EIGHT  A Bird in the Hand

When I came to, she was standing over me in knickers and a white vest, Swedish as I remember it, and I had a brief mental playback of the night before. There’d been a Libertines show at the famous Hope and Anchor pub on Upper Street; it was early in the band’s life and, to celebrate my progress in overcoming my creeping stage fright, I’d gone on to have a real night of it, and had been approached by a girl after the show as I stood by the bar. Lying there, I began to think how playing in a band was all right by me, but my reverie was shattered when I realized my special new friend had no idea who her bed companion was. First there was noise, which mainly consisted of her screaming ‘Get out! ’ at ever-increasing volume. Her face, so pretty the night before, was now lined and angry. She started kicking me, and then a punch went into my ribs, making me gasp and realize how hungover I was. This is broadening my spectrum of experience considerably, I thought, as she let off a canister of CS spray in my face. Now, you may know all about this, may be one of those people who likes to attend marches and goad police dogs, but if you’ve never had CS gas in your face I really don’t recommend it, and especially when you’re in nothing but your pants. I tried to remonstrate with her, foolishly as it turned out, as opening my mouth meant that I actually swallowed some of the stuff. She kicked me in the shins as I hopped around on one foot, one leg stuck in my jeans like I was Brian Rix in a West End farce. I half ran, half stumbled out of the door, and stood in the street wheezing and rubbing at my eyes with my T-shirt. I’d been wearing our bass player’s hat the night before, and I realized I’d left it behind. He’d be less than pleased with me, but there was no way I was going back. I hacked my lungs out some more, straightened up and asked a quizzical looking passer-by where the Tube might be.

∗ ∗ ∗

I’ll lay my cards on the table – the kitchen table, to be precise. I’ve been no saint. It’s late and my girlfriend’s upstairs, asleep. She’s tired because she’s carrying our baby, and I’m sitting here with the kitchen door open, smoking a cigarette that I shouldn’t be, hoping the night air will carry the smoke and the smell away. It might sound mawkish, but it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that she saved me from myself. When I think back now to the places I’ve been, the things I’ve seen and done, I feel ashamed, but I shan’t turn away from the man I once was.

Blisters on my skin aside, that night was a bit of a lesson, an eye-opener about the whole being-on-stage thing. You standing up there on a bit of wood just a foot or two higher than everyone else somehow acts as a ridiculous aphrodisiac for some women – a fact that, at the time, seemed like a burgeoning recompense for enduring stage fright. The notion of someone wanting to have sex with you because you’re carrying a guitar is gross, but still you end up doing it because you have certain flesh-and-blood needs and, besides, you’re only human. I was weak: I became as addicted to smut as I did to cocaine and Jameson’s Special Reserve. It became part of the game, back when my life was a game and not like real life at all.

∗ ∗ ∗

I think it was a ‘rock star’ – let’s say it was someone from Kiss – who said don’t fall in love with the girls you meet on tour, because when you leave there’s always another bus coming through town. I’ve known plenty of girls who have wanted to be with the band, and their motives are still a mystery to me. When we first went to Scotland as The Libertines, two sisters turned up after a gig, just oozing sex and dark possibilities, and instantly offered me a threesome in the toilet. I don’t think it was the first time they’d been in that scenario, and the thing that struck me was just how pretty they were, and how desperate to do the filthiest things, all at the tender age of seventeen or thereabouts. It wasn’t salacious, it was grim, though if I’m honest a lot of the reason why I didn’t disappear into a cubicle with them was fear. I was intimidated by the whole business and sort of had to teach myself to be filthier, to lose my inhibitions.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but I was a late bloomer in many ways, and especially when it came to girls. As a shy teenager in Whitchurch, my friends – what friends I had – were leaving me far behind. At the very least, they certainly talked like they were. At the start of my teenage years, I thought girls were a different species, inhabiting a different world, but love eventually came and got me at fifteen. My first real girlfriend was a little younger than me, and we were together for nine months, which is an eternity when you’re a teenager. We did all that nauseating stuff on the phone, the ‘I love you, no, no … you hang up first …’, a terrible cliché in many bad films, but actually, and embarrassingly, true. I’d fumbled my way around other girls before then: there’d been plenty of extremely uncomfortable moments trying to undo bodysuits on park benches in the dark, followed, once the breakthrough had been made, by not really knowing what to do once you got there – the definition, perhaps, of a hollow victory. Those bodysuits were a Gordian knot, far better than a medieval chastity belt at deterring the average teenage boy. They really were hard work. You’d be slaving away, driven like Dr Sam Beckett by some unknown force, and the bodysuit would render the whole affair utterly unsexy. Bringing them to mind conjures up apologetic memories, clumsy thumbs and stuck clasps, wilting passion. Awkward, gauche conversations:

‘Shall we do this … Do you mind if I …? ’

‘Yes, you may now touch my breast. ’

So very, very unsexy.

It was frustrating because my friends were obviously more driven than I was by their urges and instincts – to the point of not giving a fuck – and their attitude, perversely in my eyes, seemed to win them greater popularity with girls.

France, too, had a role to play in my sentimental education, in the form of a girl called Solè ne, who also inspired a song, the rather imaginatively titled ‘France’. I was eighteen, living in Stockwell, and she came from a small town outside Paris and couldn’t have seemed more exotic. She was the first truly beautiful girl I’d ever dated. I think the fact that she was French helped, though that worked against us eventually. She’d returned home in floods of tears with the promise that I’d go and visit her one day, but when that day came for me to board the bus to France I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t connect with her culturally, and I couldn’t cope with the idea of it all. Worst of all, I failed to tell her before the bus arrived in Paris, so she was there to meet me, watching the bus empty and I wasn’t on it. I put her through the mill, something I’m still sorry about now. I wrote her that song, but she never spoke to me again. I’ve no idea if she even liked it.

∗ ∗ ∗

At first, when touring with the band, I was still green, and I’d often mistake the intense attention we received from our fans for ardour, which led to some awkward situations. I’d make the move, that fatal lunge, and instead of willingly acquiescing, they’d be devastated. It’s a sticky, silent moment: all she wants to do is read you her poetry, or show you the painting she’s done of the band, and you’ve made it clear that you want something completely different – you’re nothing but an insensitive misogynist and the embodiment of all the worst cliché s about musicians. In truth, all I ever wanted was a little love, which is the kind of thinking that can get you into all sorts of strange trouble. I used to try and keep the girls going for more than one night, as if we were in the first bloom of love, that each time, each coupling, was something with the potential to last. I was fooling myself, though I’m not sure I was fooling them. Naivety, drink, drugs or simple bad judgement? It was one, or a combination, of those that sustained that delusion. I have to romanticize everything, even girls whose idea of a good time is being filmed by a drummer while she gyrates on a tour bus.

One of the saddest things about the groupie life, I discovered, was the brazen ambition of it all. Girls would start off aiming at the highest point, the singer or guitarist, say, and then, if they failed, move on down the pecking order, until they ended up sleeping with the big fat guitar tech. Everyone had a sort of value and a place in the hierarchy, and there were plenty of guys working in the crew who knew their place, but were content to wait to catch the scraps from the lion’s table, like vultures. Band members’ mates, people hanging around backstage, even journalists got lucky. I’d see naï ve young women just starting out, but already committed to that lifestyle, and I’d think, Don’t do this. I’d even try to talk to them sometimes, but they’d just think I was patronizing them. And I knew full well that the day our bus pulled out, the next one would roll into town; you couldn’t ever really save them.

I confess, however, that my moral compass wasn’t always pointing in the right direction, and often I’d delight in the random, impersonal physical encounters. I remember moments, the backs of buses, grabbing hands in toilet stalls, walking through the audience, slippery and pliant, and any number of hands, female hands, just all over me and thinking, Why are these hands on me? I’m disgusting and wet. They’d go for my chest and back and occasionally my arm and, if I was high on MDMA, I used to think it was incredibly sexy. Different countries would offer up different kinds of decorum. If you kissed a girl in a Scandinavian country, it seemed the sex would be a foregone conclusion, that within seconds she’d have taken all her clothes off and be assisting you as best she could in separating you from yours. It could get very frenzied; it must have been something to do with the cold weather. And, although I was learning to play the game, on my way to becoming something of a rogue, there were times when I’d miss all the signs. I’d watch guys in my band kissing the girls and have no idea that that was the green light. I’d sit and watch them, and still try to woo the girl I was with.

The tour bus had a weird protocol, and you quickly learnt where to draw the line – unless, that is, you were one of our crew who we’d come to call Peeping Tim, for obvious reasons. He’d always be in your peripheral vision, staring, but in the rush of the moment and in the desire to acquit yourself favourably, you couldn’t really stop and tell him to fuck off. That said, there was definitely an etiquette about how things went in general. For instance, if a girl had been on the bus a while – it was the third day running, say – you had to be careful how you approached things. You had to let her know that it was time to leave the party, go to the nearest station and catch the train of shame; how best to slip the question ‘Are you going to get off in Frankfurt? ’ into the conversation? On the other hand, although there was no point pretending it could go any further, you couldn’t just spurn someone who’d maybe crossed borders to spend time with you, with whom you’d spent a few stolen moments of happiness in between performing and unconsciousness. Even when it did all end happily, you often had to give them some money to help them get home, and then it looked and felt like a transaction. And the tour bus, even at the best of times, without the band tensions that spiralled out of control, was a claustrophobic place. Many a grotty morning I’d wake, with a truly thundering hangover and a head filled with cotton wool and cocaine, squashed into my bunk next to someone I didn’t know, someone who, two weeks and ten more gigs down the line, I wouldn’t have been able to pick out of a police line-up. I’d be vulnerable and paranoid, coming down and with a hint of panic creeping up on me, and I’d struggle out of the bunk to find our rotund tour manager in his pants looking for something on one side of me, and our very fleshy guitar tech on the other, and I’d be trapped between them, enclosed on all sides by flesh, drowning in a sea of pink.

Often you’d get bizarre requests, or get placed in an impossible position. Regularly, after The Libertines finished a show, boys would approach to ask us to kiss their girlfriends. It happened a lot: it was a genuine trend, and one that, frankly, confused the hell out of me. You didn’t want to offend a big bloke by not kissing his girlfriend, but then you didn’t want to offend him either by kissing his girlfriend and looking like you were enjoying it too much, or, God forbid, if his girlfriend suddenly got into it and tried to latch on. It became really awkward, occasionally, when you’d see an angry, red-faced man standing in the corner looking at the floor, and a girl sauntering towards you. ‘My boyfriend and I, ’ she’d say, with a dismissively pointing finger, ‘each have one free pass – one person that we can sleep with, no guilt or shame. ’ Then the killer punch line: ‘Mine is you. ’

Riiiiiight.

‘You’ve both got one, have you? ’ would be my opening gambit, making light of it, and I’d try to hold it at a conversation, though I’d be frantically scanning the room for the nearest exit, plotting an escape, mentally sawing a hole around myself, like Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote, so that I could drop through the floor and disappear. I can still see those guys standing there, their hearts breaking, their girlfriends oblivious.

∗ ∗ ∗

Japan provided, in hindsight, one of the most shameful experiences. It was towards the end of The Libertines, I’d met a Japanese girl and, all evening, it had been smiles and giggles, just lovely. So I invited her to join the band for dinner but, later, when it came down to it, she was tense and stiff as a board, not moving a muscle. She would only say ‘Hi’, which she repeated over and over, and I had to keep asking her if she was all right. Afterwards, I was sort of falling asleep and she began to sob, on the floor in a ball. I panicked, thinking that ‘Hi’ might be Japanese for ‘Stop’ and that I’d done something terrible. I had images of me being carted away by the Japanese police, flashbulbs going off, my face all over the British tabloids. I leant across to touch her on the shoulder, asked her what was wrong and she said, tears streaming down her cheeks: ‘I was worried that I wasn’t good enough for you. ’ That made me sad; sad for her and sad also that I had helped the whole sorry situation into existence.

From then on, though, she seemed to appear everywhere we went, acting surprised when she saw us, saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re here! ’ It was all very calculated and totally at odds with the vulnerable girl who’d been in my hotel room. But then Anthony, who was playing with us as a replacement for Peter, took a shine to her, and began to woo her. He asked her up to the hotel roof with him, to go and look at the stars – even though, as I’ve said, you often didn’t have to woo girls on tour. This situation was a prime demonstration of that fact. All he really had to do was say ‘Can you please go inside and take your clothes off? ’ and she would have done, but his conduct was sweet and refreshing, a moment of normality amongst the madness. Secretly, I was delighted when she’d suddenly turn up in unexpected places and tell Anthony she couldn’t believe he was there, too. The coincidence. Who knows? Then one day she caught him hiding. We’d been walking down the street and he’d spotted her and hidden behind a pillar, without realizing that his presence was betrayed, reflected in the glass of the big windows behind him. She burst into tears, and I felt ashamed about the cruelty of it all.

∗ ∗ ∗

Sometimes, though, tour life was just plain fun. Every once in a while someone really sound came along, and you’d both be absolutely in the moment, just enjoying it for its own sake. There was a model, for example. I was on tour with Dirty Pretty Things, it was our second album, we were in a fug, and I think we could all hear the wheels slowly coming off, when I met her in Stockholm. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson with Swedish girls, but rational thinking was beyond me at that time, and I can still clearly remember her coming backstage, then kissing after three drinks in some bar we’d gone on to. After that, she just got on the bus with me, not even a change of clothes, and we left. She had a sense of freedom about her that impressed me and made me envious: I wished sometimes that I could detach myself from all life’s expectations and hurts and just exist with that kind of fervour, that kind of liberty. She stayed with me on the bus through six different countries, the cities flying by on a cloud of cocaine and booze. ‘Why don’t you get me pregnant? ’ she said. ‘Just give me a kid, I’ll look after it, I won’t ask for anything. ’ And I was so out of it that I agreed. Fortunately, we’d both forgotten about that idea as soon as the words left our mouths. We finally said goodbye when we got to Germany, where I think I paid for her flight home. Later, she got in touch to say she wanted to come and see me in London but, in all honesty, for me it was over, just part of a highspeed, borderline-insane bender that happened in another country. Thankfully, it didn’t go anywhere, and it transpired that she had a boyfriend at home anyway. That had never come up in my bunk. Strange the things you neglect to mention when you’re out of your mind on coke.

I realize that I’d turned, by that point, into something of a predator. We’d be pulling up to the venues and there’d be fans already outside. A pretty one would catch my eye, and I’d make a mental note of her face while I rid myself of the previous night’s girl, making sure she could get home safely. It’s crass and shameful, but for a while it seemed like the most normal thing in the world. My second band was falling apart almost as tragically as the first, and I was watching the world drift by in a hungover haze, desperate for any kind of escape. I had so little self-worth by that stage. Genuinely, a lot of the time, I’d think, or hope, that we’d be embarking on these trysts on an equal footing, that she, whoever she was, just wanted a little fun. Then I’d find that, pressed to give more of myself, I upset a lot of girls when I made it clear that I didn’t want to see them after what I believed was the relationship’s natural conclusion. The meltdown and recriminations always took me by surprise.

Later, when I went solo, I was crashing out of control while supporting Glasvegas on their US tour, a drunken animal still stuck in the old patterns of behaviour. And Glasvegas were so bloody gracious to me – I’d organize impromptu parties on their bus and they’d be fine with it. At my worst, I stole two girls from James (the band’s vocalist and actually a good, and hopefully forgiving, friend) who was in the back of the bus, being gentlemanly and charming and slowly working his magic. I, on the other hand, stumbled cross-eyed and ruined into the party, leapt on one, grabbed the other, and left. Glasvegas were going to Canada the next day, and I couldn’t follow as I wouldn’t have been able to re-enter the States, so I took them off to my Seattle hotel, leaving James, dejected, on the bus on his own. In Glasvegas’s position, I’d have given me a swift kick up the arse and left me at an all-night gas station to fend for myself. The mess was compounded by the fact that I’d already kissed a different girl that same night, who was something to do with Glasvegas’s record company; she’d tried to come on the bus with me, but Glasvegas hadn’t wanted her to. There’d been a stand-off, and, when she’d grabbed my arm, pleaded with me to stay with her, I ran away. I always did. I got on the bus.

I’ve spent so many nights doing that: pushing the eject button, moving on, looking for the next thing, trying to find something better, someone more beautiful, trying to fill the void. I’m aware of how selfish that sounds. I’d spend countless nights looking over people’s shoulders, working the room and then everything would blur, and after a while I’d come to and find all the girls I’d been talking to were long gone – each convinced, perhaps, that I was going off with someone else. Perhaps they were simply bored with being played. I’d weave down the hotel corridor in a stupor, get one last drink at the bar, slur my goodnights to the receptionist and flop down on my bed, the lamp hurting my eyes. I’d wonder where I was and then it would hit me: I was on my own. And I’d wait quietly for sleep to come.

∗ ∗ ∗

I can only look back at this so much; it’s getting late, and I’ve smoked too many cigarettes. London’s quiet now, the house is still, and I realize I’ve come to the crux of the matter. All I really wanted was company; I never wanted to go to the hotel on my own. I’m not a great fan of my own company and I’m not making excuses for my behaviour, but I did find comfort in some strangers’ arms and legs. I’d probably advocate that lifestyle if the backstage sex was just pure sporting fun, if it was ever done without guilt or guile, but that’s just not the way it was. And the sad thing is that I always desperately hoped that I’d meet a woman at my shows, someone I really did want to be with, who I genuinely got on with, who shared my taste in books and art; someone who was level-headed, beautiful inside and out. But, even if she had been there, it wasn’t as if I could have gone out into the crowds to seek her out – I wouldn’t have got ten yards without being mobbed. Unfortunately, that sort of girl, the one I imagined I wanted to meet, rarely tries to push her way backstage. She doesn’t want to be mistaken for a groupie. So you drink another shot and end up talking to the girls who are milling around and trying to catch your eye, looking like sharks that have smelt blood in the water – though I realize now I was the shark.

EIGHT A Bird in the Hand

EIGHT  A Bird in the Hand