FIVE  Montmartre

I was standing in Montmartre, underneath the huge white dome of the Sacré -Coeur basilica, and I was telling Peter I didn’t want him to come and play with us. I gazed over Paris, over some of the most beautiful architecture I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I could feel that I was breaking my own heart. From what I could hear over the phone, Peter’s heart was breaking, too. He was in Kentish Town, throwing himself at passing cabs and into shop windows, just smashing himself up. How had it got to this? I reflected. Peter had failed to turn up for the tour and then there was a will-he-won’t-he moment, but in the end we’d made the decision that, for his own sake and ours, at least in the short term, he needed to be out of the band. Something died for me on the hill of Montmartre that day, though it hasn’t destroyed my love of Paris, or of France. After visiting the Vendé e with my grandparents as a kid, I returned to France at fourteen, ostensibly as an exchange student to learn the language, though it was the thought of getting off with French girls that was driving me at the time. I was a bundle of hormones cased in a prickly skin.

The next time I crossed the Channel – my third ever trip to France – I found myself in Paris, and in Montmartre, for the first time. I’d had an eventful first night in the City of Lights; now, on my second, I was preparing to bed down in the street. I’d run out of money and had nowhere to go, so I made myself into a ball in a futile attempt to ward off the freezing night. Above me Sacré -Coeur in all its luminescent glory, below me the lights of downtown Paris. All I could hear was the sound of my teeth chattering and the whistling of a wind best described as cruel, and thought that now I’d been down and out in Paris and London I could justifiably claim one point of reference with George Orwell. It was cold comfort at best, and I began to picture Rose’s Café, a greasy spoon on Bermondsey High Street, where the lights glowed warmly and the door tinkled whenever it was opened. I could smell the bacon and feel a mug of tea in my hands as I opened one eye and pulled my coat tightly around myself. Paris was still there, standing defiantly before me, reaching towards the horizon. I sat up and shivered and lit my last cigarette. I felt like I was out there alone against the universe, but somehow I felt safe.

I’d been working in the Haymarket Theatre as an usher, sleeping on other people’s floors and occasionally out on the streets. It’s the lowest feeling, getting to the end of the day and having absolutely nowhere to go. No mates to crash out with and you can’t go back to your parents because that means you’re a complete and utter failure. I remember one night near Hoxton Square attempting to bed down behind some bins, though bedding down without an actual bed is a bit of an anomaly. The Eurostar had just begun operating out of London and they’d been giving away promotional tickets in the Evening Standard. Someone I worked with at the Haymarket had won a pair and offered them to me, and my thinking was, Well, I’m homeless here; I may as well be homeless there instead. I took my friend Phil, scraping together enough money for one night in a hotel even though we were staying in Paris for two. The hotel room provided a single bed for the two of us, but then I met a girl and Phil didn’t. I suggested to him that he give up the bed for the night so that my new female friend could stay – a brilliant idea to my mind, though the look Phil gave me suggested he thought otherwise. We had a minor stand-off at the top of the stairs and then my new friend and I took off on an adventure. I can still see us with our hands linked running into the Parisian night. I’m nothing if not a slightly cliché d romantic, even in retrospect.

That night moved quickly, a brilliant blur. We met dozens of people and, as everyone else faded away, she said she wouldn’t give herself to me without protection – which only added to my illusion that I was playing a part on a grand Parisian film set and my life was a movie. Off we went, two would-be lovers with no money trying to blag a free condom. I’ve touted lone cigarettes a hundred times, but trying to raise a prophylactic is a whole other ball game, if you’ll excuse the pun. Eventually, after a fruitless search, she decided to go home and I walked with her to an alien neighbourhood. It was late as she slipped through the door and suddenly there was a lot of shouting coming through the walls, absolute uproar, and I heard heavy footfalls coming down towards me. I turned and ran hard down the street, did a quick left and right and stood panting in an alleyway trying to stop my heart hammering, worried that it would somehow be heard by my pursuers. There was a sliver of starlight above me visible through the buildings and when I stepped back into the small, cobbled street I realized I was hopelessly lost.

I took off in a randomly selected direction, wandering around trying to find my bearings, and I was stealing fruit from outside a corner shop when I reached around into my pocket and discovered I’d lost my passport. My stomach flipped over and I dropped to my knees and squatted there, wishing myself home, wishing that such a place even existed. After a moment, I got up again and began to try to retrace my steps. I figured out roughly where I was, and decided to head for the hot-air risers from the Metro, where all the city’s tramps congregate to sleep. There I met a French American, a hulking black guy who was truly out there. I was impressionable and young and open to the idea of meeting new people, new characters, and he was straight out of Full Metal Jacket. He kept saying things like, ‘They’re just sleeping out here, it’s like ‘Nam! ’ and I was entranced, but still had the deeply niggling fear about my passport and had no idea where Phil was either. Then, huddled in the warm, musty air stream, I remembered a park that I’d found absurdly romantic, where the girl and I had sat on a bench kissing. Somehow, I made my way back to it, but the quiet of the place had been shattered. The park was filled with raucous Algerian teenagers, who were shouting and hitting each other, and couldn’t have been more intimidating to a drunk, confused Englishman. As if on cue, the heavens opened and my trainers, which I’d stolen from a lifeguard at the ponds on Hampstead Heath, slowly filled with rain. The kids had graduated to trying to smash bottles on each other, so I stood there, behind some rather lofty wrought-iron railings, with a fleur-de-lis motif at the top, watching, with rain dripping down my face. Eventually they opened a few bottles of beer, and it was like mother’s milk to them. They instantly settled down and moved away from the bench where I’d been sitting earlier. And then I saw it, my passport, there on the bench, almost glowing in the gloom, five hours after I’d unwittingly left it on that spot. It was moments before daybreak, and suddenly it seemed important to get to it quickly, before it got too light and something bad happened, so I clambered over the fence, slipped and fell, and caught my trainer on one of the fleur-de-lis flourishes. I threw out my hands to save myself, straight into a puddle of piss, and so I hung there upside down, inert and stinking of piss, with a stolen trainer the only thing keeping me from cracking my head open, thinking: What the fuck am I doing? Somehow, I managed to get down, grab the passport and clear the railings again without either falling in dog shit or suspending myself like a piñ ata. Then I managed to find Phil, too, and, with a few hours still paid for at our hotel, I flopped down on to that single bed. It felt like feather-down pillows and a dozen quilts. I didn’t deserve it, but for the rest of that morning I slept the sleep of the just.

∗ ∗ ∗

Later on, Peter and I went back to Paris in an attempt to write some songs. It was where, in fact, we wrote ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’. We hired a flat opposite Sacré -Coeur, which I felt, having roughed it there a few years before, was somehow fitting. The girl who rented us the place worked at PIAS, and she took it all very seriously. She gave us a printed inventory, made us sign some forms and took a deposit, too, and became very irate when, checking the inventory when we left, she found six spoons missing (you might well imagine where they’d got to), though she’s now a good friend. We had some fine times there. I remember promising Peter that I could cook and going off to the market to buy the ingredients for bangers and mash. That idea’s obviously a non-starter in France, but I was a naï ve English idiot. To compound things, I can’t cook anyway, a fact that was borne out by the potatoes I eventually served, which were so rock hard that we ended up lobbing them from our balcony at passing tourists.

During that trip Peter decided to get on a train for Italy to catch up with an ex-girlfriend and, no matter how much I pleaded with him not to go, and to stay and write some songs, he went. I was left there alone in the apartment. It wasn’t a good time for me to be on my own, and I began to feel utterly lost. Things weren’t working out the way I thought they might between us, or with the band, and I was fighting low feelings a lot of the time. With Peter away, the malaise manifested itself in a recurring nightmare in which nightly I tied a rope around my neck and jumped off the balcony to hang myself. I’d wake up each morning, shaken, and the first thing I’d see would be the balcony. Thankfully, a family crisis meant I had to go back to London and my dreams of hanging above Montmartre stopped.

Perhaps Montmartre, however much I love it, will always be associated with death for me. That day, after I asked Peter not to come and play, I turned my phone off, leaving him to his tempestuous cannonball run across London, and stood there looking out across Paris thinking: How in the hell are we going to do a gig without him? My world had been torn apart. He was my best friend and it felt like I’d thrown him away, but it was the only way I knew how to save him. I’m still not sure if I did or not.

∗ ∗ ∗

I think what killed the band for me was when Peter, the one I knew, my friend, disappeared. At a young age someone in my extended family died from what I now realize was smack, so I figured out pretty early on what hard drugs could do to people, or what people using hard drugs could do to themselves. It stayed with me: if you take heroin you’re jumping on board someone else’s story and there are only two endings – death or a really fucking boring struggle. I tried to protect Peter from it as best I could, but I suppose he confused smack with the opium ideal of dining on honeydew, finding a gateway to paradise. He disappeared down that tunnel, his sense of humour departed him and he started exploring violence and the horrid things you can do to people. He was razor-sharp, and there was a lot of him. One of the other things I loved very dearly about him was the strength of his convictions: how when he believes in something he won’t let it go, no matter how seemingly trivial or illogical it is. If someone tied him down and held a razor blade over his eye and tried to make him renounce something he believed in, then he’d give up that eye. Both his humour and his convictions got lost in the smoke from his fucking crack pipe. And, it seemed to me, he was losing himself, too. After a while, I couldn’t bear it.

I often think about that sense of humour, and those young boys with their hopes and dreams who set out together, who had the ability to laugh at themselves, with real humility. I remember once doing a load-in at the Leadmill in Sheffield, and being helped out by a certain woman who still works there now. We opened the back doors of our stinky old van and watched, all five of us, as a pair of pants floated down from the top of a pile somewhere, landing in plain view on an amp. They were blue and inside out, the sort of pants you might see someone wearing in a sitcom, and they had a stain right across them. Most of us started falling about laughing – it being both more embarrassing and more funny because a woman we liked was there – but Peter’s face had turned crimson, and quick as a whippet he grabbed the offending briefs and flung them over the yard into a building site next door. I always imagined some brickie walking past and Peter’s pants parachuting gently on to his head – because they had to be his: you don’t touch someone else’s pants, do you? It’s not the pants that, for me, make that story precious. It’s the humour and the embarrassment, the humility and the humanness of it all, the slapstick moment of a young band out on the make. That was what we lost. The little things that all bands go through like that, things that, when you’ve been touring for weeks on end in a stinky van full of sweat, don’t matter, because you’ve all set out together to make something whole. Thanks to that togetherness, we became more than the sum of our parts; but when one part fails, it infects the whole thing. Our group of friends, our ‘doing it for the Albion’, one-for-all spirit, disintegrated, and we became the band you read about in the papers. I think Pete wanted everyone in the band to be sharp and witty all the time, like four would-be Oscar Wildes. But that isn’t how everyone is, that’s not their vision sometimes.

When we were in the studio making the second album and Alan McGee had hired Jeff and Michael, to keep us from tearing each other’s heads off and to stop Peter’s ghouls getting through the door, I used to think back to us in the back of that van, and Peter’s mysterious pants appearing from nowhere. Later, after I’d had to go on without Peter, I kept my security guard and he protected me from the hangers-on and distressed fans, all of whom wanted to direct their fury and sadness at me. But it was hard to take on other people’s misery when Peter left the band, because he’d spread enough of it around already. I’d just try to put myself back on the Staten Island Ferry looking up at the Statue of Liberty, or in that room full of ghosts in our New York apartment block, or on the steps of Sacré -Coeur gazing at the pinpricked sky above Paris, and wonder again where my best friend had gone.

All these places across the world, with the traces of Peter and me running through them, stick in my mind. Paris and France are bittersweet to me now but I keep going back, and even though it’s three hours away I can be transported in an instant. It hasn’t lost its magic. History still lives in those streets, and Paris has that special thing Manhattan also has – that enigmatic feel. I know the accordion players are only there for the tourists, but I still love hearing their sound filling the air. There’s a scene in the film Moulin Rouge where you first see Paris, an unrivalled kingdom brimming with magic and possibilities. Romantic that I am, that’s how I see it, too. I’ll stand on Sacré -Coeur and stare out at the city at night and it will blink its welcome back at me. I’m sure that’s what it’s saying.

∗ ∗ ∗

Life after Montmartre, after The Libertines, gave me ample opportunity to think about fame, and what it had meant to me, and to us, as a band. The first time I ever experienced fame, I think, was when I first came up from the country and into Waterloo Station, the gateway to my dreams, and I bumped into Brian Blessed on the concourse. He was the first famous person I’d ever met, and I was literally dumbfounded. He caught me staring and shook my hand, and the shock of it was so emphatic that it shot up my arm and I thought my head was going to pop off when it got to my shoulder. ‘Be lucky! ’ he bellowed, and I could feel the parting in my hair changing as he said it. It was like being in a friendly wind tunnel. I was elated and Brian grinned. He’d given me something but I’d taken nothing from him, and then we both walked away. And a modest level of fame, when it later came my way, brought me countless untold good things – a pig’s heart, for example, at the St John restaurant in Spitalfields, the waiter tapping me on the shoulder, delivering a steaming heart on a plate with a covert salute, a nod of thanks from the chef. It also brought me a drink with Slash at a corporate party. Red Bull were pulling out all the stops: there was a Formula One racing car in one corner and Slash playing guitar in the other; between them, a lush carpet covered with models. The Red Bull was being mixed with vodka, and I sat up at the bar and tried to remember the hows and whys of my arrival at this place, before deciding that neither was especially important. Slash was soloing madly, while his wife danced by his side, playing along to Guns N’ Roses songs, and I was so happy to see him and his trademark top hat – even more so when he invited me to his dressing room to tell me what exactly he liked about The Libertines. We sat there wreathed in cigarette smoke chatting, and I tried to hold on to the moment. Three months later, I was walking through LAX, the movie quality light only half softened by the shaded glass that encases the building. Across its concourse I could make out a very familiar figure struggling with a bag and guitar case, a hazy silhouette easily identifiable by the mass of curls and aviator sunglasses sitting halfway down his nose. I strode right up and thrust out my hand. Slash didn’t have a clue who I was. He regarded me coolly, like I’d just turned up on the sole of his cowboy boot, and then turned on his heel. He couldn’t give me what he thought I wanted or needed.

Notoriety puts you in a bubble, but you can decide how thick the bubble’s membrane is. Slash’s had become thick enough to protect him, but The Libertines’ skin was as thin as a snake’s. I’m quiet as a person and The Libertines attracted a hardcore crowd. I always felt I owed them, the ones at the front at least, owed them something I could never quantify but which left me indebted. I’d wanted to take the walls down between us, wanted them in on it, especially live: I had no illusions that I was anything more than the people who were coming to see us. But then, if we’d had a rude audience, people rushed the stage at an inopportune moment or knocked the guitar way out of tune, I’d get pissed off. Contrariness personified, I wanted the intimacy and the frenzy of the moment, but I also wanted my effects pedals to stay where they were and for my lead to stay plugged in. It got contrived later on – the sharing of the space – but the initial rush was incomparable, even if you did slightly fear for your life and occasionally find yourself caught in a headlock by a ginger Glaswegian girl. Even if you had strange hands in every orifice, you had that togetherness, no matter how fleeting.

In the end, our bubble was too thin. Imagined familiarity also breeds contempt, peanuts thrown at my head as a way of saying hello. People telling me my band ‘suck’, or that I’ve made a terrible mistake and the first thing I need to do is get back together with Pete, like, right now. For some, there was a tiered system of respect. Sometimes I’d meet blokes who had been in prison with Peter and they’d instantly put their arm around me, their faces close to mine, acting according to an unspoken code: I did time with Pete, right, I’ve got this, so I’m worth a good fifteen minutes and all these people here might as well fucking splash on the floor like water. Or there are boys wanting to kiss you on the lips, which is just a little bit odd – and thankfully there’s very little crossover between those two groups.

I remember once standing in the street with a girlfriend, and we’re fighting. I know we’re breaking up and she knows we’re breaking up; she’s crying, I’m flushed red in the face and angry, angry and disappointed. Our voices are breaking, we’re pulling at each other like two people who are surely going under for the final time. Hoarse and red-eyed, on a quiet, dark street in north London, and then someone taps me aggressively on the shoulder. The only sounds in the street up until then had been us, a sound you’d go out of your way to avoid. ‘Hello mate, ’ he says. Then he says something that, given the context of our meeting, surprises me. ‘Mate, I love your band. ’ He keeps a hold of my upper arm and my soon to be ex-girlfriend and I consider each other quizzically. I’m confused and angry, he’s oblivious, happily so. I pull my arm angrily away and then it dawns on him that we might be annoyed with the intrusion. His reaction still makes me furious to this day; I can feel my face going red with rage. ‘Well, if that’s how you treat your fans! ’ He stalks off glaring angrily back. I want to ask him if he was a fan, if he cared, then why didn’t he ask how we were, what was tearing us apart. My girlfriend catches my eye and then my hand and we trudge solemnly home.

Unlike Liam, the Devil’s dick, who, for better or worse, graciously declined my offer in the Dublin Castle to come home and jam with me, I have accepted offers to go to some kid’s party, random invitations to someone’s house, and I have played many people songs in their own front rooms, and it has been fantastic. But that song is never the end, it’s only the beginning. No one ever says after one song, ‘That was lovely, thank you, goodbye. ’ They want more and more: they want to hang out; they want the impact of instant friendship. And I can’t give them that. The ones who want to say they enjoy our music, shake my hand and walk off, that I can help with, that I can give them; but some people don’t know when to stop and I don’t know where to start. I’ve never been great at drawing lines.

With The Libertines, none of us had really wanted to recreate the kind of fame I’d seen acted out on festival stages – we were never going to be some sort of golden gods – and we hadn’t wanted a barrier between us. I don’t blame people for doing what they do, whether it’s the NME reader or the ex-con with a sheen of sweat and wired eyes, but in the end, for us, as The Libertines, it didn’t work; it just didn’t work. We were sailing to Arcadia, and, to be fair, Peter and I scuttled the ship ourselves. But we were sitting low in the water thanks to all the passengers we’d taken on, and sank all the faster for it.

FIVE Montmartre

FIVE  Montmartre