ONE

Raising the Colours

    The Lives of a Libertine


 
      FOURTH ESTATE • London

CONTENTS

    Cover

      Title Page

      ONE: Raising the Colours

      TWO: Plan A

      THREE: There and Back Again

      FOUR: Can’t Stand Me Now

      FIVE: Montmartre

      SIX: Dirty Pretty Things

      SEVEN: Truth Begins

      EIGHT: A Bird in the Hand

      NINE: Songs of Experience

      TEN: Of Kickboxing and Crystals

      ELEVEN: Pushing On

      Epilogue: The Longest Week of My Life

      About the Book

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

ONE
 
 Raising the Colours

  The room looked like the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album come to life: the great and the good, the infamous, the notorious and the inane all gathered under an opulent domed roof, lit up in blushes of colour, celebrating another year for the NME Awards. A dense bass guitar made the soles of my feet tingle as the room rubbernecked at a Stetson that was cutting a determined swathe towards the plush, red stairs Peter and I were standing on. Diminutive, and lit like she had her own spotlight, the lady beneath the cowboy hat tilted high on her head gave us a winning smile, before leaning towards us.

    ‘Hello, The Strokes, ’ she purred warmly before disappearing towards the door behind us.

    It was our first ever NME Awards ceremony and Madonna had just confirmed that it wasn’t our year.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  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. Faces disappear and reappear, sights crackle and fade as we aimlessly walk the streets of an ever-changing London, pub-crawling, minesweeping – secretly topping up our drinks from half-full glasses left unattended by their owners. We dream of Albion and the high skies above the low ceiling of our basement flat.

    Sometimes there’s no noise and sometimes that’s all there is.

    It’s 2003 and we’re about to go on stage. Gary and John are warming up, I can hear the thrum of the bass, the ricochet of the snare. Peter takes my hand and, barely acknowledging the rest of the band: ‘Just you and me, we can do this without them. You have to believe. ’ He’s almost in tears as he says it. Gary and John find something to stare at on the floor. My stomach turns over. Peter starts in again: ‘Something’s going to happen tonight’, and I envisage some sort of imminent meltdown on stage. It’s the equivalent of your girlfriend telling you that she needs a serious talk with you that evening: you know it’s never going to be good news. Then, nothing happens. Peter plays a storming set; he’s all over the stage, heralding the crowd, grinning at us three. Bumping chests, we collide at the centre of the stage, and to an onlooker it would seem like there was nowhere else we’d rather be.

    When we were performing, I used to worry about being found out, that I didn’t deserve to be on that stage. I’d swap glances with John and Gary and we’d get on with it, we’d buckle down as we always did. But then there was this other part of me that knew how lucky we were, that knew we gelled, and how lucky we were that, without trying, me and Peter had a chemistry; we fitted together completely – which made it all the more difficult when he tried to wrench it all apart. I can see those lights, feel the sweat gather at the small of my back. I’ve never been happier, I’ve never been more angry, never more fulfilled or let down. The Libertines heightened my insecurities, made me feel like I was king of the world, realized my dreams and dashed my hopes. We were that kind of band.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  Before The Libertines, before the madness and the money, before the room started filling up with people we didn’t know, Peter and I would romanticize about Albion. I don’t even know when we first started saying it. It was something that, many years ago, Peter and I, if we were trying to motivate the other to do something, we’d say: ‘Do it for the Albion’, and it would work. It would spur us into action even if it did sound as if we were talking about West Brom. Most people wouldn’t even have bothered to dress it up: they’d just have told you they had goals, but we imagined ourselves on a voyage sailing through choppy waters, on a ship called the Albion looking for Arcadia. That might sound vaguely nonsensical or highfalutin to other people, but as far as I’m concerned that’s the voyage I’m on. If you are going to set sail, then you have to give your vessel a name, and my good ship’s called the Albion. For the sake of home and hope and glory, let’s sail to Arcadia, an unfettered place with no constraints and infinite hope. That’s the destination. We held Albion and Arcadia close, twisted it into our own philosophy; we changed and mutated it along the way. It was our own personal mythology, our idiosyncratic, romantic ideal. It was the Greek myths with England at their heart: Homer and Blake.

    The whole idea of Albion has got tangled up over the years, but the important thing was that Peter and I met in the middle with it; we chimed with that ideal. I truly believe that we’re still on that boat – at the very opposite ends of it right now, but still stuck on the same fucking sea.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  I’ve lived in London since the summer of 1996, when I moved up to study drama at Brunel University. I wasn’t particularly popular in Whitchurch, near Basingstoke, where I grew up. I was something of a ghost, felt straitjacketed there, and had to move away. Some people pick their point of the compass and stick to it; all I ever wanted to be was at the heart of the action.

    Richmond, though, seemed very far from that. It’s where I lived for most of my two short years at Brunel, hunkered down in the student halls on campus. I met Peter there, which was important in itself, but campus life also allowed me to plug into London’s social scene and student life meant I had money in my pocket – a ludicrous notion for most students now – as well as all the time in the world to spend it. I was always annoyed that my Richmond halls didn’t have a London postcode – they were in TW1, on the other side of the river – so I ended up moving with a friend to Sheen, in the first of many moves towards the heart of London. Sheen was SW14, I think, and we had a little old house next to Richmond Park, into which we used to creep at night and steal wood to burn in our fireplace, ambling back through the darkness weighed down with piles of wood. We’d cycle into Richmond together on my bike, the two of us careering along, one of us on the crossbar like the scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ running through my head, going way too fast, two miles there and two miles back. We thrived on the bright lights of central London, and every trip home from town was spent on the number 9 bus, which would inevitably see us waking up in Kingston, the end of the line, bodies contorted and mouths drooling, faces pressed up against the glass, Richmond some miles back. Kingston’s a very unforgiving place at seven in the morning. The driver would never let us stay on board the bus, even though there were never any other buses there and it would always be the next to depart. We’d stand for twenty minutes, bleary-eyed in the freezing cold, until he allowed us back on for the return journey – at which point we’d fall asleep again and wake up in fucking town. Sometimes it felt endless.

    Peter’s sister Amy-Jo Doherty was the only person at Brunel I really felt a connection with during my short time studying there. From my vantage point in Whitchurch I’d imagined that, when going to London to university, I’d take rooms, and there’d be a succession of characters who’d process through my digs wearing bottle-green tweeds and carrying armfuls of leather-bound books tied with packing string – I think in my head I was going to Oxford circa 1930 in an Evelyn Waugh novel. What I actually found were people with golf clubs and Best of 1994 dance CDs. Amy-Jo was the one person I met there who seemed engaged with the sort of things I was looking for. We became best friends and she’d often tell me fantastic stories about Peter, an aspiring poet who was a year younger than her and still lived in the sticks. When he finally came up to visit, she asked me to look after him while she went to an evening class. He wasn’t really as I expected: very tall and wearing a kind of plastic jacket, looking quite ‘street’ – but then he’s always courageous with his outfits. The family resemblance was more than incredible. I’d heard a lot of good things about him, and he was interested in me because his big sister used to come home and talk about the new world of university, and particularly about this friend she’d met.

    Straight away we began to talk about music. He was a massive Morrissey and Smiths fan, and his sister had asked me to write down the tablature to ‘This Charming Man’, but I didn’t know anything about The Smiths, and I’d transcribed ‘Charmless Man’ by Blur, instead. He didn’t play guitar very well, so I showed him a few things, and he played me his one song, ‘The Long Song’, which lived up to its name. I had some songs with terrible lyrics, and we started doing musical things together; we bonded over music very quickly. That first night, too, we had an argument over the meaning of a word. I can’t even remember what the word was now, but, finally, it felt as if I was getting the intellectual stimulation I’d been searching for and had been expecting from university. For me, it was a joyful moment.

    We began to meet up every time he came to town. He lived and breathed London – he’d go to charity shops and buy massive shoes and corduroy trousers, kitsch tea sets and Chris Barber vinyls, and he had a certificate to show he’d climbed the Monument – and just loved to draw it all in, for all the right reasons. I found that very charming. I was learning things from him, too, although I wouldn’t have readily admitted it. I was performing the role of the older, experienced guy, and I’d try to play it like he was the little’un nipping at my feet. But in reality Peter knew a lot about the world I wanted to know. He’d read and read, and searched for authors to inspire him, and, by helping this passion come alive in me, helped me become more the person I wanted to be. He only made the trip to London every once in a while, so things progressed slowly. We’d said from the very beginning that we wanted to start a band, and kept on repeating it but to little effect. Amy would get him on the phone when we were out at night, drunk, and he’d say, ‘What about this band, then? ’ That was all it was for a while – good intentions and drunken promises. It must have been a couple of years after we first met that we finally sat down properly, at my house. We wrote a song that became ‘The Good Old Days’ that first night, along with quite a few others, and I remember us sitting there, staring at each other in silence as the clock ticked towards dawn, searching for the right words. We were trying to find a line for the middle eight, and he’d tell you differently but I’m absolutely sure it was me who came up with it. Finally, we had: ‘A list of things we said we’d do tomorrow. ’ We’ve argued since about whose line it was, but that seemed to be a moment when everything slotted into place, and it was quite a forerunner of things to come.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  London, its streets and neighbourhoods, litter my lyrics, and I can always find some part of it to suit my mood. I first felt plugged in to the city at a place called the Foundry on Old Street. They’re knocking it down now to build a grand hotel or something, to cash in on the area’s cool – Shoreditch surgically removing its own heart – but Peter used to run a night there called Arcadia, a performance poetry thing, which he used to revel in. I’d come along and play the piano very badly, but it was art so the quality of the performance didn’t really matter. We’d get free Guinness and we’d host a raffle to make money. I think the most auspicious prize we gave away was half a gram of speed and a Charles Manson record, but it always made us a couple of bob for a few beers and a fine breakfast.

    London really began for me, though, in Camden and Soho. I have such a strong image of Camden from those days, entrancing but horrific, edgy and dark and hilarious, at least partly thanks to some of the characters who made up the Camden contingent. Irish Paul was in a band called The Samaritans and was the kind of legend that my Camden was made of. He was part of our schooling, older than us, as was Essex Tom and another guy called Max. They were the big boys, the older brothers, and when they spoke you pricked up your ears and listened. I was always a bit cautious around them, though, as they’d drink, fuck and fight whoever or whatever they could find. We’d be walking down the street and Max would have this really demonic look in his eye, then pause, apologize, and leg it up Parkway to knock seven bells out of a couple of students who were being lairy and drunk. Then he’d come back again and resume the conversation as if nothing had happened. Essex Tom I remember from his run-in with John Hassall’s girlfriend, a girl called Jenny who’d had a boob job and therefore instantly became known as Jenny with the Big Knackers on Holloway Road. It wasn’t always poetry and lofty ideals with The Libertines. Anyway, one day we were all sat around in a pub and Tom took John’s camera from the table and went to the toilets to film his dick – a dick, moreover, with a notorious kink in it. John took the camera home without realizing and, later, Jenny with the Big Knackers on Holloway Road stumbled across it and recognized Tom from the footage. I think her relationship with John was doomed from thereon in.

    Irish Paul, on the other hand, had a Dickensian air about him, and I remember when he invited all of his mates to a celebratory dinner one night at the Mango Room in Camden just after it had opened. ‘My ship’s come in, ’ he told the assembled company. ‘You’ve stuck with me through the lean times, each sorted me out when I’ve needed it, so now it’s your turn. I’m going to treat you all to a night out. Tuck in, fill your boots. ’

    I felt touched, a real part of his gang, the inner circle, and we had a great evening. Then, at the end of an incredible meal, just as the bill was presented, Irish Paul got up: ‘I hope you’ve got your running shoes on, you boys, ’ he said, then he ran straight out of the restaurant and away down the street into the night. There was a significant pause and then all hell broke loose as we all bolted for the door. It was like the rush to get on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

    There was another Paul, Rock Paul, an American, who’d been a fixture at the Good Mixer through all the different crowds and bands who came and went. He just sat up at the bar, watched them come and watched them go, and drank. One night, we were all in there, about to embark on a session, and Rock Paul walked in looking utterly stricken. ‘I’ve had some really bad news, ’ he said, and it fell very quiet, the only noise the clicking of balls on the pool table behind us. ‘I’m terminally ill with cancer. ’ We were shattered. All I could think about was an empty stool, another face fading from the scene, and the Mixer, Camden, London, everywhere being the poorer for it. It got very sad, and slow, and we started to exchange stories, buy drinks for the fellow, reminisce about the good times we’d had and the good times we’d dedicate to his memory when he’d gone. At the end of the night, we were all mellow and drunk, giving hugs and saying goodbyes, and Rock Paul, on his way out, admitted he’d made the whole thing up. That he just wanted us to buy drinks for him. We were horrified and dumbfounded, but slightly in awe that he’d play the cancer card just to get free drinks. Passing him in the doorway, Welsh Paul gave him a level look that suggested he’d best not try that again, but I think that even he admired the gall of it. Cancer in exchange for a few drinks: how do you meter that out?

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  That was the Camden that made us, formed The Libertines, but the centre of my world, the heart of Albion, was undoubtedly Waterloo. It was where the city first came into sharp relief for me when I was fifteen, where, with a few friends, I came blinking into the light as we descended from the train for the first time. We were country bumpkins at their most inoffensive and wide-eyed, innocence personified in Jim Morrison T-shirts and old German army boots. It felt like the whole world was watching us as we slunk into dodgy bars in Soho, tentatively asking for that first drink then suddenly cocksure when they served us. We trawled the illegal twenty-four-hour joints along the back of Archer Street and felt as if we were in a film, though the magic waned briefly for me when I walked into a toilet and saw someone jacking up as he leant against a tiled wall. I was equally freaked out and awed. From a distance, London had always been faded glamour and drinking underage; coming face to face with hard drugs in a sleazy bar was all I could have hoped for, a ridiculous notion that really does lend weight to the phrase ‘Be careful what you wish for’. At fifteen the rush was almost physical. The three of us then went to a peep show in Soho with about three quid between us, and squeezed into a single booth, the smell of cleaning fluid making our noses wrinkle and our eyes red. Then, as our tingling anticipation built, the screen slid up to reveal an empty room with an old bike propped up against the wall. The emptiness was almost a relief … and then something moved in the corner, a woman you could best describe as tatty, reading a paperback, with part of Spider-Man tattooed across her face. She stood up, her book still hanging from one hand, and gyrated momentarily before us. Then the screen came down, and I think we were all secretly pleased it did. Strangely, I was glad the moment wasn’t sexy. My dream of London was of decaying beauty and a brittle, tawdry sheen of glamour. I had wanted to see the workings beneath the surface and that afternoon in Soho they couldn’t have been more visible.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  After I dropped out of Brunel and Peter came to town, we set sail together around London, moving from squat to flat, to mates’ houses and then back again. Peter found the first important place: DeLaney Mansions, 360 Camden Road. Our landlord was just like Del Boy, had Del Boy been Greek and fond of shell suits and gaudy chains heavy enough to sink him if he fell in the Thames. It was a sixties bedsit that time forgot. The front door didn’t work, so we had to exit and enter via the window, which we half-heartedly secured with a bicycle chain. Not that we had anything worth stealing. We had so little, in fact, that we shared a mattress on the floor and a kitchenette, and that was it. We had two cyberpunks for upstairs neighbours, a couple who looked like characters from a William Gibson novel: plastic straws in their hair, huge shoes, multiple unappealing piercings. They practically lived on speed. He was a computer programmer (ironic, given that he looked like he belonged in Tron) from Philadelphia; she was an Israeli, quite mad, and with a rather strange sideline. People would pay her cash to go into their houses and beat them up, which I found both creepy and enterprising. The cyberpunks would clomp around above our heads all day, but if we made the slightest sound on our acoustic guitars they’d start screaming and banging the floor. One night a brick came through the window. We looked out through the jagged hole and it was the Israeli, screaming in at us, shouting, ‘Fuck you! ’

    We called the police, the first and only time we ever called them, I think. But nothing much could be done about it and the upshot was that we had a broken window for the next four months. It was winter, naturally.

    We then moved along Camden Road to number 236, where Peter sweet-talked a family who had bought a big house there who we helped move in. The house was a mix of old bedsits and small flats and sat atop a huge basement. The basement was a real mess, but you could see the potential in it, and they gave it to us to live in while they made the place into a home. So we had this glorious subterranean Victorian expanse with a garden, and a grand old toilet cistern; it reminded me of ringing a church bell every time I pulled the heavy chain to flush it. That was where we began to forge our legend, where we started throwing impromptu gigs and parties. We’d flyer Camden and invite people back there and play for them, revelling in the randomness and the unexpected that this brought. At the first ever gig there, we’d decorated the place with lots of candles, and Peter had been to visit his parents in Germany and come back with lots of beer and cigarettes, which we’d put out for people. Everyone sat expectantly around, waiting for us to begin and, as soon as we played the first chord, all the lights went out. We had to ask around for a pound for the meter, but got things going again eventually and it turned into a very long, debauched party. Irish Paul shagged someone in the bathroom, which at the time we thought was particularly impressive, and that first night created the template for all the gigs there to come. The locust swarm would descend, we’d play, and they’d leave us, sometimes days later, with only debris and hazy recollections to show for it. The flat would be wrecked, but we’d be happy. Later, after we were signed, the so-called ‘guerrilla’ gigs would take over the mantle. They came about because, by that time, the internet was becoming a force in everyone’s lives, and we were knocked sideways by the way you could post ‘Gig tomorrow night’ on a forum somewhere and, as if by magic, people would turn up. The guerrilla gigs were chaotic and disorganized because there was no time to sort anything out, and precious little money, too, but the fact that people would turn up was a real buzz. They were a continuation of the impromptu gigs at 236 Camden Road, in the same mi casa es su casa spirit. They were about anyone being able to reach out and touch the people in the pictures on their wall, the musicians they were listening to at the time, about pushing all the boundaries, seeing how far that was possible. It was the best fun imaginable, and everyone was invited.

    Remarkably, the family upstairs at 236 Camden Road looked on us as some kind of novelty. They never batted an eyelid even when we serenaded up to seventy people at a time below them. Then we hit upon the idea of sub-letting the space under the stairwell to a French conceptual artist who we charged twenty pounds a week. He was happy there in our basement. And so was I, for a while.

    I was always much happier on Camden Road than I was later, living on the top floor of a townhouse in Holloway, which, looking back, was an exercise in making myself feel edgy. Some nights I even slept in a cage, in the spare room of a prostitute we’d made friends with, a woman we’ll call Natasha. Natasha worked from home, I suppose you could say; she ran it as a sort of brothel and, when she wasn’t working, she hung around Camden a lot, a face at our shows. Someone said she knew one of the guys in Blur, but I don’t know. What I do know was we needed somewhere to sleep, and she had the space, so we took her up on her offer, despite its pitfalls. Natasha looked like a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy: skinny, emaciated and striking, and she was an enigma. She thought it would age her being outside too long, took cabs everywhere, and wouldn’t leave the house without applying sun block – a very paranoid girl, and quite lonely as far as I could tell. The bedroom I was allocated had a big iron cage in it, halfway between an outsize birdcage and a medieval torture device, which I often ended up sleeping in. I think her clients used to spend their hours in there paying to suffer, but it afforded me a degree of security I enjoyed. Natasha was our drummer for a few hours; we liked the notion, but she really couldn’t drum.

    When she had a client, Peter and I would sit in the next room holding pellet guns and talk in gruff voices so that, through the wall, one might think that she had muscle to look after her in case a client freaked out. As a thank-you she’d usually take us to the café across the road and feed us, which seemed a fair exchange. Peter and I used to spy on her and her clients, sometimes, crawling quietly around on our knees to peep through the keyhole. I remember seeing her with a Hassidic Jew and, surprisingly, the drummer from a band we knew. Not at the same time, of course. We sat back dumbfounded when we caught sight of him on the other side of the door.

    However, the boarding arrangement couldn’t, and didn’t, last. A few months in, Peter found a new girlfriend, which Natasha didn’t like at all. She could be quite possessive and paranoid, and she used to have these fits and attacks that she seemed totally convinced by, but which we never quite fully believed in. We used to take her to hospital and she’d always rally and make a recovery, a little miracle every time. She claimed to be able to see auras around people, and know high-ups in government, clients, she said, who were in positions of terrible power. One night she left a note to say goodbye and perched out on the window ledge feigning a suicide attempt. There was another suicide note pinned on the door one day when we got back from somewhere, and we ran into the kitchen where she had her head in the electric oven. I’m not sure she enjoyed the sound of our laughter, and I don’t think we were laughing because we thought the situation funny. Fundamentally, we were pretty scared of her. In the end I took the coward’s way out and fled to Manchester in the middle of the night. Peter had already gone, and I was getting the fear alone in my cage. Someone told me Natasha has since moved to Ireland, but if ever I’m on the Holloway Road I still tread lightly.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  They were lazy days on the whole, though, and when there was no wind to fill our sails Peter and I would drift in slow circles, becalmed, waiting for the currents to bear us away. After we left Holloway, we moved to Dalston, where Peter had a room and I was sort of squatting. Also there was Don, whose place it was, who was eccentric at best, and another guy, Mad Mick, who lived up to his name and was always hanging around. Nothing much moved on those long hot days, cars hummed in and out of sight, and we lay listlessly in sunlit windows trying to feel the world turn. Downstairs there were a couple of French girls who spent their spare time attempting to make ketamine out of rose-water that they’d bought at the chemist. They’d spend afternoons boiling all sorts of ingredients in rose-water, because one night at a club someone had given them a bum tip that that was how you made the stuff, but they were having about as much luck with that as most alchemists have conjuring up gold. Mad Mick was from Brooklyn, and I liked him. He was quiet and self-contained, but a lunatic with it, and it was as if he lived in the shadows: you’d only see him at very strange times, like six in the morning at Dalston Kingsland train station when he really lived over in Kentish Town. We’d always meet him at the most odd, out-of-the-way places with the oddest people. We’d show up at a random squat party in Deptford and he’d be there. I was in a Jobcentre in Hackney once in an interminable wait to see someone and I suggested we start breakdancing and, without another word, he did. He was a damn good breakdancer, and it made the surly staff feel uncomfortable, which was a bonus.

    During those early days we got a gig in a nursing home in East Ham because our drummer at the time knew one of the nurses there and we’d been promised £ 50 if we did this gig for the old people. So we trooped down and were confronted by a room of very fragile and vulnerable old people, the kind of old people, shockingly old, you don’t see on the street any more because they can’t really get around. I feel quite bad about it now. About the most suitable song in our repertoire was a cover of ‘Anything But Love’, the old jazz standard, and we tried to be quiet, but we weren’t especially good at that, and there were a lot of fingers in ears and a lot of confusion. People kept getting up and walking around, as if they weren’t quite sure what was going on, or where the door was. One of the patients there was called Margie, and she took rather a shine to us; the poor lady had alcoholic dementia and kept asking if we’d brought a pint with us. We persisted, though, and by the end of our set a few people seemed into it. Then a couple of nurses came in and quietly drew a curtain around one of the beds. It transpired that its occupant had died during our performance of ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. It was a pretty incomprehensible moment for us, but the nurses took it entirely in their stride. It might sound cold, but I suppose that’s just how it is in a hospice. It was terribly tragic, but what a pertinent song to go out on. There are, I imagine, worse ways to go.

    To add to the surreal turn that the day had taken, before the gig we’d told Mad Mick that he could be our manager. We didn’t really want him to be, and of course there wasn’t a job because we didn’t really need a manager back then, but it was just a cool thing to tell people none the less. We’d said to Mick that if he ran to the gig from Dalston then the job was his. As we left the hospice after this terrible confusion, just as we were driving off, we saw Mick at the end of the road, huffing and puffing. He had just arrived, had run all the way, but there wasn’t room in the car to give him a lift back so we had to leave him there. I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and there was Mad Mick, confused and red-faced, sweating in his jeans, getting smaller and smaller until he was only a speck.

    Gigs like that were clearly not going to pay, so I had a series of other, mostly crap, jobs that I sometimes enjoyed but mostly resented. Waterloo had been my gateway to the world, but the altogether less lovely Hammersmith was my gateway to the world of work. The temp agency there saw something in me that I’m not all too sure I saw in myself, dispatching me across London to push paper around like a clerk in the background in an Ealing comedy. For a while, I was at the BBC, and I looked out over west London from my office at Television Centre, a network of endless corridors and boxy rooms that held about as much charm as pleurisy. I was twenty-one, and an easily distracted employee at best. The wages were criminal and, feeling hard done by, I spent my days roaming the corridors wearing a suit and a trilby, which wasn’t really done back then, and flirting with random BBC employees, ambitious girls who really didn’t care if I lived or died, though the hat piqued their interest. I was a purchase ledger clerk, which mean paying the BBC employees, though I can’t quite remember ever paying anyone or not. At the same time, I was performing in the house band at a place called Jazz After Dark on Greek Street in Soho. The four of us played for four hours a night for the princely sum of £ 20 (between us, not each) and a bottle of beer apiece. Which, considering that none of us could actually play jazz, was probably fair enough. My undoing was oversleeping one morning after a gig and missing my shift. The BBC drafted in another temp to do my job, a temp who accomplished, I was reliably informed, my whole eight hours’ work in the first five minutes of the day. It was fair to say that they were on to me.

    After that, I worked at Cobb’s Hall in Hammersmith, which wasn’t a place for a suit or trilby. I was on the front desk, or the front line as I came to think of it, for a building full of social workers. A lot of their clients were mental health patients, a good portion of them schizophrenics, who came in to get their injections to offset their psychosis. I won’t pretend to understand what went on in the clinic or what disorders some of the people were struggling with, but I was pretty much the first face they saw when they came in. So I had people who were overdue their injections, very interesting people, very angry people, some telling me they’re the Son of God and they need to kill me, and there’s no security. Just me sitting there in splendid isolation. I had a little black alarm cord that, when you pulled it, made a sound that I can only describe as inoffensive, and that was my only protection. All for £ 5 an hour. I never got hurt, although came close to it, but there was an impreciseness to their plans, so when they loomed up it wasn’t too difficult to get out of the way. In quieter moments I used to go through the computer system and see who was on file. I found a few people I knew.

    Far more pleasant were the three years I spent off and on as an usher in London’s theatres. The job excited me if only because it let me in on the periphery of the glittering world I’d imagined London to be. I was still outside its walls, but I could finally see in at the windows. Before I moved to London, I’d get home from a day trip to the West End, turn on the TV and there was the city again, and it seemed fantastic to me that I’d been somewhere that was on the box, that it actually existed. When I moved there, I’d go back to places again and again, and remember standing in the cobbled square in Covent Garden early one morning with a light mist on the streets and no one around. I fancied I heard the flower market starting up across the way, blooms brought on trestle tables. I imagined Oscar Wilde, the comings and goings of My Fair Lady, I romanticized it out of all proportion and it took me a long time to realize that it was a modern-day tourist trap. When I was working at the theatres I used to go down to the Piazza in my lunch hours and watch the performers, and I’d see people in sleeping bags waiting to perform for the tourists and people a little too drunk for lunchtime, and I realized that the only place that the romantic Covent Garden lived on in was in the hearts of people like me. And, little by little, the lustre faded. The world inside the theatre, however, still held some magic, and I particularly liked working at the Old Vic. It was near my spiritual home of Waterloo – the portal to this new world for a country boy like me – and I loved its tradition and its history; it signified something and felt real to me. I had one pair of blue trousers and a horrible matching waistcoat that I wore for all my theatre work; the trousers were a pair of flares that were so worn that they shone. They never got washed because I had nowhere to wash them, and at one point I had impetigo on my legs that I couldn’t help rubbing, and the trousers eventually blended with the scab. But those trousers carried me through, from my initial days among shadowy aisles pointing patrons to their seats to the day our Rough Trade deal finally allowed me to fold them neatly along their thinning creases and put them away for good.

    That might make everything sound very purposeful, but the truth was that I didn’t have any sense of where we were going while I was at the Old Vic, though Peter and I were increasingly inseparable and working more and more intensely on our lyrics. Peter was always very optimistic but somehow – and this is probably indicative of the insecurities that would dog me all the way through my performing career – I never thought I’d make it in a band. For me, it was an impenetrable world, and playing in front of a small audience was already intimidating enough. Peter’s attitude was different: We can do this, you can be that. He was full of faith, life and vitality, and that sustained me; it was a real part of the magic of the time. Peter surprised me at work at the Old Vic one night, when we were meant to be rehearsing but I’d taken the paying job instead. Separate worlds – music and theatre – colliding momentarily, almost causing one to spin helplessly out of orbit. I was in my trusty trousers, probably gleaming in the theatre lights, serving a platter of vol-au-vents as part of a reception for Marcel Marceau. It was an after-show as far as I can remember – as much as great mime artists have after-shows, anyway. Then Peter just appeared, lumbering into sight, red-faced with tears in his eyes. I can’t imagine what the guests must have thought as a stranger button-holed one of the waiters, and the quiet of the theatre bar is shattered as he screams: ‘What are you doing here? Can’t you see these people are cunts? We’re meant to be writing songs! ’

    The room screeched to a halt, a hundred heads turning towards us, now centre stage in the encroaching silence. I was livid. How I kept my job there is still a mystery.

    As well as the Old Vic, I did stints at the Aldwych, the Apollo and the Lyric. Ushering is a funny job, mostly populated by hopeful actors and musicians, a lot of whom fall by the wayside and get stuck in that routine. The idea is that it’ll subsidize your earnings and allow you to pursue your dreams during the daylight hours, but the reality is that you all end up going to the same cliquey bars after the show, spend all your money and then sleep all day. Many people get stuck in that for years. It wasn’t entirely without merit: I got to meet Harold Pinter and Michael Gambon, an impressive man who seemed to have a glow about him. I even had a chance to speak with him too, and he gave me some advice.

    ‘What is your purpose? ’ he asked.

    I mumbled something about going to drama school, breaking into acting – I was still very young and shy – and he looked me directly in the eye and said: ‘Don’t worry about that bullshit, just lie. I got an agent on the strength of saying I did this thing at the Old Vic and it was a total lie. ’ He was quite encouraging, and pleasingly unprincipled, too, as far as I could tell.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  For a short while we called the band The Strand, principally because, during my breaks as an usher at the Aldwych Theatre I used to walk up and down the Strand wondering when it was I would be randomly offered a part in a film or even to be scouted to be a model. Those were the kind of dumb things I’d sometimes do. London for me back then was limitless, and I was naï ve and silly. I just assumed that there was a chance anyone could make it, get lucky. Funnily enough, it never happened like that, but the band name stuck for a period, one of our many awful names, along with The Cricketers and The Sallys. Then I suggested The Libertines: we’d had a well-thumbed copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Lusts of the Libertines floating around the band for as long as I could remember. That name was, briefly, rejected, though I can’t imagine why: none of us was particularly enamoured with the idea of being called The Sallys or The Strand.

    Later, by utter coincidence, we found out that the Sex Pistols used to be called The Strand. I met Glenn Matlock backstage when we supported them at Crystal Palace and the only conversation I could think of, while he’s sitting there drinking herbal tea and I was drunk and looking for drugs, was to tell him that my band used to be called The Strand, too. It must have sounded like a complete lie, the sort of thing you’d make up just to cosy up to him, to let him know that you really knew all about the Pistols. I felt a ridiculous need to make conversation because I was a fan, and really wanted to talk to the Sex Pistols. He, meanwhile, simply regarded me quietly over his tea. It was at a football stadium, and so we were standing in our dressing room, trying not to worry too much and just enjoy it, and the Pistols were in the room next door. I could hear John Lydon saying, and I think he was talking about Keith Flint, ‘I was doing that, I had that haircut twenty years ago, cheeky sod. ’ That made us roll about with laughter, deliriously happy just to be a part of it, to be that close to the inner circle.

    Even though we were playing in front of all the Sex Pistols’ gear, the stage was a vast expanse. It was a magnificent day, perfect for a festival, and the crowd was made up of families and lots of blokes in their late thirties and forties, out for the day reliving their youth. Punk pomp with pushchairs. We had our matching red army jackets on in the blisteringly hot sun, and we tried to get them going, but they all started to sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ at us, I think on account of our jackets. That just fired us up, so we ripped off our tunics to expose skinny bare flesh, this pasty punk flesh, which for reasons I’ve yet to fathom always goes down a treat. Suddenly they seemed to be on our side. Fear and adrenalin meant that we were going mental, fucking giving it as hard as we could and we really, really meant it. I think that came across, and our enthusiasm was reciprocated by a very partisan audience. They were there for one band and we weren’t that band. Later on I remember reading Steven Wells’ review of the gig and I think we got a quick mention, which I was pleased about. The Sex Pistols are a pretty hard band to support.

    Afterwards, I bumped into John Lydon and I asked if he’d seen the show. ‘Libertines! ’ he said.

    ‘Yes, ’ I replied.

    ‘I don’t miss a trick, ’ he said and shot off.

    We were pretty much ordered to go to the after-show party. I remember someone who might have been Lydon’s minder pointing his finger at us and shouting at us to do so. I’m assuming that John Lydon’s quite into drum and bass, because the party was at a rough drum and bass place in Wandsworth High Street, which I found a bit odd. Peter took a chair from the Lydon group, and he’s a massive Lydon fan so he was crestfallen when Lydon said to him, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Those chairs are for us; they’re our chairs. Be fair! ’

    The drink and fervour of the day had taken their hold when I started asking Lydon if he could get us any drugs. ‘I’m not your drug dealer, ’ he said, ‘but I shall speak to the proprietor and see what I can do. ’ Looking back, I doubt he did, and I must have asked him another four times that night before he took our manager to one side and said, ‘I am not his drug dealer. ’ I stopped asking him after that. At least I hope I did.

    ∗ ∗ ∗

  I think if you’d said to us back when we lived on the Camden Road that only a couple of years hence, just a hop over the millennium, we’d be supporting the Sex Pistols, I would have laughed you out of town. On millennium eve, I was with Johnny Borrell and his girlfriend, Jen, and we were drunk. We’d left it too late to organize our evening, we couldn’t get near any of the celebrations so – and I’m still not sure how we hit on the idea – we went down to the Kingsway underpass knowing that it led directly to Waterloo Bridge. The crowds were milling about as we disappeared into the gaping darkness and clambered over the locked gate. We stumbled along, for about half a mile, the sound of London fading behind us, until we came out right in the heart of the celebrations, the Thames below us, the sky full of gassy sulphur. It was exhilarating, euphoric. We walked into the middle of it all with a bottle of Cava. Everyone had been wondering for years where they were going to be in 2000, and I was in the epicentre of my universe: Waterloo.

    That moment seemed freighted with significance, seemed to be one of the rare times I was in the right place at the right time. Mostly, we’d just bob about, drift through London like ghosts, talk about our band and admire the city’s shape; it seemed magical to us. Sitting outside pubs in Soho on long summer evenings, climbing the park fence at eleven at night in winter, that stillness among the firs, grass crunching beneath your feet.

    Other times Peter and I would just work away, on the peripheries of the scene, made all the more aware of that fact by the near misses we had. One night, I remember being elbowed in the ribs by Liam Gallagher. I was in the Dublin Castle innocently minesweeping drinks into my pint glass at the time. I looked around. He was accompanied by Mani from The Stone Roses and Finley Quaye; you could almost hear the sound of a hundred necks craning to get a better look at them all. Peter approached Liam and said something to him which I couldn’t make out, though Liam’s voice cut across the room: ‘I’m the Devil’s dick, me. ’ But Liam didn’t mean anything by the accidental elbow, graciously bought me a beer and then politely declined to come back to our flat and have a jam. I can fully understand that, now that I’ve so frequently been on the receiving end of such requests. It was impossible for me to understand, then, that he was just a person in the pub enjoying a drink with his friends. Not the rock star, not the performer, just the Devil’s dick enjoying a pint.

    Another night, we liberated a moped on the Kentish Town Road, a Honda Cub 90 propped up outside the WKD Café, a dive full of indie kids being scrunched by bouncers. WKD stood for Wisdom, Knowledge and Destiny, which were hardly abounding in there. It didn’t last long. The moped had been sitting outside for a while, obviously abandoned or dumped, and the third time we walked past we decided to wheel it with us. Down a backstreet, Peter was walking along and I was sitting on it, sort of wheeling it along, and then we got leapt upon. I remember this Kiwi man, a sort of angry, apish figure waving a police badge at us, the headlights of a car screaming up the road. It was like something from The Sweeney. Scary stuff, it jolted us out of our reverie and then some. We were arrested and carted off down to the cells. When they asked us what we did, I said I was an actor and Peter said he was a poet. I think it was then that they realized that we weren’t professional criminals. The police officer at the desk was from Liverpool so I instantly tried on my bad Scouse accent, trying to impress upon her how Peter and I weren’t vagrants – that we shared a house, that there were lots of books in our toilet. A little too Withnailian now that I think about it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I asked her if she read on the toilet, or did they call it the can in Liverpool? At the end of it I think we kind of charmed them, but they still banged us up in the cells anyway.

    Once we’d stopped protesting our innocence, I think we were charged with the theft of an automobile. I still have the charge sheets somewhere. I think we were both shocked when they actually shut the cell doors on us. They had small chalkboards outside the cells, and on the way through we liberated the chalk next to the boards through the little shutter in the door and Peter wrote poetry on the walls. We left our mark as we thought Libertines should. We were released the next day with a caution; by all accounts the bike’s owner was less than pleased that we’d liberated his Honda.

    But we were Libertines: we liberated. That was what we did. We always did know how to make our own fun.