TWO  Plan A

It’s late at night, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. Another cigarette, another glass of red wine … there’s tea on the table, too, but that’s cooling. When I set out to write this book and this solo album I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I unearthed some journals that I’d long ago put away, out of sight and mind, and was flicking through the pages, and they fell open to reveal four photo-booth pictures still in a strip. Two of Peter and two of me: we’d shared the booth, running in and out so we could get two shots apiece. We look impossibly young; I’m cocky about something, or pretending to be, and Peter’s a shock of hair and eyes like a deer. A few pages later and there’s some truly terrible poetry, a sketch of Peter that he hated (but sketched when I was hating him so that’s fair enough) and then some words I recognize as being the genesis of ‘Death On The Stairs’.

I’ve just been watching the young me play Top of the Pops for the first time. I usually can’t face watching myself sober, so I’ll get drunk and go online to look at past glories, and am occasionally pleasantly surprised to find that some have hardly faded at all. I can’t believe it now, but when we were offered a spot performing on that British institution, we began arguing about the rights and wrongs of doing it. We really wanted to – for egotistical reasons we were dying to be on national TV, and you don’t join a band like The Libertines to be a shrinking violet – but then someone said that The Clash had refused to do it. God knows what relevance that had, but it seemed really important to us at the time, and someone else said that Pan’s People, or whoever it was, had danced to ‘Bankrobber’ in their absence, and that that was even worse … As if that had any fucking bearing on us at all: I think this was the first moment I realized how intrinsically self-important bands are. Everything has to be analysed, ruminated upon, done to fucking death. It’s all so massive and important, so Spinal Tap at times. Forget the devil being in the detail: all the bands I’ve been in are stuck in the fucking cracks.

Anyone could tell we wanted to do Top of the Pops. Who wouldn’t? We only had to talk ourselves into it. Our egos won that battle, along with me saying that if there’s one kid in Wigan who’s going to tap into what we’re doing because of it, while he’s eating his beans in front of the telly, then we’ve achieved something. We did ‘Time For Heroes’ that first appearance. It was back in the exact same BBC building where I’d stalked the corridors in my trilby trying to impress posh girls, so that was a little victory in its way. We did Top of the Pops again, a second appearance on the show, but that doesn’t get talked about so much because Peter wasn’t there. Peter hated Anthony for a while – Anthony Rossomando who replaced him for some of the live shows – because Anthony did Top of the Pops in his place. Peter accidentally saw it on telly, and he was at his lowest ebb at the time, and it understandably tore him up a bit.

Even back then I avoided watching myself doing ‘Time For Heroes’ on the TV until I was good and drunk. When I did, I watched it out of one eye while listing slightly and it was all right; it looked like we were winning. Quite soon after, I met Graham Coxon from Blur for the first time, which was a big deal for me. He’d seen it, too, and he said he loved my ‘anti-guitar solo’, which I didn’t really understand but decided to take as an enormous compliment anyway. I tried to maintain my composure, but I can’t explain the feeling of happiness it gave me. When Coxon was a drinker and he was in the Good Mixer pretty much holding up the bar, our bass player, John, had gone up to him and asked him if he was Graham Coxon. Graham said to him that if he didn’t know the answer to that then he could fuck off, which makes a lot of sense in a way. Though that didn’t help John much; he was gutted.

There was a similar frisson of excitement when we got played in the Queen Vic for the first time, too. Like Top of the Pops, EastEnders crosses those boundaries, it helps explain to your parents and family what it is you actually do because, in the real world, playing and singing in a band is not working for a living. So when your family’s sitting watching Pat behind the bar, or whoever it was running the Vic at that point, and the jukebox starts playing ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, it helps people close to you to understand. Before then, they’d say, ‘Have you met anyone famous, have you met Britney? ’ But getting a record deal doesn’t give you the keys to some secret half of London, to the parties where Bono hangs out with Britney. And thank fuck for that. The Vic’s a good way to help a different generation understand another world, and maybe a good benchmark for your family, so they can start taking you seriously, and maybe get off your back a little bit. It was like giving my dad a gold disc: an affirmation I think we’d both been looking for. So I raised a glass when we snaked out of the speakers in the Queen Vic. These days, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, though I always regretted never catching sight of us on one of those band posters they have pasted up by Walford East Tube station. And this from the man who debated if being on Top of the Pops was selling out.

∗ ∗ ∗

My parents broke up when I was five years old. I didn’t see it coming, but I suppose I heard it. Our house was filled with shouting, things were broken, stuff was hurled across rooms. I’m sure nobody got badly hurt, though I’m certain some feelings were. I’d come into the living room to studied silence and a smashed mug in the corner of the room, shards like chipped teeth across the carpet. My mother would be staring hard out of the window, my father in the kitchen busying himself with something, the kettle announcing morning with its shrill whistle. The noise abated quickly when my mother left for good, and there was a hole in our household then that filled up with sadness. My father seemed shrunken somehow, but that must be in my imagination. I’m not sure a five-year-old could have truly understood what was going on. All I knew was that I missed my mother, and I’d stare out at the estate we lived on and imagine her making her way back towards us through the hedgerows and houses, and how she’d catch me staring and wave. Then my dad would tell me to get dressed and pull me from my reverie.

When I was born, we were living on an estate in Basingstoke, and the birth was a particularly protracted and painful one by all accounts. There were two of us; I was the unexpected twin, or the uninvited guest as I sometimes think of it. My brother died a few months later and I don’t want to labour over this, but I don’t want to deny it either; it’s something that’s stuck with me all my life. What if he’d lived, and what if he were here with me now? Did my living have something to do with his dying? I’ve always stayed close to one person since – I’m not sure if that’s coincidence, or even relevant – but there’s been Peter, and there’s been Chris and Anthony and Kieran Leonard (the lithest man I have ever met, a screaming and tender troubadour – a scruffy Cobainesque comrade in striped skintight Beetlejuice trousers, big boots and a razor-sharp wit). Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve always needed someone near. My big sister’s two years older than me – so I was born with a boss – and we grew close as cups were thrown and doors slammed shut, and our parents banged up and down the stairs.

My mother might as well have disappeared into the ether for a year or so after she left; she adopted what I’d come to think of as a happy hippy lifestyle, a transient freewheeling. We lost her to a commune, a number of communes over the years as a matter of fact, and so, for the next eight years or thereabouts, I lived between two places. School days with my dad at our house in Whitchurch, and most weekends and holidays out at a commune or in a field under the stars. It certainly wasn’t without its charms, but there was such a stark and unexpected contrast between my two lives; I’d literally feel the jolt as I made the transition between the two worlds.

I’ve come to regard those times very fondly. I was blessed to be torn between two such different ways of life, to be exposed to all of these colours; my formative palette was surely enriched by it. What I most remember about the communes at first is looking up and seeing all this hair, men with huge beards and wild, untamed hair everywhere. I go back and look at photos from that time now and it looks like fun, quite a groovy scene, but at the time I found it peculiar. I’d make them laugh by complaining about it all, about the smell and having to sit around in the dark with people farting. It didn’t feel particularly liberating, but then I suppose they were on their own journey. They used to respond to my moaning by laughing and saying, ‘Isn’t it priceless the stuff that kids come out with? ’ But I reckon kids quite often come out with the truth, as they haven’t yet learnt to censor themselves. Farting and sitting around in the dark aside, there was a lot of hand-holding and embracing; spiritual meditation, New Age philosophies, that sort of thing. And lots and lots of music. I remember the sound of people meditating, the ‘Om’ reverberating through the tents as the nights drew in. There were lots of drugs, though I only ever really saw the effect they had on people – blissed-out faces all around and glazed eyes staring off into the depths of the universe. It was – and this is an understatement on a grand scale – a very colourful landscape for a young child. Very conducive to the development of an imaginative and inquiring mind. I don’t think it did me any harm; more opened me up to things. And then the inevitable jolt, the return to my home on the council estate with its well-defined rules, structured days and, most importantly, stability.

I am nostalgic about my childhood days, yes, but it’s not entirely unalloyed fondness I bounced between, feeling pretty bereft emotionally. I know both my parents tried very hard in difficult circumstances, but I was very aware that I was missing some sort of a loving linchpin in my life. I wanted someone I could turn to, someone to lean on and trust. My dad was working all the time on various artistic things and working hard to help the family get by, although he carried a simmering anger around with him, which I may or may not have inherited. Meanwhile, my mum was off being a totally different person, a different kind of parent. I think my sister and I felt cast adrift a little, as if we didn’t belong to either. I needed the stability of my dad’s world, but I was never hugged or cuddled there as a child, while, in the other world, the world of free love and enlightenment, everyone hugged you to the point that it became meaningless. In The Libertines people never stopped hugging me. I’m pretty good at hugging, actually; the five-year-old in me throws himself at it as if it’s salvation.

∗ ∗ ∗

Looking back through the fog, I’m grateful for Top of the Pops and the Queen Vic. Our deal with Rough Trade brought us that kind of presence, and saved me and Peter from bedsits without doors and other people’s basements. It was more than we could have hoped for at the beginning, especially when, at a certain point in our development, the early line-up of The Libertines fell apart. We’d been drifting like tumbleweed across London, taking our own sweet time, playing beautiful, flowery songs and singing about love’s vicissitudes, lugging amps into old people’s homes, and doing little gigs wherever we could. It all broke up, though, when Peter began to change gigs around, cancel shows and refuse to take money for performing. The original drummer and bassist were too ambitious to take this, so they quit and the bottom fell out, but we stuck with our manager and, when we saw what The Strokes were doing, we began to form a different idea of the band. I think when The Strokes broke so suddenly and so big, we were rather fancifully annoyed at them: annoyed they were shagging our women and taking our drugs, taking the space that, in our minds, was reserved for us. We decided something had to be done, and so we began to write new songs. They were faster and more driven – sexier, more tortured, funnier – and everything began to click. I remember the time well because there was a Rough Trade showcase looming on the horizon, which we were due to play in, and I was at a friend’s flat teaching Johnny Borrell the bass line to ‘Horrorshow’. It was the day the planes hit the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, and only a few weeks before the showcase. Johnny was originally our bassist but, when the day of that showcase came, I phoned him as I was arriving at Earl’s Court, to see if he was almost there. Johnny, though, was on the Alabama 3 tour bus in Cardiff, in the middle of a rather large bender, so we had to do the showcase with me playing the fucking bass. Thankfully, it still worked, and Rough Trade took us on. Gary, a session drummer who’d played most famously with Eddie Grant, was working in marketing at that point – he was our manager’s secretary’s boyfriend – and he came on board, too. Rough Trade then pointed out that we needed a bassist, so we asked John. And that was The Libertines fully formed in its second, famous, incarnation. We’d found a rich seam of new songs, which we continued to mine for the first single and album, but when we got to the second album the old ones started to sneak back in. ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ is a song that has its roots in the quieter, poetic first incarnation of the band. It was great, after the angry thing, to have such a reservoir of wonderful rich, lyrical material that we’d really wanted to sing about when we were young, fresh and idealistic.

Signing for Rough Trade was amazing, as well as a real relief after all those years of slumming it with our intricate little melodies and beautiful words. We’d come back with an attitude and anger, as if on the rebound after the years during which people hadn’t wanted us: a very genuine sense of frustration followed, suddenly, by that incredible connection, and we weren’t going to let it pass. Thanks to Rough Trade, Peter and I moved east to Bethnal Green, to the next Albion Rooms, and it was domestic bliss after a fashion. We shared a business bank account and the flat, a beautiful place that had one big room upstairs and one tiny little cupboard. Nevertheless, it was spacious and bright, and the main room – Peter’s room – housed the most amazing brass bed. I know that because I saw it every time I went through it to get to my bedroom (the cupboard). All I ever wanted in that flat was a proper door to my room. Peter’s room was always filled with noise: records or guitars or repeats of Steptoe and Son and Rising Damp on TV. We had a modest fridge, which never housed anything other than booze and £ 50 notes. We’d never handled large amounts of £ 50 notes before so we luxuriated in them, ironing them and placing them in the fridge. It was very cinematic opening up a fridge and seeing all that money in neat, colourful piles. It sounds vulgar in hindsight, but it was actually quite innocent. When the Dollar Man, our dealer, came around we’d pluck a couple of fifties out of the fridge, press them on our faces for that cooling sensation and hand them over. We liked him: he had a gold tooth and wore shades, just like you’d want a drug dealer to. It was while we were in Bethnal Green that I came home one day and saw our record contract sitting on the table. And I thought that Peter must have been getting nostalgic, revelling in the moment when we got picked up, looking at the paperwork that sealed our deal, and thinking how far we’d come. And then I saw my chequebook, open, with a cheque missing; and next to that a piece of paper with lots of different versions of my signature directly lifted off the contract. Peter hadn’t even tried to hide the fact that he’d forged my signature; I quite admired him for that. I admired his spirit.

∗ ∗ ∗

Even when Peter wasn’t forging my signature, I’m about as adept with money as the World Bank – by which I mean not at all. I started off being frugal and I’ve always been a hard worker. I went out to work as soon as I was allowed, and had a whole range of awful, dangerous or soul-destroying jobs, factory jobs cleaning sump oil, or tossing salad in a huge warehouse under barbaric lights. Nevertheless, they got me out of the house, and they were happy hours. It was great to be alone and isolated even in the company of others and the idea of actually being paid opened up a new world for me. Earning your first wage is an amazing feeling, even if I wasn’t great at the jobs I unearthed.

There were rumours in that salad-packing factory that there were black widow spiders in the crates, and part of our job was to pick fat moths out from between the green salad leaves, put them in a polythene bag provided expressly for that purpose and not give them a second thought as they expired. Someone found half a frog once, and they had to stop the whole load, shut everything down, and there was another enduring rumour that a frozen body had once fallen out of one of the crates of imported leaves. Some poor bugger had been trying to get into the country illegally and had chosen the wrong method of entry. I imagined him shattering on impact with the floor, like someone caught in liquid nitrogen in a movie, shattering into a thousand pieces, shining limbs skittering away across the factory. The reality, if it had ever happened, had probably been an urgent call to HR and a screaming workmate being led quietly out of the door.

The factory was about three miles outside Whitchurch, and I worked the graveyard shift, which meant cycling through country lanes with no streetlights, and I’d hope for nights with a full moon as that made my journey easier. I’d zone out and use my peripheral vision to sense where the road was, my gears snagging as I puffed my way to work. I’d arrive around ten in the evening, the salad factory floodlit and looming before me like a UFO that had dropped out of the sky, white clouds drifting upwards, glowing eerily in the halogen lights. I’d climb into my white overalls and wellies, feeling like the sperm in the Woody Allen film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, pull the hairnet tight over my head and apply some alcohol rub. The latter was easily the most fascinating aspect of the job: get too close, inhale too deeply and the strip lighting overhead grew briefly, if brilliantly, bright and my heartbeat would fill my head. Then I’d trudge towards the gigantic fridge, where the conveyer belts ran on an endless loop and huge bins of salad sailed by like a low-rent Generation Game. The strip lighting that bloomed with alcohol rub made everyone look gnarled and zombie-like and cruel. Features washed out, eyes glinting like cheap glass; smiles became grimaces, a cheery wink an indication of impending evil. Admittedly, I was seventeen and sleepless, but it wasn’t just my imagination that was making ghouls of the workforce. I did that for a year and the thing that stays with me the most isn’t the sheer inanity of the tasks I was asked to do or even the chemical rub: it was the piped music that came in through the refrigerated walls. Alanis Morissette’s ‘Jagged Little Pill’. It had just been released and what was worse than hearing it over and over again was only just being able to make it out and then it got lost in the drone of heavy machinery. In reality none of us had a clue what we were doing, but the salad would slow in front of us on the conveyor and we’d toss it and then send it on its way to who knows where. I’d imagine people unpacking their lunch and biting into their sandwiches across the country, never giving a thought to the aimless shuffling of salad leaves by drones like me on quiet nights in the Hampshire countryside. You couldn’t really talk to anyone unless you were willing to shout so I’d get lost in myself, just thinking of elaborate ways to entertain myself. At first, I pretended to the woman who did the coat checks that I had a mental disorder and I always had to wear two of everything. So I started off by wearing a watch on each wrist and slowly added bits and pieces until, by the end of it, I was wearing two pairs of trousers and two coats. On reflection, I might have taken it too far, but that’s where I went when I got lost in my thoughts. All there was to do was think, reflect on where you were, how you had got there and how you could get out. I’d just think and think, until it was five in the morning and the day was reaching in and I made my weary way home, the bike’s spinning wheels beneath me.

When I finally got out it was on my own terms, even if I was wearing three layers of clothes. Unlike in my first job from which I’d been fired, aged thirteen, for my own good. At £ 2 an hour I’d been cleaning the bins and machinery in a plastic mouldings factory. The sun used to come in through the ventilation grills in the ceiling, as did the rain that collected in gleaming, oily puddles on the floor. Years later I’d see the Alien movie and recognize the interior of the Nostromo, there among the greasy steel moulds and unmoving machines that bent plastic to their will. I’d run a rag carelessly along them, the only movement among the stillness, a strange, and in retrospect, dangerous and illegal idyll.

∗ ∗ ∗

Once I’d escaped the sleepy, dulling routines of Whitchurch, and Peter and I were living together, just starting to feel our way with the band, my grip on money loosened. I remember the day the Giro came we’d go mad. Suddenly we’d be dining like kings on oysters and champagne for twenty-four hours, and I recall once taking tea at an upmarket tea room, all porcelain and sponge cake and cucumber sandwiches without crusts. Peter had looked at his watch and said, ‘We’re late, come on. We must go. ’ And, at that, he stabbed his cigarette out in his tea, took a final sip, and then upped and left, no doubt whisking me along to our next money-burning appointment. To me, that was just devastatingly cool. Then, when all the benefit money was gone, we’d slum it for a fortnight. It’d be back to minesweeping drinks in Camden. I don’t know how we didn’t go completely mad when we first made any real money. I think, on my part, it simply came down to base avarice. Peter used to joke about how much I loved my DVD collection. So, when I first had some spare cash, I bought a computer that played DVDs, and a new suit, and then dived straight into another shop for a Fawlty Towers box set and some David Niven films, too.

The importance of those old British films to me shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve only ever written songs about escape – I don’t write about the here and now, I want to be transported, and to take people with me to some fantastical place – and that’s what cinema has always represented to me. Peter Sellers, the inimitable David Niven, Sir Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, they all knew how to take me away. To a generation, Alec Guinness is the righteous knight at the heart of Star Wars, but to me he’s the ultimate comic actor and chameleon: the D’Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the shadowy villain in The Ladykillers. There’s something about him, something so quintessentially English. It’s strange to think that a leading man these days is rarely out of his twenties and they were all pushing on into their late forties. Some would say change is for the better, but I’m not sure I’d agree.

All of those actors were role models but David Niven stands out because, when I watched his films, I couldn’t help but see my grandfather on the screen. They looked the same to me, sounded the same, carried themselves in the same way, so much so that, when I was little I truly thought Niven and my granddad might be the same man. I found Niven’s autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon, in a charity shop when I was living in the Albion Rooms, sharing a basement with Peter, and it became a treasured possession, taking pride of place in our one big room with a mattress on the floor, and I’d sit there, reading it by candlelight. The whole book is charming: even when he’s talking about blundering into his first sexual experiences, the death of his father, his friendship with a prostitute, he has a certain grace. He was a noble and dignified gent, a symbol for me of a lost art, a lost way of being, a lost Englishness. Like Niven, the Marx Brothers have the power to make me feel momentarily elated. They found the goodness in things, too. When my glass is half empty, when I’m trying my damnedest to see the light and failing, I can watch Niven come up that beach in A Matter of Life and Death or watch the Marx Brothers horse around in Animal Crackers and feel their rare magic jolt me back to life. Peter liked the Marx Brothers, too, and we’d watch their films on the bus, to help us forget the relentless miles slipping by under our prone bodies.

DVDs, then, were my first vice with Peter, the first thing I splurged money on, and it seems strange to me now that it took me a while to splash out on a nice guitar. I remember the day I did, however. Peter and I went down to Vintage & Rare, the pair of us as pleased as punch and practically glowing with pride, both very naï ve. The proprietor must have seen us coming, because he was standing behind the counter rubbing his hands together with glee. I bought my Melody Maker, which I still use, and Peter bought the Epiphone Coronet, which I believe his father impounded for reasons that still escape me.

Even though he’d ultimately kick my door in and try to steal my stuff, Peter gave me security and confidence to go out and do that, to believe that I could go out on a limb, even in prosaic, financial matters. When we were really firing on all cylinders and were together then it really felt like no one could touch us, and that nothing else mattered. As much as I try to deflect it, play it down and be English about it, there was a very powerful romance and beauty to our friendship. At the beginning it was pure and uncomplicated; there was a chemistry. Together we were a complete unit, in each other’s company quite different from how we were with other people. I can sit here as the shadows get longer and be diffident about it until the sun comes up again tomorrow morning, but the fact is that if that dynamic between us hadn’t existed none of this would have happened, I wouldn’t be lamenting what I lost – what we both lost – I wouldn’t be writing it all down. When we’re together and we can forget about bullshit, we become two old souls, kindred spirits in seclusion.

∗ ∗ ∗

Enough of lamenting what we’d lost, though. When we signed to Rough Trade, it was all just beginning, and before we’d had a chance to realize what was happening, The Libertines were on the cover of the NME. The new deal with Rough Trade had brought us a new family, not least in the shape of our press officer, Tony the Tiger, a lovely man whose mum knew him better as Tony Lincoln, a man who always wore a backpack, even with a suit. I found that charming. He made an effort to take us aside just before our NME cover photo was due, when the single was getting played on radio stations, and he said, in the nicest possible way, ‘You do you know, after this Wednesday, that things are going to be very different, don’t you? As soon as this cover comes out you’re going to be very, very famous. I’ve seen this before, so just prepare yourselves. ’

How did we prepare ourselves? You can get the NME in the West End on a Tuesday, a day before it gets sent around the country, so, come Tuesday, Peter and I reconvene at home in Bethnal Green, suited, booted, sunglasses, acting absurdly cool, and take the Tube to Tottenham Court Road station. Sure enough, there we are, on the front cover, on display on a little news-stand opposite the Astoria. So we ask for a couple of copies, give a knowing nod to the woman behind the counter and then … nothing. Peter very slowly takes the change from her hand and tries to meet her eye, and she just smiles at us and moves on to the next customer. We spent all day walking around clutching copies of the NME, cover out, and nothing happened that day, or that week, not a sausage. It was a fallacy, a funny one, but a fallacy nevertheless.

I’m not quite sure what we were expecting, but, when we broke, we broke big and we broke quickly. We stepped up to the plate and swung, as an American fellow told me as we stepped off stage at the Astoria, the very place, only months before, we’d been to buy the NME. We were supporting The Vines; it was meant to be their first headline show at the venue, but they pulled out and we got top billing by default. That’s when I realized that we were breaking – no one, but no one, gave their tickets back, and as we stepped out it was if they were there to see us. Even the balcony was a mass of adoring silhouettes. We stepped up to the plate and swung. These are the inescapable moments.

All of a sudden, we were recording our first single for Rough Trade with Bernard Butler. Initially, Peter was in thrall to Bernard: he placed him on a pedestal in many ways. As a young man Peter was an NME boy, a letter writer, and Bernard was the cover star, someone who, as part of Suede, helped change the musical landscape for a while. I remember Rough Trade brought him along and he was wearing his Converse and had a big parka on; he was looking very Bernard Butler, which endeared him to me. I sometimes want people to look and act like my perception of them, like the picture I hold of them in my head. When I meet people, fans who stop me for a photo in the street or people who just want to say hello, I always hope that I come away and leave with them the impression they’d hoped for. So, in one way, Bernard was the man we hoped he’d be, quite a player, amazing style. He was also very, very methodical and slightly schoolmasterly in his production approach, which I also found charming. He was like some cool, floppy-haired teacher whose lesson you always secretly looked forward to. And we needed it at first, that hands-on approach, making sure all the boxes were ticked.

Later on, we also worked with Bernard to record ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ and he and Peter got on less well. I think Peter was getting tired of the prescriptive approach: it was only when Peter felt that he’d outgrown that way of doing things that it all turned a bit nasty. Strangely enough, that was exactly the same time as all the crack and the brown business started happening. The constant niggling of my nerves ensured that I never fully enjoyed the studio, as I was always so nervous as to what the results of our labours might be. Somehow, in that second session, we managed to pull it all together, and get everything done with Bernard that we were meant to, thanks mainly to Bernard playing guitar parts and doing backing on the songs that Peter hadn’t showed up to finish. We were having to edit together one or two particularly bad vocal takes, stitching things together and doctoring it afterwards, putting in more work than we really should have had to. But what could we do? During those sessions, Peter wasn’t playing ball at all really. At one point he stopped coming to the studio altogether. We’d show up at two in the afternoon and stay until about two in the morning and our eyes would occasionally drift towards the door, but he rarely walked through it during that fortnight we spent there.

Mick Jones, who produced Up The Bracket, and also our second album, The Libertines, was instantly one of the boys when he worked with us, much more a part of the gang. Everyone took to him. He was a musical hero to the other guys, but I genuinely didn’t know that much about the music he’d made. I mean, I’m the guy who told him to think about changing the mix on ‘Guns Of Brixton’ because I thought it was his new stuff and needed tweaking. I suggested he get rid of the ‘poing’ noise. To his credit he let it go, but I thought the rest of the band might jump me. At the end of each day’s session, he’d give us a crash course in The Clash. We’d all put our feet up after recording, someone would nip out to the supermarket and grab some beers and they’d talk me through the catalogue, a few punk pointers here and there. I really enjoyed it. My enduring memory of a lot of those sessions is looking through the glass and Mick taking it all very seriously sitting there with his pen and pad and a huge joint on the go – either that, or doing his famous dance. Both are reassuring images to me.

∗ ∗ ∗

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That first single, the double A side of ‘What A Waster’ and ‘I Get Along’, came out in June 2002, and in August we played the Reading Festival for the first time. We were the opening band on the Evening Session Stage, and it felt like a dream, a bad dream, the ones where you’re naked in front of a crowd and there’s nothing you can do about it. It was the wrong place at the wrong time, around midday and swelteringly hot, and even from the wings you could see that the tent was packed. We were in our ascendancy and the drunk blokes and the girls on their shoulders chanting our name only served to confirm that. It was the first time that my family had come en masse to see me, too, so I was jumpy, doubly on edge with the pressure of the show and my mum and dad being among the expectant faces out front. So we started, and, as in most cases when we were a bit on edge, we just threw ourselves into it, and suddenly it all felt like it was clicking into place and I began to enjoy the fact that it was summer time and here we were on the Reading stage and it was packed out for us. And then without warning our backline went down. I’m not sure if my amp blew up or not, but it gave up the ghost with something that sounded like a sigh. We were two songs in, I’d just started windmilling the arms, giving it some oomph, and then nothing. So we just had to stop and wait while this tech called Barry changed the amp for the spare that didn’t really work. And I literally didn’t know what to do. It was one of my biggest nightmares, standing there silently in front of the crowd. They were looking at us and I was looking right back at them, pacing around like an expectant father. We didn’t really have the confidence, and hadn’t learnt that level of professional showmanship to start a singalong, or make a joke. That was something we’d all learn later on. The seconds ticked by like hours. A terrible cliché, but true, when there are thousands of disgruntled punters staring at you, and you know your dad’s out in the middle of them, quite probably tut-tutting to himself. In reality, we only stopped for about five minutes, but that’s still a chunk of a forty-minute set and, to make up for it, we came back on with added vigour, which led to extra buffeting between me and Peter. We were really running at each other, crashing into each other mid-stage, giving the mic stand hell. Anything was allowed, really, but the main thing was to avoid the heads of the guitar. We were thundering through ‘I Get Along’, buoyed up by our collective energy, giving it everything we had, colliding like particles, launching ourselves into orbit and banging into each other in the middle. Peter would come charging in, and I’d sort of brace myself, but not too much, because you didn’t want it to be too staged, you wanted to keep the genuine beauty and flow going and John, sensibly, stayed out of the way while all this was going on. Stoic and still and very handsome, that’s what you need in a bass player, I think. Towards the song’s climax, we ran into each other at the side of the stage, bounced together against what had previously appeared to be a wall, and then disappeared through it out of sight as the canvas gave way. And that was it, goodnight and good luck. Peter managed to haul himself back onto the lip of the stage, which made my father angry – I think he suspected some kind of bullying in the band, but in reality it was just part of our thing. I’m surprised we didn’t fall off stage more, now that I think about it. But the fall felt like redemption. We’d managed to pull it back from the brink, to get past the potential humiliation, nerves and the confusion and to overcome, to conquer the audience in our own special way.

Now the events of that day seem fatefully funny, almost like a Marx Brothers’ sketch, though I won’t deny that falling off the side of the stage was a little bit embarrassing, especially as I was sort of semi-throttled by a guitar lead around my neck as I rolled over the edge, like a condemned man swinging down through the trapdoor. The audience didn’t get to see that bit, thankfully; they just saw this rather extraordinary stage exit. We’d fired them up and they were riotous by all accounts.

The next gig didn’t go so well. We’d travelled up to Leeds to play the second leg of the festival. Peter kicked me up the arse on stage and we ended up coming to blows over it. His comedy kick wasn’t a new thing, and it always wound me up. It wasn’t the physical pain – there wasn’t really any – it was more the humiliation. When you’re giving your heart to a melody and you believe you’re really connecting with something spiritual, tuning into something higher … then you hear the crowd laugh and you turn around to see Peter doing a Charlie Chaplin kick up your bum, it’s a little bit insulting.

Now, I firmly believe there is a time and a place for Charlie Chaplin, but it’s not on the stage at Leeds in the middle of a Libertines set. Charlie Chaplin has always been one of my heroes. I had a copy of Modern Times on video when I was nineteen, but I really fell in love with him a few years later. I was on tour and Rotterdam had offered up its usual vices and found me wanting. I stood next to the local promoter and he held my gaze as he detailed precisely how, between them, the Luftwaffe and the RAF had levelled the city during the Second World War. I imagined the bombs falling, the plumes of steaming water rising up in the bay, wood cracking in the heat, shots being exchanged. Later, I was rolling drunkenly around the town with this at the back of my mind when I spotted an innocuous looking door in an alleyway. I wish I could tell you that it led me to Narnia, but, to me, it was better than meeting a talking lion. The blackboard above the door simply said ‘Chaplin’ and, as I pushed my way into the darkness, the room fell back to reveal a cinema screen, a full orchestra and Modern Times about to start. I sat there in the blackness as Rotterdam disappeared from my thoughts and Chaplin wove his unique magic, the rising swell of the orchestra’s strings and brass carrying me away. I was instantly and absolutely hooked, floating happily in another universe, another time. Charlie Chaplin was the first Englishman to conquer the world and he did it with love. I heard a story that in Cuba in the 1960s they erected a screen in a backwater town square and showed Modern Times to people who had never seen a moving image before. They had no idea who he was and everyone, different generations together, was dumbfounded by it, by him. I once made a girlfriend watch The Great Dictator and she resisted at first, but was soon drawn in, inching towards the edge of the sofa as if she were going to reach out and touch the screen. It’s simple beauty reaching out across the years and the final speech echoing down the ages. Even Hitler got Chaplin; even he was entranced by Chaplin’s innate goodness – and, by coincidence, they were born only days apart. It means a lot to me that one generation of my family lived in Lambeth the same time as Chaplin did, though I’m sure they never passed in the street or saw each other in the shops. It’s enough for me to know they shared the same space. They’re funny things, heroes. I have very few. I guess the only one still alive is Lou Reed, now that Beryl Reid and Oliver Reed have shuffled off their mortal coils …

∗ ∗ ∗

But I digress. I think that day in Leeds, after Reading’s triumphant exit stage left, I was coming down from a mountain of coke and what amounted to a great victory for us, one of the first. Peter was elated about what a fine show we’d done, but I felt angry, aggrieved and down. Maybe Peter hadn’t meant any harm, and it is likely I was volatile and oversensitive that afternoon and that I was letting the hangover and the comedown get the better of me. I didn’t let go of my anger about the kick, probably hammed it up a bit for the onlookers’ benefit, in fact, and he began to get upset that I wasn’t enjoying it all like I should have been until, without thinking, we lunged for each other, and Gary grabbed my hair and pulled my head backwards. Peter piled in with fists flailing: I got quite the clout thanks to Gary’s kind intervention. So, rather childishly, I ran away and cried a little, but it was the kind of crying you do when you’re waiting for someone to find you and ask what you’re crying about. It was just like being a kid all over again. We then had to get the same bus back to London and, after a little while, we were all friends again, but it was my fault for tainting that really. I did and I do take the blame for that.

∗ ∗ ∗

It’s funny that, even though the band was becoming all-consuming and starting to get out of control, we could still carry on in our same old ways. One moment that particularly stands out is an ill-considered trip to France, a fool’s errand into the night. The Formule 1 chain of hotels is, I think I can say without fear of a lawyer landing on me, less than salubrious. If you’ve yet to experience the delights of this ever-expanding chain, the rooms are moulded out of one big plastic frame, the sink and the beds an integral part of the actual wall. I imagine that, once you’ve taken the bedding out, you can clean the whole thing in one go with a high-powered hose, like a festival toilet. Innovative, yes, but it felt to me as if we’d been banged up again. The bunk beds came with plastic mattresses that scratched at your skin with every turn. I looked across at Peter and his friend La. I wasn’t sure what we were doing there, and even less certain about La’s part in things. La liked brown, too; he was one of Peter’s shadier companions, and his being there made me feel even itchier than the mattress did. A white hotel room made of plastic, and two heroin smokers in a restricted space: who doesn’t love a road trip?

We were on our way to record a session in Nantes for two French guys we’d met in a bar in London. Our first album was out and making some waves, so I suppose we can blame the booze we’d been drinking for agreeing to work with two Frenchman we’d never set eyes on before. They were quite provocative as I recall, telling us that we thought we were really big news but that we should go to France and record something real with them, for a small label they owned. Peter and I kept saying yes to everything – it’s like we wanted to star in our own unbelievable sitcom or farce – so we ended up in a freezing barn on the outskirts of Nantes that was supposedly doubling as a studio. La, it transpired, was meant to be producing the sessions – the same La who’d never produced a record in his life; but there was always a job for someone who’s carrying brown around.

We did four songs out there. I remember really not wanting to go, as I didn’t have a passport at the time and I was happy in London with my then girlfriend, quietly enjoying the first real fruits of our labour with our debut album. But Peter really laid it on, saying that if I didn’t go along then he’d leave the band and that would be it. I was forced to cross the Channel using my sister’s passport, so I had to sit in the back of the car with my hair in my face pretending to be asleep as we got on the ferry, just so that we could go to a derelict barn to record songs for two men we didn’t even know. We arrived on the Continent and snow was falling thickly. It was blowing a miserable gale and it didn’t even feel like an adventure. It just felt dumb. A few years down the line, the song ‘Narcissist’ from those sessions surfaced on our second album, but that could quite have easily been recorded at home in London, in a room where the windows worked and the snow didn’t get in. The other songs have since been posted online, but they were never really released. We never made things easy for ourselves. I’ve been told since that’s part of our charm.

∗ ∗ ∗

In the grand scheme of things, a band’s a speck. It’s nothing. But it’s also chaos, excitement and expectation. We were on an upward trajectory, but you can’t properly feel it at the time. In a way, I wish we had experienced that thrill, the thrill of the booster rockets falling away, knowing that this was the upside and the downside was coming. You’re getting more popular, more and more people are coming to the shows, but you’ve no idea when you might level out, what that feels like, when you reach the apex of your flight and the only way to go is back down. I feel pressure oppressively and, even then, I was beginning to feel a bit like Atlas with the world on his shoulders, trying to keep my dreams alive.

TWO Plan A

TWO  Plan A