Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

  Halfway home, my flatmate came panting down the hill. ‘You left me sitting on my own in the pub,’ he said. ‘I finished your drinks.’ It seemed like I hadn’t seen him in ages. I hugged him and felt triumphant.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In the blink of an eye I was on the M4, reading road signs aloud, travelling to one of my favourite places in the world. It was early on Thursday morning – I knew this because I’d asked everyone in the car three or four times, just to check. No bands to be in, no shows to play, just a punter. My manager at the time was driving us and I had the window open to feel the air on my face. I was feeling good about things: it was one of the bursts of enthusiasm that usually lasted an hour, only to be replaced by a black cloud of despair, which was then followed by more sudden sunshine. I could best be described as acting erratically. I had organized us accommodation a while before, a tepee from a lady who just happened to be launching a lingerie company called Dirty Pretty Things. I said I was happy for her to use the name; she gave us a tepee in the field she was organizing in return. Led Zeppelin had the Riot House on Sunset when they wanted to let loose; I had a tent based on a classic Native American design somewhere near Pilton.

  Glastonbury has always been close to my heart. I went to my first festival when I was one, the year Hawkwind were playing, I think, and Lemmy was still in the band. Back then, my parents were still together, and Glastonbury was the sort of place where my three-year-old sister could get lost without fear of harm. It really was all fields round there, not the tent city it’s become. I visited again and again, and had one of my first real emancipating experiences there, when I was about twenty-one, around the time I was staying in Dalston with the ketamine-cooking French girls. Peter hadn’t come with us, for some reason, but I drove down with two mates, dodged the patrols, Bravo Two Zero-style, and crawled through the fence to the land of the free, soon losing myself in a rainbow pool of acid, crouching on the side of the moon and uniting a band of merry men with my Huxleyan visions, disciples I then led through the night, liberating things from stalls.

  Back in the year 2009, though, back in the tepee towards the end of the longest week of my life, I was sitting with The View, who, like me, were attracted like moths to the flame of the idea of not going to sleep. I’d often come back that weekend and the place would be filled with different people. It was in all honesty, fucking mayhem, which suited my mood. I wanted the energy of others to keep me going on my journey, reasoning that, once I’d been through it all, I’d never have to do it all again. It was morning and The View looked slightly the worse for wear. They were having an argument over what looked like a piece of snot, something that even I couldn’t see the point in doing. It was either a piece of snot or a raisin, which was probably the crux of the matter, but they couldn’t decide, so they started fighting. I tried to get between them, but I couldn’t tell if I was helping or not as I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. There was a pause and then one of them, I forget which, grabbed the raisin (let’s call it that for argument’s sake) and ate it. There was a moment of blissful silence and them absolute mayhem as fighting broke out again. I sat outside and watched Saturday stirring as the shouting abated behind me.

  Blur are my one abiding memory of that festival. They were amazing, and I was pleased, if only because Graham Coxon had been nice to me once along the way, when The Libertines had hardly really begun. I thought in my haze that Damon was being nice to the audience, but he’d told us to be cruel to ours. Everything felt like it was culminating in this, voices escaping the void, my history piling up around me and, for the first time Glastonbury felt like a lonely experience for me. I was lonely in myself because all I could see as I looked around was what other people had and I hadn’t: families and love and a purpose. They looked like they were needed, and I didn’t think I was.

  I was standing in a field as night fell and we – my newfound fellow travellers and I – had found a bar. Hands were shaken, strangers hugged, someone sourced some more drugs and a cheer went up, then it was suddenly quiet and everyone stalked off into the darkness in different directions. I weaved around for a bit and then found myself sitting in the doorway of my own tepee, quite alone as the rain set in. I think that I’m in a film far too much at the best of times, but that really did feel like the anti-hero’s dénouement and that I was destined to die alone. My bands had died, I had nothing left, I was past my sell-by date. My whole future seemed as if it might consist solely of that moment – all surface, no feeling, bouncing between orchestrated highs and chemical lows, roaming around a field near Glastonbury Tor with all the other has-beens trying to connect with a world they once knew. I hadn’t slept in almost a week and, I realized, staying conscious was the extent of my quest, my life’s ambitions at that point: how fucking noble. All I had to show for my past musical life was one big broken friendship, a lot of very faded memories and a free tepee at a festival that I’d managed to blag because someone wanted to sell knickers and bras with the same name as my old band. I clearly remember thinking that I wouldn’t even have that currency next year. Nothing to show for it all, and nobody to share that nothing with. It was an end-of-the-road moment.

  A few hours later, I’d bottomed out into something like clarity – perhaps, like Spinal Tap, too much fucking clarity – and began to wander through the VIP areas, full of rich girls partying in designer Wellingtons on daddy’s coin and celebrities complaining they daren’t go out into the crowds (which begs the question, why didn’t you stay at home, you simpletons?). It’s a strange world when you’ve got a pass to go literally anywhere even when you’re not playing, so I just did a little tour, giving a cheery wave here and there like a country vicar on his rounds. I ended up sitting next to an English pop star, and, by then, I was experiencing a little lull. Consequently my grasp on my faculties loosened. Remember me on the Soccer AM sofa trying to explain to Noel Gallagher just what made him so great? Yep, just like that. I could barely speak, and little Miss Pop Star was absolutely disgusted with me. She looked like she’d never seen a puddle in her life, which was impressive considering we’d just been rained upon. She was bragging about taking helicopters to the shows she’d recently been playing in Europe, and I must have come to momentarily because it dawned on me that she was only touring large clubs and small theatres, so economically it made no sense. At that point, she got the right hump and was forced to explain to the gathered company that her travel tab was being paid by Mohamed Al Fayed. She was certainly keeping it real.

  I didn’t really fare any better with Jarvis Cocker, who was only a couple of tepees up from me (it really was quite the neighbourhood). He’s one of the few people in the world – Brian Blessed being another – who makes me instantly star-struck, even though I’m almost certain that he doesn’t like me (possibly due to a vague memory I have of chewing his ear off once, while off my face, when he was completely sober and probably with his kids). But not even that can deter the fan-boy face I adopt when he’s anywhere near. I’ve met him a few times since Glastonbury and he’s seemed … detached, shall we say, but I have such an artistic crush on him that it doesn’t matter. After bothering Jarvis at his tepee for a while, I got into a fight with his old bass player, Steve Mackey, a fight that went on for hours, which is odd for a number of reasons. Firstly, I really like and admire Steve Mackey; secondly, we’re friends; thirdly, ten minutes of kickboxing used to make me feel like I’d wrestled a bear, so how I made a fight last that long is one of life’s great conundrums. It wasn’t a real fight, more a hopeless tangle of bodies, though I did have my lip cut open a couple of hours later, when a friend of a friend came up at me out of the haze and smacked me in the face. There was a tussle, and blood in my mouth, but like so many cocaine moments there was a softness to its edges. My lip was swollen and then he was gone again. Drugs and a lack of sleep couched the moment for me and carried it all away. In retrospect, I think I was a little ragged by that point.

  After the punch I found some sor
t of median between my erratic highs and lows, and I began to feel quite calm. My heart was no longer audible in my chest and, as I watched kids playing in the rain, I saw in them the different phases of my life as I grew up on those fields, coming back year after year, first with my mum, then with my mates, then with my bands. I’ve done that, I thought, as a kid went over in the mud and gurgled happily instead of breaking into tears. I’ve been that boy in the hat and I’ve been her, the girl holding her dad’s hand and looking up at him happily and I’ve been all these people and I’ve laughed that laugh and I’ve shouted what he’s just shouted. As I kept walking it all seemed to make sense, and it wasn’t utterly morbid, it was kind of enlightening. With everything I saw, I kept thinking, I don’t need that any more. I’ve done that. I don’t need to.

  The rest of the weekend consisted of getting wrecked with scallies from Manchester in their camping area, holding court in the tepee, completely off my rocker, and, later, calmly sitting with Emily Eavis taking it all in, every tier of life in the place – all the magic created by the motion of bodies and different worlds colliding, the weird and wonderful stalls, and people trying to make a difference – the soul of Glastonbury, I suppose. I even think I saw my mum, which isn’t as far out as it sounds: she works there every year. It was uncomfortable seeing her in that state, but either she didn’t notice or she pretended not to. It was probably best just to look away at that point. I don’t think I went back to my tepee once in the final day or so; I figured that if I sat down in there it would literally be lights out, and, even if I had begun to come to terms with myself and the demise of both my bands, I was still determined to keep to the plan.

  I was remarkably clear-headed as the sun came up on Monday morning, though Stockholm seemed like an age ago, another life, and I couldn’t quite remember if I’d started my seven days on Sunday or Monday. It didn’t matter: if I made it through today then I’d done it. I could banish all the madness from my life and move on. That’s how you talk and think when you’ve been doing cocaine and booze for a week – like a bad paperback. I thought about Danny from Supergrass, and when I dropped the pint into Sadie Frost’s piano, as I waited for the car to come around and take us offsite. That was at the start of the band; that was when we were on the up and everything was still new and inexplicably exciting. I remembered sitting next to Danny on an old leather sofa, looking out of an open window on to one of Camden’s most salubrious squares, trees making shadows of the streetlights. There was a girl standing near us, and I whispered to Danny that she was very pretty, but she looked like a fat Kate Moss. Then she turned around and it was Kate Moss, and she was pregnant. Why they let me stick around all summer I’ll never know.

  That thought took me all the way to Frome, where Danny and his family lived. There were three of us in the car: my manager, who’d been raging all weekend, me and Anthony Rossomando, who was sharing the journey back. We soon pulled away from the main road, full as it was with deranged looking kids clinging to their steering wheels, tops off and windows down, music that little bit too loud, off on to B roads and away from all that madness. The road got leafier by the mile, the views calmer, and then I experienced the softest of landings, sitting in Danny’s garden to enjoy a family lunch, good food and a respite from all the recent insanity. Sitting outside digesting the first solids I could remember, I felt the warm air on my skin and Anthony came and hugged me, then someone brought me a glass of wine. My manager had crumpled in a heap towards the bottom of the garden, and had rolled on to his back, blissfully asleep, his snoring the only sound for the next four hours. Suddenly, everything felt normal again, and I thought about Edie the cellist and, even if she wasn’t really my girlfriend, how I still really missed her, but how that was somehow okay. The dread of being alone was fading, as if I’d purged – or beaten it – from my system.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The sky was black by the time we got back to London and I waved as the car pulled away. It was probably Tuesday by then, a new day just begun. From the high street down the long steep hill to my house there’s a view of London that is extraordinary: you can see beyond the Gherkin and the West End, past the Millennium Dome and all the way down to Crystal Palace where the natural bowl that holds this city in place rises up again. I lit a cigarette and the smoke went straight to my head, then walked unsteadily down the hill. I let myself in and walked out to the kitchen where a mouse scurried through the darkness. I picked up a pizza box and looked for somewhere to put it, realized there was nowhere and threw it back on the floor. I’d clean tomorrow, I thought, and I think I actually meant it. I climbed the stairs and flopped down on my bed, the house quiet and still. Somewhere a car alarm was going off. I was tired, but I wasn’t in despair. I didn’t need to have strangers in my house any more. I didn’t need to live life as a series of peaks and troughs. I had that choice. Later, I’d find a new manager who’d spot me playing as a surprise guest with Peter on YouTube; I’d find it in myself to write a new record, but alone this time; Edie the cellist would enter my life properly and save me in the process; I’d have a kid, and we’d reunite The Libertines … but I knew nothing of that then. I didn’t know that happiness was waiting for me, I only knew that I had to give in, I had to let it come. I lay my head on the pillow and slept.

  About the Book

  ‘Looking back at The Libertines is like catching flashes of sunlight between buildings as you race by on a train. An old film reel where the spools are weathered and worn, leaving empty frames on the screen…’

  In the final years of the last millennium, Carl Barât and Pete Doherty forged a deep musical bond, formed The Libertines and set sail for Arcadia in the good ship Albion; a decade later, Carl would emerge from his second band, the Dirty Pretty Things, after one of the most significant – and turbulent – rock ‘n’ roll trajectories of recent times. Threepenny Memoir navigates the choppy waters of memory and gives an inside look at life in the eye of the storm, chronicling how a pair of romantics armed with little more than poetry and a punk attitude inspired adoration in millions worldwide – and proceeded to tear apart everything they had.

  With unflinching honesty but real warmth, Carl – who has recently performed with The Libertines for the first time since 2004, and released a solo album – looks back at the creative highs and the drug-addled lows of life with both bands, as well as giving an intimate account of the people and places that have informed his songwriting. From Camden bedsits, impromptu gigs and mine-sweeping drinks in the Dublin Castle to Japanese groupies, benders in Moscow and chatting to Slash, Threepenny Memoir charts a fantastic course through recent musical history. And, in the aftermath, Carl reflects on the pressures – both external and self-inflicted – that led to each band’s demise, and on the challenges and rewards that life as a solo artist now holds.

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Carl Barât 2010

  1

  The right of Carl Barât to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-00-739376-3

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  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-39377-0

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