TEN  Of Kickboxing and Crystals

Some people say good songs come out of depression, that art needs angst, but not for me it doesn’t. For me it can only come out of really feeling life and feeling alive. Only with a bolt of some kind of vital divinity do I even begin to think about the songwriting process, so, for me, the depression is when that can’t happen. And, after Dirty Pretty Things, everything stopped. I had a lost season, a period of consumption and excess – a time full of nothing. I felt like I’d left Dirty Pretty Things with a good heart, although I was sad at how things had become, and I’d learnt a few lessons from it: don’t be a lazy shit; follow your heart; don’t invite Miguel into the studio; don’t try to write twelve ‘Bang Bang’s, and for fuck’s sake be strong. Summer quickly faded, Christmas came and went and I realized that I was creatively fallow, a vacuum. Looking back now, I think I was getting rid of all the chaff and waiting for reality to come, but that wasn’t how it felt at the time. It was at this point that I turned to a therapist for help. That was one of the things that set me back on my feet.

I’d been in therapy before Dirty Pretty Things split, although I’d always been mistrustful of it – I felt it was all about old couches and old men, weakness and failure. But my first foray into therapy – the first time I felt myself going under – was just after Peter had gone to prison. I was still living up on Harley Street, probably getting my front door fixed, drinking myself to sleep, and barely crawling out of bed when I was awake. I felt I was dragging a dead weight around with me everywhere I went, and a friend – someone who has seen me through thick and thin, who has shown a lot of heart – recommended a person I should visit. Even though I perceived it to be some sort of freak show, I was so desperate and unhappy that a part of me wanted in. The therapist, who pretty much lived up to all my worst expectations, told me to stop drinking and doing drugs and suggested the twelve-step programme. I remember my reaction as being something like: That’s not my problem: my problem is depression, what are you talking about? Subsequently, I’ve realized that stopping the substance use is a recurring, and correct, piece of advice. It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge the truth of it, but if I don’t take loads of drink and drugs, then I don’t get anywhere near as depressed. I do still get depressed – it’s part of who I am – but without those things it’s a lot easier to live with. However, twelve steps wasn’t a life choice I wanted to make, so I only visited that therapist twice. I wasn’t getting the answers I wanted to hear (I’m aware of how ludicrous that sounds), and because it was so rigid and uptight – all leather chairs and bronze dog sculptures, note-taking and ‘Tell me about your mother’ – I just didn’t see for a second how it was going to help me. I decided I was just too busy drinking to go again.

Would things have turned out differently if I’d gone on a different day, with a different mindset, or if any one of a thousand variables had been different? I still ask myself that, because, after I decided not to go back, I just went mad. I drank and drugged my way through two bands: you only have to look at the chapter on Dirty Pretty Things to see how hell bent I was on self-destruction. I look at the situations we put ourselves in and wonder if that was in any way deliberate: was I subconsciously trying to push some sort of button? The next brush with therapy came during Dirty Pretty Things, between albums, although the band did seem in limbo, in some sort of holding pattern, sort of running out of fuel. It was after I’d taken up kickboxing. Someone in our management had encouraged the whole band to do it – kickboxing, that is, not therapy – and everyone else had decided not to. I, however, went along with it, imagining that practising that kind of physical art form would be a release, that the emotion would pour out of me, but in the event I could be furious and it would all just sit inside me, buzzing around my chest, unable to flow out through my limbs. I could never make that little hole in the dam, to begin the little trickle that would eventually let everything flood out. Afterwards, I’d be knackered, frustrated and really upset; I had no release. I was kickboxing on my own, just going in with a hangover every day, three times a week, and, in the end, the kickboxing just tailed off. I was asked to compete, but I missed the weigh-in because I had a hangover. That just about summed everything up. I gave it up. I’d been hit in the face enough, and my heart was no longer in it. After that, I slumped. I knew that if I even went for a walk I’d feel great, but I couldn’t even muster the energy to get up and leave the house. Some of the band were trying to talk me around at that point, to get me interested in some songs they were working on, but I was useless. On top of it all, our management problems – it was splintering apart – were looking to me more and more like a prelude to the band’s own demise. I had the black dog on my shoulder and I was starting to have real problems with my girlfriend. I can’t imagine my state of mind helped: I must have been as much fun to be around as a box of broken glass. So I screwed up my courage and rang another therapist, dressing my case up a little to make sure he’d agree to see me – probably symptomatic of how messed up I was. No wonder I spent six months trying to kick other people.

These days, I consider the man, my second therapist, a good, insightful friend, but at the time I couldn’t help feeling that he was meddling in my life – in a lot of people’s lives, actually. The real reason I stopped seeing him, though, was because of a retreat he took me on. It struck him as a profound idea, given my upbringing bouncing from hippy communes to a working-class home like a demented ping-pong ball, and so, when he suggested it, I agreed. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a cottage in the Cotswolds or on the Welsh borders; picture windows and rolling hills; groups of us sitting around in big, battered armchairs. A cat, maybe, but definitely some clarity to my thinking, so I was as surprised as anyone to find myself in the departure lounge at Heathrow. I wondered if it was too early to get a drink and whether, if I did get a drink, it would be frowned upon to offer him one. (As it turned out, I wouldn’t be allowed a drop for the duration of the trip. ) A couple of hours later we touched down in northern Spain and drove to what I can only describe as a hippy commune. The reality of the commune was a shock to my system. In the vein of juggling and fire-breathing, unicycling and poys, unappealing nudism and rebirthing ceremonies aided by crystals: all the dark arts were being practised. I took part in yoga sessions, which were interesting and very hard work (although I missed the kicking aspect of my exercise regime), tried to avoid the preponderance of crystal-based energy ceremonies, and chomped my way unenthusiastically through the tasteless vegan dinners sourced entirely from the commune’s grounds. The sessions with the therapist were good, but otherwise I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d walked straight back into my childhood, something like the film Westworld, in which punters paid to immerse themselves in a past reality, only without the fun bits – Yul Brynner, Stetsons and robot hookers. My face ached from all the wincing I did and physically I was on edge. I realized I had to get home: I had to face up to problems on my own.

My grandfather passing away while I was at the retreat was the catalyst to leaving – the David Niven grandfather, the grandfather whom I idolized. I left the commune not cleansed, not reborn, simply at a loss, and guilty that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to my grandfather, or to be with him when he died. Until his funeral I was an utter mess, though my family came together in the worst of circumstances, and I tried to help my grandmother out. She’d just lost her partner of sixty-five years, which made the Spanish retreat pale into insignificance.

∗ ∗ ∗

I saw the therapist a few more times after Spain, and the mists began to clear. I began to take stock of things, and to come to terms with the path my performing life had taken me down. My gigging life had started at the age of sixteen and, from that band’s very first gig – we only did three – I was absolutely petrified with stage fright. It was at a pub called the Railway in Winchester, and I wasn’t singing, just concentrating on hiding behind my guitar, using it as a weapon to deflect the gaze of the people – the few there were – staring up at us. Even so, the nerves were just awful. Our second gig was worse, because we’d got rid of the singer – he really couldn’t sing, though he remains a good friend – and I’d taken on vocal duties, pushed up there to the front with my mouth open, thinking, How and why am I here? It was like I’d been scooped up by a tornado and deposited miles away from normality. It might sound ludicrous now, but that’s how alien it all felt. And to this day when I’m on stage I still find myself thinking, What have I done in my life to end up here? Someone once told me how cocky and comfortable I looked up on stage and I thought, You’ve really got no idea.

It was Peter who taught me to stand up on a stage and helped me to master – if not conquer – the fright that still paralyses me when I’m waiting to perform, and I thank him for that. Together, we used to roll around playing all sorts of bits and bobs wherever we could. We’d see a poster outside a pub advertising for performers, for instance, and troop right in there. We’d do open mic nights and I couldn’t enjoy them, mostly because the standard was usually pretty dire; the second reason was the dreaded words ‘Right, you’re up next’. One minute I’d be sitting there finding something to stare at on the floor, my stomach doing loops, filled with the absolute fear of God, thinking of ways to get out of it. The next I’d be bolt upright saying, ‘Oh my guitar’s out of tune’, or ‘I suddenly feel sick’, and then I’d flee. I’d catch Peter’s eye as I was heading out of the door and he’d look at me as if to say, What the fucking hell are you doing? and I’d stand in the street smoking a cigarette, like a condemned man on his final fag. I’ve never got over it, this weird brand of stage terror. I often ask myself why the hell I’ve chosen this life as a performer, but I owe it to Peter: I could never have done it without him. He opened up that bit of me.

I also learnt to forgive those fans who would try and keep me in the past. I did an NME cover with Morrissey once, and Morrissey said, ‘To some people I’ll always be Morrissey from The Smiths, no matter what else I do. And you’ll always be Carl from The Libertines. ’ I’ve never minded that, I’m proud of it; what I’ve had trouble with, though, are the ghoulish people who thrive on the darkness they imagine exists between Peter and me, running back and forth trying to make our business their business, carrying poisoned bons mots toward me like apples spiked with razors on Halloween, and inviting me to eat. The strangers who order me to sort it out, faces close to mine, leering, ‘Get back together with Pete. ’ I remember visiting Peter once at his flat, after he came to that Dirty Pretty Things gig in Paris, and it was full of people whispering about us, brown tinfoil poking out of their pockets, staring across the room and imagining scenarios between us, hooked on a long-dead idea of The Libertines, an idea that disintegrated when Peter and me did finally speak. Because, when we do, all of that crap becomes totally insignificant. People often used to tell me ‘Pete thinks this …’ and ‘Pete thinks that …’, but, because he was my best mate, my dearest friend, I always had an idea what he was thinking. We’re not going to lose that, though we’ve both moved on. We both had to. And that’s why, I think, I never saw the girls on Brighton Pier’s lack of interest in Dirty Pretty Things as a low point. It was just something to accept. The moment happens, and then it’s gone.

∗ ∗ ∗

It’s late at night again, and I’m half a bottle of wine down. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s looking back at what I’ve left behind, but I’ve started to notice certain things. The realization that, although you can still stomach twelve pints, and then some, the first bit of alcohol in the evening does change you. Hands getting older, tiredness edges around the eyes; and you realize that’s mortality talking. Also, in truth, my family-to-be has provoked a certain reassessment.

I still go back to those early days in north London, down those back alleys of my mind, to when we were ambitious, bright, undaunted – or that’s how I see The Libertines as we walk through Kentish Town, on our way to rehearse down on Patshull Road, where John’s mum lives, walking up from there to the swimming ponds at Hampstead Heath, where Peter would always insist on wearing his seventies-style, brightly coloured flannel Speedos. I’ve left Camden now, but I’m not too far away. I visit often, and my heart’s still there. I’m not such an idiot as to romanticize Camden and Kentish Town, or even London, out of all proportion, but sometimes I’ll sit out in the sunshine and sip a coffee, and I’ll see Peter go by in his pornographic swimming trunks, Natasha ducking into a cab on the Holloway Road with the light hurting her eyes, Max lamping some students, Rock Paul drinking his cancer away, or me and Johnny clambering over a gate to get to the South Bank and watch the new millennium arrive. Then, suddenly, there I am, fifteen and stepping off the train at Waterloo looking up at London’s skyline with wide eyes. I hope I never stop seeing it like that.

TEN Of Kickboxing and Crystals

TEN  Of Kickboxing and Crystals