NINE  Songs of Experience

If some of the earlier chapters of this book read like a succession of sense impressions loosely connected by a thin thread of consciousness dipping and diving into oblivion under the influence of various substances, well, that’s what my life was like, for years, with both bands. And, once Dirty Pretty Things was over, I had a lot of time to myself, time during which I continued partying, on autopilot, without thinking about what I was doing or where I was going. I liked the recklessness of not sleeping. I’d sleep maybe Monday, Wednesday and Friday, fading in and out, living a white noise existence, having parties at random and hoards of people over, sitting around in front of an unlit fire in the front room waiting for a dealer to come around, until I would suddenly look up and realize I didn’t recognize half the people sitting around me. How had they got in? Had I met them in the pub? And who’d invited them back? All of which only served to ratchet up the paranoia on top of all that coke that’s making you bug-eyed anyway.

∗ ∗ ∗

Growing up, there was very little to do in Whitchurch apart from drink, take drugs and think about sex. My first can of cider – it’s always cider first, isn’t it? – lasted me for about a week; I’d take a few swigs every night to make me feel different and quietly convince myself that I was now off my face. I was unpopular at school, or, if not actually unpopular, just invisible, until, when I was fourteen, my mother moved and I had access to a neighbour’s greenhouse where they were growing dope. I used to steal a bud or two whenever I wanted – after all, it wasn’t as if they could report me to the police if they caught me jumping over the wall with a fistful of their weed. So I quickly became the man with the plan, everyone’s favourite friend. Weed, though, sent me west, something I worked out pretty quickly, so I knocked it on the head at a relatively early age.

Cocaine, now I think back to it, was an accident at first. I was fifteen and smoking a spliff in the park, just taking a toke, when someone told me that it had charlie in it. And suddenly, psychosomatically, I felt all far out and scared, because I was sure I’d read somewhere that cocaine rots your brain. For hours afterwards we sat around worrying and saying things like ‘My head feels long’ to each other. But when you’re kids there’s not really cocaine around; only movie stars and music industry buffs have access to that sort of stuff. Everything about it – what it was and what it could do to you if you took it – existed in the realms of myth, and I didn’t have it again until I was in my twenties and living in London.

The park incident happened at around the same time that I started doing acid and mushrooms, magic ones, of course, that we’d forage for out in the countryside near our estate – a nice way of saying that we went out looking to get high. I was useless at finding mushrooms, so I focused on the acid instead, which was more potent and would take me away for hours. We’d score it from a travellers’ site not too far from where we lived, and I became so fond of it that I took it at school a year later. At the time, fractal designs were popping up on posters for raves everywhere; they were really in fashion, and everyone had them covering their exercise books. Four of us had taken these things called Blue Bananas, and I was sitting there in maths completely off my box. How the teacher didn’t notice is beyond me. One of my classmates even told him that I was tripping, but he seemed quite oblivious to it. It was so utterly fantastical: I remember just rocking back and forth, the fractals on my exercise books glowing at me. Then I had a drama lesson, a drama exam, in fact, and, given that all I would do was lie on the floor with an office chair and spin it round really slowly, they had to scrap my part in the play. I was absolutely useless, but they had to incorporate me, lying there on the floor, into the play. And I still got away with it.

After a while, acid was all we’d do. Microdots every night to the point where they almost stopped working, and acid and bongs, acid and bongs, acid and bongs below a disused railway line in a long, old tunnel where you never saw the ceiling. It was like being in The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ video. I had an epiphany there once. We were down in the acid tunnel, sitting right in the middle, farthest away from the ends as we always did, with some slightly psychotic older kids who for some reason thought it a good idea to set a motorbike on fire. It must have been the shock absorbers that blew up, because the next thing I was aware of was the most horrific sound, the noise echoing off the walls, and we were confronted with a wall of flame. Everyone else freaked out and ran away – they must have thought Satan had swung by for a bowl – but I didn’t move a muscle as pieces of the tank and wheels flew by me, whizzing past and bouncing off the wall. There, in the heart of the explosion, I swear I saw a phoenix rise up and touch the roof, lighting the entire tunnel as it went with a brilliant white light. And, somehow, someone had got up to the curved ceiling and written: ‘Pain is an illusion of the senses, fear is an illusion of the mind’. Which means fuck all now, but at fifteen when you’re off your face it’s pretty profound.

Near-death experiences and brushes with Satan didn’t stop us, though. We carried on in the same routine, breaking through the fence into the local trading estate, walking along a wall, fifteen feet high and one brick wide, to steal pallets to break up and burn on our bonfire. Then we used to scramble back and carry them, tripping our balls off, along the brick tightrope and through the fence, carrying them a mile to the acid tunnel in the dark, banging our shins and ankles and stumbling into holes along the way. I once bashed into a burnt-out Ford Capri and started bleeding, my blood appearing green thanks to the acid, and I felt like Jesus with the Cross carrying those things. It was all about the drugs; all we cared about was being totally fucked. Our parents never seemed to notice. It’s the same in so many small towns across the country. The smell of the smoke, the paraffin evenings, wrap themselves around my memories of Whitchurch.

When I moved to London, I shed some of the drugs and went straight to booze. I used to drink whatever I could that kept me going, often concoctions such as Diesel – Caffrey’s and Stella with vodka and a bit of blackcurrant added. I liked – occasionally still do – a whisky spritzer, too, because the bubbles get you drunk more quickly. When we finally made some money I moved on to imported lager and gin martinis, then David Nivens, which I think were made with brandy and ginger ale; whatever their constituent parts, their name is a delight. Every drink should be called a David Niven. While I was working at the BBC, my girlfriend at the time lived with a girl who was a big clubber, and so little wraps of cocaine would start appearing around her flat. It was a bolt from the blue. I started liking that stuff a lot more than I did back in that park; I liked the coke because if I had more coke I could drink more booze. So I needed the coke, which meant I needed to be around the right people. It’s pathetic, but when you start liking a drug it becomes really important. The drug, rather than who you hang out with, is the thing. It’s part of the fuzzy logic that drugs give you; it all seems so precise at the time, as if it’s the only possible answer.

∗ ∗ ∗

Back in the early days of my performing life, I hated going out on stage. I still do. Let me clarify this: I like being there, but that first step over the precipice is a daunting one, and drinking was an encouraging pat on the shoulder, a little pick-me-up to see me across the threshold. I’m not sure when I started asking for Jameson’s on our rider, but Jameson’s became my thing. It would sit by my monitor patiently as I played the show, its rich blend clinging to the bottle’s sides, only disturbed when I took a long, lingering slug. I thought of it as an elegant whiskey, a step-up from Teacher’s and Famous Grouse, more cultured somehow. It was a lot more palatable, went down a lot easier than Bell’s and it became my drink of choice. My only saving grace is that I’ve never really been a daytime drinker. That said, a lot of time on tour I’d never slept, so, in my mind, the drink was still part of the event, still ongoing from the night before. That’s what I told myself and, thinking back now, I truly believed it. I wasn’t trying to hoodwink myself into thinking that I wasn’t drinking excessively; I knew I was drinking excessively, I’m just not sure I cared enough to do anything about it. By the end of The Libertines I was easily getting through two bottles of the stuff a day, mostly on my own.

But I’m getting away from myself. For me it was Jameson’s Special Reserve, strong continental lager and vodka for the boys and Jack Daniel’s for Gary. I was quite haughty about Jack Daniel’s: I always thought it a bit of a cliché, though that never stopped me from drinking Jim Beam. I’d drink two bottles of Jameson’s and give it little or no respect, and then turn my nose up at a bottle of Jack and consider myself a connoisseur. Like our drinking habits, all our touring habits changed over the years. With The Libertines in those early days when you didn’t have your routines, it was a real adventure. You mucked in with everyone, you got your booze and drugs and fags or whatever, whenever or however you could. Whereas, when we’d been going for years, we all had our little rituals, our predictable vices and, strangely enough, it gets boring. It becomes all you do. On those early tours, everything you managed to blag was a treat or a real surprise. The moment when you have your first headline gig, say, and somebody turns up with a packet of something, or you’ve done a good show so somebody brings you a crate of booze, that’s truly thrilling. You feel like you’ve sung for your supper, even if that supper is a dozen bottles of imported beer.

We started out in the backs of vans, like any band worth its salt, and got promoted to tour buses pretty quickly. That’s really when it all started to go a little pear-shaped. When we suddenly had people carrying our equipment, having a crew doing the load-in, that’s when the in-fighting started. We became less of a gang and more of a band; it became more of a job. It’s a terrible cliché, but success did spoil us. That and the drugs; but they came with the new territory. Inexorably, the magic faded and the routine took over. Whatever we did, it all ended up the same, and for me that meant being drunk through every gig, finishing a bottle during our set and coming off stage and putting away another one. Peter saw that coming before any of us did. He’d rage against the dying light, try to cajole us into not behaving in a linear way. He wanted to break out of the gig/hotel/bus routine very early on, almost as soon as it started happening. ‘Don’t do that, ’ he’d say. ‘Come on an adventure instead. ’ And, in a way, he was right, even if that adventure did end in a crackhouse at sunrise.

I remember the first time I saw Peter smoking crack. I hated being around it and I was really furious when I first found out. We were doing demos for Rough Trade in Nomis Studios; he was with a friend of ours and neither of them was doing anything to hide it. I was outraged, along the lines of ‘Is that what I think it is? ’ Desperate questions, and leading to pleading with him not to do it. I remember doing that for a long time. Then I got duped once when I was with Peter and some of his friends. It was raining and it was about seven, maybe eight, in the morning, and they promised we’d find a dealer who’d definitely have some charlie. We got back to the Albion Rooms and someone said that she was on her way. It was an odd hour for a delivery – the lady was supposed to be juggling on the side and to have a nine to five job – but still I was pleased when a little silver Golf with two kids in the back pulled up and a lady got out. She didn’t look like a coke dealer, but she gave us two little balloons and disappeared. I went back inside and started cutting it up, but it was like cheese. I wasn’t too far gone to think, ‘Hang about. This is fucking … this isn’t what we wanted. ’ But there was Peter and his mates, already sat in a circle and making a pipe. I’m ashamed to say that I was so pissed, and so intent on getting high, that I sat in there with them and kind of convinced myself that it could have a cocaine feel, the same effect. The pipe came around and, as soon as I’d done it, I instantly wanted more. It was like smoking a bin bag and then having a thirty-second hurry-the-fuck-up panic attack as the pipe moved round the circle, repeating, and then wanting more. Then there were two pipes going around – the other one was the brown to take the edge off the crack – and it was all just so fucking ugly to me. I’d be parachuting, hit the crack and then do the smack to take the edge off. ‘It certainly keeps you awake, ’ they said. I’m lucky I didn’t like it, otherwise I’d be dead now for sure. I didn’t like it, but when I took it all I ever wanted was more.

I’ve already mentioned our trip to Paris – the one where we were going to write songs, Peter disappeared across the Continent in pursuit of an ex-girlfriend and I dreamt of my own death night after night. What I didn’t mention was the brown we were doing, how we were just doing brown and falling asleep. There were a few times when I thought that if I did it, too, it would draw me closer to Peter. And I kind of hated it, but I was still doing it and I don’t know how, but I managed to blag a day to go back to see my then girlfriend at home, and when I tried to drop it casually into the conversation that we’d been doing brown for days she went, quite understandably, fucking ballistic. And that was it: I didn’t do it again, ever. If that’s being under the thumb then I’m all for it. It was strange; I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t even like it, yet I was still getting close to actually being hooked on it. Yes, it’s costing me money, I don’t like it and it’s fucked up my life: now just give me a little more.

∗ ∗ ∗

Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see how drugs caused a rift between us. Everything became so serious and emotional; Peter and I would flare up for no reason and there’d be fights and ructions that had never existed before. During the second album recording sessions, Jeff and Michael were there as much to stop us fighting as to stem the flow of drugs into the studio. On day during one of those sessions I remember we fought because I accused him of stealing some money from my sister’s room when he burgled my flat. He’d deny it, but then there’d be counter-recriminations, that endless back and forth that happens when a relationship breaks down. To give him his due, I don’t think Peter did take her money, but we were on edge all the time. We just wanted to get at each other and I blame the drugs for that.

Drugs took me to the edge with Peter, and the breakdown of my relationship with him, combined with drink, landed me in hospital. This was before the second album sessions, and Peter and I were at Alan McGee’s palatial home on the Welsh borders. It was a dark time for the band and for me personally, and Alan, as our manager and friend, was trying his best to heal the rift between Peter and myself, to make us whole again. Though we did manage to make merry a little, it was a tough time, lots of talking late into the night, analysing what had gone wrong between us, why Peter had kicked in my door on Harley Street and tried to take my stuff – little things like that. We’d set out from London with high hopes, with the intention of writing some new songs, but now I can see that we were getting ahead of ourselves with that idea. There was too much between us to go straight back to writing music together. But I admire Alan for coming up with the idea, and, later, some songs did surface that had had their genesis in that period. One night at Alan’s it got too much and we all got too drunk and I was angry with Peter but, rather than direct it at him physically, because I’m just not like that, I retreated to the bathroom while he retreated to his bedroom. I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself for a long time in the mirror not quite sure what I was seeing, and then began to smash my head over and over again into the basin; then, and I’ve no idea how, I managed to get myself into bed.

The next morning I woke up not quite knowing what was going on. My entire head was numb, and I couldn’t really see, but there was a trail of blood leading from the bed towards the bathroom, and the bed itself, sheets, duvets, pillows and headboard, was liberally splashed with scarlet; it was like someone had tipped a tin of red paint over everything. I must have lost pints. I went downstairs and Alan was sitting down, talking on the phone, and he did a double take before slamming down the receiver. I think he thought at first that I was playing a practical joke, wearing some Halloween mask to scare him; mask or not, I think I managed that. It wasn’t something that was new to me. There had been times in the past when, less dramatically, I’d get drunk and emotional and head-butt walls and knock myself out. In all honesty, it was usually when there were people around, so they could react, be horrified, tell me how crazy I was and offer to look after me. Girls, usually. But the basin was much worse. I think it was a signal for help, that I needed to be rescued.

That rescue didn’t happen for a long time, though; not even a complete ban on drinking could do it. The ban came after the Moscow trip, at the tail end of Dirty Pretty Things. It was no surprise – it wasn’t as if I was just looking a little washed out, just feeling a bit under the weather. The oncoming pancreatitis was making me feel like my insides were exploding. We’d practically been living on gear and I was eating handfuls of steroids a day just to keep me balanced and to clear my head. I was doing so much coke that I couldn’t breathe through my nose. There’s nothing more miserable than a person who’s trying to do coke but who is actually just pushing powder around a plate with a straw because he can’t breathe properly. We were downing huge tumblers of Russian vodka, then I’d attempt to snort a line and throw six of these red pills down my neck, decongestants of some sort. At least I think that’s what they were. I used to go to see the doctor all the time, especially after a cocaine binge, and tell him that I had a dust allergy or hay fever. No one’s going to believe me if I ever get hay fever again.

Back from Moscow, the pain didn’t stop, but neither did it stop me. I remember how it shot through me, having a meeting in a pub and having a glass of wine; all sorts of situations, and the thought that it might return would make me panic. Later on I’d try a beer, and panic-thinking it was all going to happen again. Then I had an interview with a Scottish Mirror journalist, who came to see me in the studio and couldn’t stop wincing. Even when I talked I was in pain, and the article the next day mentioned how Carl had struggled valiantly on. That didn’t make any difference to me, though: another visit to the doctor, some more tablets, but they did nothing – like hay fever pills for a cocaine addiction. Only when a friend came round to see me did I finally buckle and give way. He’d come to talk about the breakdown of his relationship with his girlfriend and left with me beside him in a taxi destined for hospital. This is going to sound ridiculous coming from someone who cared so little about his health, but I had health insurance. And so I lay there in my private room with the reassuring sounds of London traffic far below, light streaming in misty rays through the window, the TV on quietly and the morphine taking me away to some undiluted place, uncaring, just happily off my head as my body healed.

Then came the crushing news that I couldn’t drink any more. Professional opinions differed. Some people told me that I’d never drink again, and at that news my stomach flipped over, just as it had when I was lost and homeless in the Parisian night and had reached into my back pocket to discover my passport was missing. Others said I should cut it out for a year, and then I’d be restricted to one beer, that sort of thing. But after three months of not drinking I decided to try again. I had one beer in Brazil, the beach was below me, the view white sand and endless sky, as I squinted at the label and put the cold bottle to my lips. The skin on my shoulders was a reddish-brown that was already beginning to peel, and I was wearing a straw hat – strange, the things you remember. The beer felt vital and good as it made its cold passage towards my belly, and I think I held the bottle up reverentially against the light, admiring its shape and feeling good about things again. Within hours, however, the pain was back, bolting through my stomach and up my side.

I persevered with drinking, though, like the idiot I am. I won’t try to make excuses for my inability not to drink, but it’s very, very unpleasant to live the life I was living without boozing. When you’re sober it gets to eleven o’clock and suddenly everyone’s got bad breath, everyone’s talking right in your face and repeating themselves, not listening to a word you say. Which, of course, is exactly who you are, I am, everybody is, when you’re hammered. That was Billy Connolly’s take on things: he said the reason he stopped going to the pub with his mates after he’d cleaned up and stopped drinking was because he realised how dull his friends were, and how dull he was, when they were pissed. I noticed exactly the same thing. Why does nobody understand personal space? I have since been told that I’ve made a full recovery, my internals are as they should be and I can now drink normally again – whatever that means.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, drugs were The Libertines’ springboard, crutch and stumbling block – beginning, middle and end – but they played a generous part in Dirty Pretty Things’ decline, too. As I mentioned, the coke we had in the studio for our second album turned out to be laced very generously with crystal meth. The studio’s enough of a boiler room as it is, but with chemically induced paranoia there were bound to be fireworks – and not the wonderful bursts of light that fill an autumn night sky. So we fought endlessly. Fighting is usually anathema to me – I go out of my way to avoid it – but due to the crystal meth coke I wasn’t backing down. I remember raised voices, thrown punches. We wrestled as far as I can recall – which isn’t very far. It was all very Women in Love. Though can I at this point exonerate Gary, our drummer? He never seemed to touch any drug, so when we would all be raging and fighting, he’d fall straight to sleep – a trick I wish I could have learnt. I was talking to a therapist about this (more of whom later) and he said it sounded as if the band was dead, and that, by that point, I wanted it to be that way. I think he was right: even then, I realized subconsciously that I couldn’t stay with Dirty Pretty Things. There was too much bullshit. The pain and angst outweighed everything, and I hadn’t got into another band just to have to deal with all the same crap again. So I disbanded, put a stop to it and it eventually turned out all right.

∗ ∗ ∗

Up until recently I still had the hangover from my lifestyle on the road: sleeping only three nights a week, with a lack of purpose and of direction to boot. And, on top of the lack of direction, I wanted to do it. They’re glamorous, drink and drugs; there’s no point in denying it. They helped me walk tall, yet they also laid me very low. They did for both my bands and wrecked the friendship I had with Peter. Sadly, none of that ever stopped me.

Red wine and tea have fuelled this book, as they have my music. If I reached out a hand now I could grab a glass and drain it, just as I used to with Jameson’s whiskey, my long-time friend and onstage collaborator. But I don’t need to. Red wine is safer, somehow. When did it all change? After Dirty Pretty Things, it took me a long time to work out that the drink and the drugs and the sex were a dead end. What it took was therapy, a woman and seven days without sleep, the longest week of my life, to push me beyond, to bring some peace to something inside me. Now that I’m getting on with other stuff, working on a new album, recruiting a band, writing songs, living with my girlfriend, drugs aren’t a problem. My girlfriend doesn’t like me on coke. Strangely, I don’t like me on coke now, either. I’m over thirty, and I actually like going to bed. I sleep at night and I like eating. And if, every now and then, at four in the morning I think it’s a great idea to do some more gear, the feeling of wanting to pull my own skin off the next day is a stiff reminder of why I should lay off it.

I was scared in the park that time I was fifteen and I realized I’d taken it, and maybe I should have heeded the warning there and then. But I don’t blame my teenage self: he’d keep on making mistakes for at least another fifteen years. The drink and the drugs were just part of the journey.

NINE Songs of Experience

NINE  Songs of Experience