. I had someone to give my love to, and it healed me. Soon after Edie and I started going out, I went to see another therapist, because I was worried that I was embarking on this whole new thing and that my new girlfriend might be thinking I’m a fucking old depressive. I was also performing in Fool for Love, and had taken to having a quiet beer each night after the play, a quiet beer that had turned into several raucous ones, and I was worried I was heading down that road again. The therapist came to see the play, and we met several times, painful, agonizing sessions where it felt as if I was on the rack, laid bare. They’d hurt me for weeks after, and I do feel some catharsis from them.

  The therapist also helped me through my fears over getting The Libertines back together. I was in the British Library, looking for John Lennon’s lyrics and wondering why they weren’t housed there any more, when I got the telephone call offering a re-formed Libertines some live festival shows. To have received the offer in a place so full of grandeur, literature and history seemed like a good omen. And thinking of the British Library also takes me back to my early days in town, when I worked for a time at the British Museum, which housed the British Library’s books long before I came on the scene. The job at the British Museum came with privileged access to areas of the museum that were closed to the public. Behind closed doors I got to look under great grey drapes covering ancient pieces of marble, and be completely alone in the gathering stillness, just me and huge chunks of history. It could be overwhelming. I was living with some of my mum’s friends in Dulwich and each day I’d put on my suit and get a taxi into work. The cabs there and back would cost me half a day’s wages but I was working in London at the British Museum: naturally I had to wear a suit and travel in a black cab. Why else would I have moved there? Somehow, re-forming the band seemed to connect with that optimism and romance once again, and to be looking for Lennon’s lyrics, connecting with English music’s Arcadian past, seemed just right, too.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I always used to fret when journalists asked me to pin down the specifics of what I write about. I suppose I’m scared that if you pull out the keystone then the whole edifice collapses. So I tell them that all I can ever do is tell the truth through my eyes, and put it out there in the vague hope that it connects with somebody else. That’s the point at which they tend to look down at their notes and ask me about the red jackets we used to wear. These days, now I’ve settled down, my songs are all caught up in my family. I’m still a creature of chance, and of jeopardy, and it could be that the biggest risks and biggest successes – personally and creatively – are still to come. But now I’m standing on the edge of the precipice hand in hand with a lady that loves me, and a family to be part of. For a while recently, my grandfather (not the David Niven one) was in hospital and, coupled with the baby, it made me fret that I’d start writing like Elton John – late, ‘Circle of Life’ Elton John, not the good seventies stuff. Doctors and nurses look at me less gravely when I go to see him now, but for a while there were frowns and downward glances. He’s coming out of hospital soon, and my girlfriend’s going in to have our child, and I so desperately want them to meet, my granddad and my kid.

  I suppose my songs have always been about escape, and I sang a lot about death at the end of The Libertines and the beginning of Dirty Pretty Things. But maybe that’s changing. The last song on my debut solo album, the last noise on the bar, is my baby’s heartbeat. I sampled it during the twelve-week scan. Maybe now I’m trying to sing about life.

  Epilogue

  The Longest Week of My Life

  Let’s rewind a year or two, back to when The Libertines were over and Dirty Pretty Things had gone. Love had withered and died on the vine and I’d broken up with my girlfriend. I was oblivious, and desensitized, not even able to drag on my martial arts whites and go and kick people. Was I in limbo or purgatory – was I waiting to be called upstairs or sent down to the boiler room in the cellar? At that point I didn’t know, but whichever it was, it was well appointed, if dirty. There was drink, there were drugs and there were girls, and I’d come to in my kitchen and there’d be dishes piled waiting to be washed in greasy, grey water, pizza boxes stacked higher than the sink, rodents running around in the ruins. Everything that could be used as an ashtray was an ashtray: I lost count of the times I pulled at a cold cup of coffee or tea and felt the dirty remnants of ash in my mouth. Most nights I’d be surrounded by people I didn’t recognize, strange laughter and music up the stairs, and I’d get paranoid and wonder who’d invited them. Usually, it was me; I’d be useless at keeping a vampire at bay. People seemed glad to see me, but I couldn’t for the life of me place them, which put me at a disadvantage. After a while that stopped mattering to me. I didn’t even know what day it was; I could only guess the time by the light outside. Someone called my name, but it was no one I knew.

  Somehow, I had to break the cycle of waking up, going to the pub, meeting strangers, inviting them back to my house, tearing days out of my diary, finally coming to, people prostrate everywhere, and checking my watch to see if the pub was open. Repeat to fade. Then, a moment of clarity in this smoke-filled madness: I decided to cap it all off, this misery and despair, by staying up for a whole week. I’d deprived myself of sleep before, three-day benders on a heady cocktail (isn’t that what they say?) of whisky, lager and cocaine. For years it was my natural state but, for some reason, I hoped a week without sleep would draw a line under things and somehow let me start living again. I thought it was some kind of epiphany at the time, but in reality it was just skewed thinking from a man at the end of his tether. I was sick of being alone and I was sick of my lifestyle, so I opted to purge myself through excess, bleed myself dry to make things better. I wanted to get closer to my mortality, I was fed up with how pointless it all was, fed up with wrecking everything. Although a number of things had led me to this, in hindsight only one of them was important. I’d just met Edie, and I could tell even then that she would be worth it. It’ll tell you a lot about my state of mind that I thought this was the only answer – although you should realize by now that I can’t do things by halves (although these days I’m trying). I really didn’t know what would happen, but for once I felt like I had an interesting point to make.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I was in Stockholm when it started, playing a solo show. It was early summer 2009, and the weekend before Glastonbury; I wasn’t going to sleep until after it had finished. I applied some spurious science to my undertaking: any longer than a week and I’d probably run a serious risk of dying or not coming back, so seven days was the limit.

  Drugs are hard to score in Stockholm and, believe me, I’ve tried. Luckily, I had some drug buddies in town and I knew they were on their way so after I came off stage I just stayed awake and sat around waiting for them to deliver. There were two acts on the festival bill that had caught my eye for completely different reasons: Mötley Crüe and Peter. I managed to see neither. I just gorged on drugs thinking, This is it, what’s the point of fucking sleeping at all?

  I don’t remember much about getting home from Stockholm. There are fragments of being dazed by a news-stand in the airport, and the man behind the counter asking me if I wanted a newspaper or a magazine. Then, when I didn’t answer, he asked me if I wanted help. I wanted to tell him that love wasn’t the answer, for some reason, but waved him away instead. Then I stood by the giant window that looks out on to the runways, the jets beyond silently rising and falling in and out of the sky. I came to in London, in my flat, or that’s how it seemed. There were no clean dishes, nothing to eat off, and the windows looked dirty, although I couldn’t be sure if that was just me. I turned to my flatmate Mario and asked him if he thought so too, but he just shrugged and pushed at a pizza box with his foot. Lack of sleep and the cocaine were making me itchy, my mouth felt like it belonged to someone else and the
skin around my eyes felt dense and rubbery. I hadn’t shaved, I couldn’t be sure I’d washed. I would, however, almost certainly have bet that it was Tuesday, a time that I’d identified in my strategic campaign planning as a danger point – a lull between Stockholm and Glastonbury that might threaten my endeavour to ride out a week awake. I knew I had to be in London until we could head west on Thursday morning, so I dragged Mario down to the pub and ordered a pint of lager and a Jameson’s. Voices sounded a long way off and the light coming through the window was too bright, then the man we were waiting for came through the pub door, and with a nod I was up so quickly from behind our table I almost made the glasses tip over. Beer sloshed everywhere. The people at the next table gave me an admonishing look, but I was already away sampling the goods in the toilet cubicle, lining my pockets with tightly packed wraps of cocaine. I was on the dark side of the moon, on cloud nine, through the looking glass, past the wardrobe and out among the fields of Narnia. I was quite simply the cat in the hat.