FOUR  Can’t Stand Me Now

Another year – 2003 – another NME Awards. This time around they’ve moved to the Hammersmith Palais, the venue that inspired one of The Clash’s greatest songs, a venue that’s now been turned into luxury flats – London’s good at papering over its own history. We were nominated for Best Newcomer, and I remember being very nervous, even though we’d been told that we’d won already. I knew we had the award in the bag, but, typically, a part of me was telling myself, No, they’re just saying that so we’ll turn up, we haven’t really won. Sometimes I’d give anything for my nerves to take a back seat. All the band were there, as well as Irish Paul, who was sitting across from me dressed in military garb. And, to stop my aforementioned nerves having their way with me completely, I was getting very drunk. There were silver buckets filled with booze in the middle of all the tables, which we were doing a good job of emptying, and I remember feeling so proud and scared when our award was announced. We walked up to the stage and, just as we were stepping on to it, Peter turned round and gave me a mocking, horrified look and said, ‘What are you wearing? ’

I had a leather jacket over the top of my suit, which, due to a combination of nerves and booze, I hadn’t thought to take off. It was a terrible moment: my dreams were coming true, and being dashed by Peter in exactly the same instant. I still find it hard to say how I felt, but it was crushing, as if he’d just leant over and gobbed in my fucking coffee. I thought he must have done it simply to be nasty and it just totally floored me. While we were getting the award all I felt was twitchy and very self-conscious.

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Regardless of those circumstances, I loved that leather jacket. It was a motorbike jacket that my dad had owned since he was the age I am now, and which at some point along the line he’d managed to dye black from its original red. When we were young my sister wore it to school and then, when she’d had her fill, I inherited it. My dad also owned a guitar, but that I wasn’t allowed to touch. It was a prized thing that he didn’t want anyone breaking; he didn’t like us touching his stuff generally. I understand his attitude, now. Years later I used to be skittish when we were playing at the Albion Rooms and people came careering towards one of my guitars: who wants to own a broken guitar? Even so, when I was a kid I’d still sneak downstairs at night, when the house was quiet and the others were asleep, and I’d practise ‘riffs’. I’d feel my way around songs I liked, trying to work out bridges and how the music flowed. I’d practise Nirvana songs: they were pretty simple in their setup and a good place to start, and I bought a Hendrix Made Easy guitar book, which was very weird. In it, all his songs were stripped back to their most basic form, but the thing with Hendrix is that you don’t want it to be easy. His songs don’t work without his flair, so they just sounded alien and obtuse.

It took me ages to learn to play, much longer than it takes the average person. I taught myself, made myself do it, even though it yielded so little for so long. I had some friends who’d been at it and they were suddenly fluid in a week, bloody junior Eddie Van Halens all of them. Someone once asked me how long it took me to learn, and, without being pat in my response, I told them that I still was learning – I still am. Learning to play guitar filled the space that had grown inside me. I couldn’t play enough.

I wasn’t just a slow learner at the guitar; girls eluded me, too. My friends were learning fast by the time they were thirteen, but my shyness could be crippling, and I was quite the oddball, the outsider. I had no emotional intelligence whatsoever. I’m not sure if that came from my parents’ divorce, but it took me years to bloom, to come into myself. One of my half-brothers had a similar thing, but with a very different upbringing, so it could be that it was a genetic thing. I had a fragility about me that made everything very difficult, but then a liberal mother, and a new home with an extension, opened the world up for me. When my mother moved back to Whitchurch from the communes it was with her new man, a man who more or less became my stepdad. Their liberal attitude (my mother once impressed my mates by showing one of them how to skin up) combined with a wood-and-glass conservatory that they had built on to the back of the house, suddenly meant I could spend hours with my friends, drinking and smoking dope and playing guitar. This helped my social life no end, even made me cool in some people’s eyes, and, all the while, I was practising on her new man’s guitars. He didn’t mind me playing them, and even started to give me some pointers. He was also very encouraging about my playing and about my ambition to get out of town and see the world, to find myself. I’m very indebted to him for that still. I think back now to those summers and my homes either on my dad’s estate or in the English countryside with my mother and her friends and I know my parents did the best they could with my sister and me, but we’d both fled a long time before we actually left.

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Back to the jacket, though. Some triple-faced rat nicked it when we were playing a gig in Leeds. Every time I go to Leeds to play now there’s a rumour: I know someone who knows someone who’s got your jacket. It just drives me potty. What I want to say is ‘Fuck off’, but I desperately want the jacket back. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a family heirloom. The first few times I was up there and looking for it, I ended up on a stupid wild-goose chase, an utter waste of my time. I’m still really angry about it, which is hardly likely to help my cause or ensure I’ll see my jacket any time soon.

It was strange, the cult of The Libertines: it was romance and poetry, a vehicle for this ragtag gang with guitars, something that people often desperately wanted to be a part of. We were the kind of band who let people in. We wanted to pull those barriers down between them and us, and we engaged with our fans, in a true, direct, way, long before such engagement – using the internet and social media – became a tool of the record industry. And I’m not sure if we invited it, or deserved it, but people did take our stuff. It’s sad, in a way, but it wasn’t ever malicious. They wanted mementos, things like our mobile phones, and really mundane objects: little bits of paper, items of clothing, foreign coins, plectrums, packs of guitar strings; sometimes they took the food on our rider. I enjoyed their enthusiasm, but it wore thin and we quickly realized that there comes a point where there has to be some order. Suddenly we’re hungry and we can’t make phone calls. Most bands would have thrown their hangers-on out on their ear, but we were trying to prove a point, often haplessly as it turned out.

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It had been quite the turbulent year when we returned to the NME Awards in 2004. That might explain why we were so drunk. However, by then it seemed as if we were always drunk so the reasons behind it were pretty hard to fathom. We were to play ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ that night, but the reason we sent a ripple through the room was that Peter and I didn’t accept our Best British Band award by spouting platitudes or gurning happily into the cameras. Instead, we recited Siegfried Sassoon’s war poem, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, which had a bit more impact than the usual monkeys thanking their labels, or saying, ‘Cheers, yeah’, and punching the air.

My relationship with that poem and the way we read it that night began, really, when I was at school, and studying war poetry. Everyone had to read a poem and my nerves were such that, in order to read the passage without having to deal with myself, I played a backing tune then just half sang the words over it instead. It was sort of hillbilly style, and it was actually quite effective; if it sounded comic, then it was only the comedy of nervousness, and it stuck with me. I kept reciting the poem like that for years, and I taught it to Peter. Sometimes when we were warming up we’d play it, just the two of us together.

At the NME Awards, however, even the old routine could not act as a sticking plaster over our differences. There was a lot of tension between us because that time was the beginning of us really falling apart. Peter had wanted to hide in the wings and then bounce out on to the stage, to make a whole ‘Where’s Peter? ’ joke to make light of his increasing absences that year. That was what I was prepared for but then he just strolled out on stage and spontaneously started to recite the first line. So I followed with the second and we went from there. I was annoyed at the time, but in retrospect it made sense to me. It’s an incredible poem and when we got the final stanza you could see people at the front really listening, eyes wide open:

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye,   Who cheer when soldier lads march by,   Sneak home and pray you’ll never know,   The hell where youth and laughter go.

It caused a stir when we did it, and in the papers the next day, but really it highlighted how incidental and minute what we were actually doing was in the grand scheme of things. And how all of the bullshit, the big balloon of music industry egos, can be burst with a sliver of truth. Then we just walked off, and I’m pleased that we did: it was impossible to follow.

I’m glad it resonated. It was a really important time and place to remember war and sacrifice. Time set aside for remembrance is important, but I think it’s much more powerful to recall things like that out of context – it shouldn’t just be boxed up and brought out once a year, it should be part of the everyday consciousness. Plus, at those awards, you’re in a room full of young men who have no idea what it would’ve been like to have been that age and in the trenches. It had never occurred to them: they lived in the moment, thought they were the moment, and were happy to sit there and pat themselves on the back while getting wrecked on free Monkey Shoulder whisky.

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Our world may have been falling apart, but even that provided inescapable moments. I’ll never forget Peter fleeing the stage when we’d sold out three nights at the Brixton Academy. We were playing at a good tilt but our much-touted camaraderie was a sham that night, and underneath we were fighting, fucking it up. Peter and I exchanged glances and then he just took off running. Later he’d tell me that I looked at him funny, and that might have been true, but not enough to cause him to take off into the streets of south London. Our two bodyguards, twin brothers Jeff and Michael, were there in the wings. They’d worked with Biohazard for a while and it showed. Jeff looked a bit like Popeye’s Bluto, which I always found quite reassuring for some reason, and they were both stacked, hugely muscular, massive and wide, both tattooed from their necks to their shins. They were from Oxford, and they were very gentlemanly, very proud to be English, a real oasis of calm backstage, sipping their tea. I think their dad is from Africa and their mum’s a lovely little Geordie lady who I’ve met, and they were terrifyingly good at their jobs. They went with me to Dirty Pretty Things for a while, mainly because I liked having them around.

Jeff and Michael were a great wall between Peter and the world, such an immediate deterrent that usually people didn’t even try to get close. They were incredibly quick, too: more than once someone lunged for Peter (and I include myself in that, but they didn’t try and stop me, thankfully; it would have been like seeing a big dog wrestle a chew-toy), and on one occasion when somebody had a halfhearted go at him, one of the brothers just shot out this mighty fist and, though it was genuinely a blur, it seemed to land almost gently, more like a push, and this guy just went up in the air and over like a well-struck skittle. It was incredible.

So Peter was running headlong into the backstreets of Brixton, all churning legs and porkpie hat, and his security was chasing after him, which must have dazed passers-by, like seeing lights in the sky you can’t explain. I’ve no idea where Peter was going, I doubt he did either, and they rounded a corner and some skanky crackhead, who must have thought Peter had robbed a shop, stuck his foot out, to try to trip Jeff up – honour among thieves and all that – and Jeff, without breaking his stride, gave him a little body check and bounced him off about three walls. I bet he didn’t know what hit him. Literally. It was strange, though: there was no malice or premeditation. Jeff was just protecting his charge. In Peter’s case there was a lot of protecting to do.

While Jeff and Peter were doing circuits of south London’s least salubrious neighbourhood and the crackhead was rolling around in the gutter, we, the remaining Libertines, were debating going back on stage. We were getting increasingly used to making shitty, agonizing decisions such as whether to go back on stage a man down or not. Even if he had run off, and was disappearing more and more, Peter was still an integral part of the band. Eventually, we decided to get it together and go back on, reasoning that the gig was sold out and that, until Peter scarpered, we were having a suitable degree of fun. Back on stage, we were playing the songs, hoping the audience was appreciating what we were doing, and how difficult it must have been for us, and suddenly there was this big roar. We were made up. Then I turn around and Peter’s back on stage. He must have tired himself out running – we were hardly in our prime physically – then heard over Jeff’s radio that we were about to go back on and decided that he wanted to be there, too. I was pretty crestfallen if I’m honest. There we were, trying to hold it all together, maintain what little dignity The Libertines had left, and the biggest cheer of the night is Peter deigning to come back and play with us. Someone told me later that they thought it was funny, but it wasn’t funny.

When Peter disappeared, most times we bore the brunt of it, were blamed as if we’d tied him up and locked him in his bunk, as if we were the ones who wouldn’t let him join us on stage. Later, I’d insist he left the band for a while in a wretched attempt to save us, but before then we’d have to troop on without him, guessing at where he might be. John and Gary locked into place, me out at the front alone. We got chased out of one gig in Spain because we were a man light. By that stage in the band, we’d factored in that this might happen, and we’d employed a guitar tech who we knew could play and we told him to learn a few of the songs. I think our survival instincts were kicking in. Nick was from Clacton-on-Sea, and he was very much a Clacton-on-Sea boy. Fish and chips and pills; pills and fish and chips. We rather liked him. Then, sure enough, Peter didn’t come and I remember being petrified going round Spain. I felt as if I was carrying the weight of the world as we travelled through these little towns, and then came that show where they literally chased us into the street. The new guitar player could only play six songs, and I was too scared to perform up there on my own – it just wasn’t an option – and so the crowd began to boo us. We left the stage, were packing up to leave, and there was what pretty much amounted to a lynch mob waiting for us after the gig out at the back of the venue. They looked mad as hell, ready for serious violence, and I had to pacify them – my heart beating out of my chest – by playing our songs on an acoustic guitar standing out there in the street. They were like a football crowd, pushing up in my face, goading and shouting, until their fury began slowly to flatten out, and turn to enjoyment. It changed from being booed and chased out of the venue by a screaming, spitting mob angry at being ripped off, to the same mob telling us what a really special thing we’d done. And, when it had all calmed down, they asked us quite sincerely what we’d done to Peter, as if we’d chosen to take our life in our hands and play with a roadie in his stead. It felt like they thought that if they asked enough times I’d bring him out from behind the bus to rapturous applause, like some magician unveiling his latest trick. It was so sad: people really liked us, and the album was doing plenty of business, but during those gigs in Spain without Peter we didn’t have a future.

I never got past being terrified about being on stage in The Libertines without Peter. I needed him on stage with me, missed the physical aspect of it, the charging into each other, having that second voice, that person you could fall back on. I was just so miserable touring without him, and felt duty bound to feel that way because all I was getting, all I was seeing, were the super-fans at the front, the ones who came to fill my brain with questions before the gig. It wasn’t their fault, but they didn’t have a clue what was going on. When I got off the bus they’d be there, at the venue they’d be there, and I was scared, ashamed and guilty, when I hadn’t actually done anything. I was fighting to make it work, paper over the cracks and do the right thing by holding it together. But I would barely have stepped off the bus and someone would ask, ‘Why have you kicked Pete out? ’ You should do this and you should do that. You should give him a second chance.

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It was odd that, even though we were suffering the slings and bloody arrows, we were actually getting really good as a band around that time, and especially when Anthony Rossomando joined. I mean no disrespect to Nick, but Anthony was one of us, and it felt more like a gang again when he came along. I’d had to go to New York to find him, because we needed an American, or someone who could work in America, for our US shows. Three people showed up, two of whom were absolute fruit loops. One started crying before he’d even played; the other was a ginger chap, who said he’d do it but actually seemed reluctant even to pick up the guitar. Then he said he could only play ‘math guitar’, so I asked him to show me what math guitar was, and he started diddling around on the fretboard. I began to lose the will to live. Neither of them knew any of the songs I’d asked them to audition with; I don’t think they even knew who or what The Libertines were, so by the time Anthony came in I didn’t care.

‘You just play the song, I’m going to play the drums, ’ I said, though I can’t actually play the drums to save my life. Nevertheless, we jammed like that for a while, and I thought, This is actually working. Then Anthony switched over to play the drums and a deep friendship was born. As with any audition I’ve ever done, there was only one real contender, though I do still wonder what the other two guys are doing now.

Anthony, known to many as Stan, is tall and slender, spidery and louche, with a classic Italian American pallor. He became a good sidekick through troubled times, ever willing to defend me in my absence or contest me in my presence. He was part of the band for some pretty memorable gigs, including one with Primal Scream on the support bill in an enormous aerodrome near Sã o Paulo. Our luxury hotel in the city was an island of international money set on a building site, in its own compound, the abutting poverty kept at bay by high fences and bulldozers. We weren’t looking out of the window, though: we’d worked out from the menu that the mini-bar’s entire contents came to something like two quid, so we cleared it out in twenty minutes – it was as if we’d never seen a half-bottle of wine before. I think we failed to notice the irony that we’d been talking about the plight of the country’s poor mere moments before. Gunshots rang out all night, but we paid them no heed. We could barely even speak, so off our faces were we on the local produce. After the gig, we got back to our dressing room and some poor women had made masses of food, like a wedding spread, the centrepiece being a great tower block of sandwiches, made out of bread coloured and shaped into the Brazilian flag. And it was all a little bit dry because it had been out for a while, but because of the state we were in none of us could eat a thing; we felt so guilty about the waste, given the poverty around us, and unpatriotic, but there was nothing we could do.

I’d been to Brazil before with The Libertines, staying and playing in Rio near Copacabana Beach. I remember John attempting to cross the beach to get a hamburger – we were playing football near there, just next to the hotel – and he was about to walk over when a guy in the hamburger stall says: ‘No, no, no, they will cut your throat! ’ We thought maybe he was playing with us, these lobster-pink English boys obviously a bit out of their depth, but only for a brief moment. We caught his eye and you could see he wasn’t kidding at all. Suddenly, I felt cold, the kind of chill you can take into a hot shower and you still can’t shift.

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I can’t pretend I didn’t miss Peter, and the band was never going to feel the same, but after Anthony joined I actually managed to enjoy a few shows. I liked Glastonbury, because my mum was there and we were on one of the main stages, and we did a Forum show where Noel Gallagher came and said he liked it. I should qualify that: he was said to have been there and liked it, but I grabbed on to that with both hands, regardless. It helped me to realize that if the crowd are chanting things like ‘We want Pete’ it helps not to get miserable and feel ashamed, as if it’s your fault Peter’s not there. I wasn’t the one who’d let them down. And, later on, people knew what they were getting when they bought the tickets. Why come if it isn’t what you want to see? It made no sense. Fair enough, if you were expecting Jefferson Airplane and you got us. I’d have started chanting then, too, and probably rounded up my own lynch mob and chased myself out into the street. Facing a crowd shouting ‘We want Pete’ made being on stage an uncomfortable, sometimes horrific place to be. Given that I was trying to hold things together for the fans, it was becoming increasingly hard not to think, Why am I bothering? I wanted Pete, too. Yet our options were narrowing until there seemed only one way out.

FOUR Can’t Stand Me Now

FOUR  Can’t Stand Me Now