ELEVEN  Pushing On

It’s a common desire, perhaps, but all I ever wanted was to be a singer in a band. Unlike many, I was lucky enough to achieve that desire, but I was also doomed to destroy it for myself: everything within these pages, everything I’ve discovered about myself and the way I work best are proof positive that it’s best I work alone. It makes me sad that I’m not part of a band: I never wanted to do this on my own. It doesn’t take the keenest analytical mind to assess my childhood, divided between bricks and mortar, and canvas beneath the stars, and realize that all I ever wanted was to belong. And, given that I lost a twin brother, no surprise that I was looking for a band of brothers, or that I bonded so closely with Peter in The Libertines or with Anthony in Dirty Pretty Things. My lack of confidence in myself is clear now for me to see, but I think it was the final album sessions with Dirty Pretty Things that made me realize how much I lacked confidence in my own songwriting abilities, too. I deliberately distract myself in case I can’t manage the job at hand, and after The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things I realized that when I’ve got someone to hide behind I tend not to do anything. Procrastination is the thief of time, said Edward Young. That should be my next tattoo. Sometimes I think I need a metaphorical Peter running in to my imaginary Old Vic and screaming in my face ‘We’re meant to be writing! ’ every time I get the urge to go and do something else instead. Okay, maybe not that, but you get the picture. Little by little, I’ve learnt to deal with the self-sabotage, but going it alone, which I realized was what I had to do, is still terrifying.

∗ ∗ ∗

When you jump overboard, or your ship sinks, you either go under or you strike out for shore. In January 2009, I found myself coming in to land at LAX, determined to make it to dry land cleansed of my sins rather than lose myself in the choppy waters. I’d arranged some low-key solo gigs supporting Glasvegas on their US tour, my first time performing before an audience since the breakdown of Dirty Pretty Things. Frogmarching myself over there to face down my demons did, however, seem increasingly foolish as the itchy fingers of fear clutched at me in the immigration line. I had no visa, a support tour to complete and a complicated story to tell the stony-faced official awaiting me, something vague about a road trip to visit multiple friends on the West Coast. I’d made up names and locations on the aeroplane, filled in forms in the airport and felt sweat forming on my neck even in the icy, air-conditioned interior of the arrivals hall. Finally, I handed them in, to be waved through, without realizing they’d been marked to make sure I was checked out. I was pulled aside and left in a room and, even though I’d sent my guitar on ahead, grilled about my luggage. I think my line about visiting Joshua Tree National Park, which somewhere over the Atlantic had occurred to me as a nice conversational aside, simply caused them to furrow their brows and jot something down in their notebooks. I was scared stiff, waiting for one of them to disappear from the room and come back with a page he’d Googled and printed off, my grinning face peering out from a darkened stage somewhere, my fate sealed, my seat on the next plane home booked.

It got little better when they let me through: I felt like a man heading for the gallows as I walked on stage at LA’s Troubadour that night. I was convinced I was going to be found out. I had a set list of songs that I’d been playing for years, songs for which, even in my blurriest states, my fingers had reliably found the complicated patterns on the fretboard and my mouth the requisite shapes to sing the words. Still a question hung over me: what the fuck was I doing there? There was an element of preaching to the converted, which was welcome, but I had something to prove to myself – because if I don’t feel challenged then I go the other way and all hell breaks loose. I felt alternately ashamed, hopeful and scared. It goes back to Michael Gambon’s question: ‘What is your purpose? ’

What was my purpose? Glasvegas dropped me off in LA and we parted on good terms, even though I’d perhaps thrown one too many parties on their bus. I was at a loose end. Glasvegas had gone home and I didn’t really care for that idea, and, besides, I had a few meetings that my dear friend Chris McCormack had set up. Chris knew people: in fact, he seemed to know everyone. He is the ex-guitarist from 3 Colours Red, a band that were Camden icons in the late nineties. We met in Japan towards the end of a Libertines tour, and we’ve been friends ever since. With his spiky hair and leather jacket, Geordie accent, plethora of tattoos and unrivaled tolerance to narcotics and alcohol, it was safe to say that we instantly got on well. I’d been looking in to writing songs for commercials – I needed the money, but mostly I needed something to do. I needed guidelines. Chris had some meetings organized, why didn’t I attend those meetings, too? He made his way to town and all hell broke loose. In California, you can stay out on the streets at night and not get cold. That thought occurred to me on the Strip one boozy, boozy night. It wasn’t profound and it certainly wasn’t clear-headed, but after roughing it in both London and Paris it seemed important to know that, if the unthinkable happened or if I simply got lost and couldn’t find my way back to our apartment, I wouldn’t freeze. In the middle of the mayhem we did some pitches, which I doubt we impressed in, and then Har Mar Superstar came round. We greeted him like an old friend, primarily because he is an old friend; he set up his video camera and said he wanted to make a show. There are many things to see and do on the internet, so I won’t be offended if you don’t take the time to track down Two British Dudes. It’s pretty crap: just me off my head playing myself twice in a little sketch. The only possible point of interest is that you can gauge how intense our partying had become. I’d been awake for two nights at that point, I’m ghostly white and have disastrously dirty teeth. God only knows what the two women who were meant to be taking us to our appointments from our villa on Sunset thought when they came to get us each morning, if we were even there at all.

We didn’t pick up any advertising work in LA as far as I remember, and flew out of the city, two sloppy Englishmen on the last scheduled flight out, asleep before take-off, only coming to, dry-mouthed, over Manhattan, with barely time for a drink before we landed. The snow clung to our coats and hair as we queued for a cab, the wind pushing us around a bit. We were here for yet more meetings, but I didn’t care. It was just a convenient excuse not to go home and face up to whatever was next. We were staying up in Harlem, where we instantly slid into a bar, to beat the New York gales and to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. I sat and watched him trip up over his lines, and was glad to see he was human like the rest of us, even if I was feeling anything but. I looked around the bar and wondered what the people sitting there must have thought, if they really believed he could save them, if he could clean the tarnish left by the Bush years.

The New York ad agencies were worse than in LA. I understood there’d be financial benefits to the job, but within an hour of being in those offices I thought, I can’t do this. This is horrible. I mean no offence to people who actually make adverts for a living. It takes a lot of discipline. It just wasn’t me. Writing to spec, composing music to which an actor-model could be seen miming some horrific jingle … I loathed myself enough as it was. I couldn’t have done that – and that was when I assumed it was easy money at which I could turn my nose up. It turned out that it wasn’t easy money at all. The ad pitches we did were endless, arduous work and, at the end of it – nothing. Not even a call-back. The pitch was for Lincoln Town Cars, as far as I can recall, the sort of car we’d often have picking us up at the airport when we travelled as a band. They’re big old things, with room enough for two or three bodies in the trunk even after you’ve put your suitcases in. And that was it for New York. Bodies in the trunk, rejection by Lincoln Town Cars and the wind cutting through you on the avenues. I remember thinking it would be no place to grow old. All the cocaine and whisky had affected my mood.

I lurched through the spring like a drunk lurching through a pub door, looking a bit like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend – ironic, as I’d left New York by then. It was still cold in London: not New York cold, but enough of an excuse to go from home to the pub and then back again. As the thaw came I began to feel ill and empty, and the house was ghoulish and abandoned in the stark spring light. It looked like I felt on the inside: clutter and crap everywhere, no care taken. I began to put the dirty dishes in the cupboards where they’d once been stored clean, obsessively hiding things in pizza boxes, and barely ventured out of the front door. I was becoming reclusive, like Howard Hughes, but unlike Hughes I wasn’t even close to being a millionaire, and didn’t seem to mind the dirt at all.

∗ ∗ ∗

I had to set about challenging myself again, and this time I found myself on an industrial estate in South Wimbledon, learning how to lasso and to speak with an American accent. I was to star in a new production of Fool for Love, a Sam Shepard play, opposite Sadie Frost. I was hoping that my training as an actor, the bit after the drama exam on LSD but before meeting Peter and forming The Libertines, would stand me in good stead.

I’d been introduced to Sadie Frost back when I was still sofa-surfing around London, by Danny Goffey of Supergrass. I remember the first evening, when Danny, now an old friend, and I had walked from the Dublin Castle back to the house Sadie shared with Jude Law, Guinness and black in hand, and I’d made myself comfortable at the upright piano that was set against one wall, out of the way of the rest of the party. I was a little intimidated as it was my first contact with that ‘celebrity’ circle. I placed my drink down on top of it, only to discover that the lid was up. The glass disappeared out of sight with a crunching sound, and purply black liquid started oozing through the keys. I quickly checked that no one was watching, quietly closed the lid and moved across the room to prepare myself another drink.

Danny and I sat up all that night back at his, playing the guitar and watching Supergrass videos until the sun came up – something that never fails to surprise me – and we walked out into the diluted sunshine looking for an off-licence where we bought some champagne. We didn’t have a plan – actually, there was the usual plan: keep on drinking – but I loped along, the champagne clinking softly in the bag, until I tripped and fell, and a bottle shattered. We didn’t have a clue what to do, so we went back to the shop and tried to persuade the shopkeeper that the bottle had exploded of its own volition, convinced that he’d buy our story until he threatened to throw us out of the shop, so we stood in the street, the morning dreamlike and soft around the edges, wondering whether to buy more or simply to go home. Then Danny leant forward, one hand placed gently on my cheek, and pulled a long shard of glass out of my head in one sharp motion. I forget whether or not it hurt.

I always quite fancied myself as a trained actor, and, after a few drinks, wasn’t shy about telling people just that. I also have a purist’s, and a possibly misplaced, idea that everyone’s got an actor in them, so, when Sadie called out of the blue to ask me about the play I thought, Well, I’ve always talked the talk and I usually try and punish myself at least once a year. Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love seemed as good a way to crucify myself as any. We travelled together down to rehearsals, probably the first time Sadie had used the Tube for twenty years. She turned up, the first day, in a big hat and sunglasses. I think she assumed everyone in the carriage was going to pounce on her. Nobody batted an eyelid. We were on the Tube together again the day the Evening Standard published a piece on the play, accompanied by a photo of the pair of us spread across two pages; there we were, sitting together, and no one even looked up. You have to admire London commuters’ dedication to getting from A to B while steadfastly ignoring everything around them.

It was a real pleasure working with Sadie, who is a sweet and generous person. Somehow, I felt instantly comfortable with her on stage. Before rehearsals started, I knew nothing about Shepard, until someone told me he was America’s Shakespeare. At which point I started to tremble, and redoubled my efforts. When we opened, the reviews accused me of not knowing the script, but I don’t think that was the problem. I knew the lines, but didn’t understand the words sufficiently to convey them convincingly. I could perform them parrot fashion, but I wrestled with the subtext, and didn’t make real sense of it until we were well into our three-month run. I’d sit backstage waiting to go on and the phrase ‘baptism of fire’ would run around the walls of my head until the bell rang and someone called me to the stage.

All in all, I think the theatre was more frightening that my first film experience, which had happened some time earlier. I’d been to see Telstar when the play was on its West End run, and had thought it remarkable – a play that, in fact, I must have talked up in the press because, in the same unexpected manner as Sadie would later call, I received a surprise letter from Nick Moran, who co-wrote the play, thanking me for saying such lovely things about it and asking me if I’d be interested in playing Gene Vincent in the movie version he was to be directing. I went to meet Nick and was instantly mesmerized by Shepperton Studios, a true, childlike awe, then went away and immersed myself in Gene Vincent’s world. I sat up nights, a bottle of red wine at my side, watching the flickering images of him driving the young women of his generation wild. He looked like a hero, and I practised and practised his style. I even had his limp down.

In the film world everyone jumps up out of bed and is on set at 6 a. m., where they then stand around for hours while the doors of static caravans open and close and a few select people walk about purposefully. The waiting process did nothing for my nervousness. I remember pulling Nick aside to outline my approach and voice some dramatic concerns; he levelled his gaze at me and told me to get on set, say my one line and then get off again. When the time came, I stood there like a rabbit in the headlights and mumbled something about looking for the toilet, repeated it once, and that was it. I don’t think I did the best job I could have done but it was certainly an eye-opener. You spend a quarter or a third of a year working on a play and, by its close, really understand what you’re doing – at which point, the performance is lost in the annals of memory. On the other hand, my grandchildren will be able to look up Telstar online and no doubt marvel at my dodgy clip.

Later, in the darkness of the Leicester Square cinema, I peered up at my face, six feet wide on the screen, my only thought something banal about how my hair had fallen down. My lustrous Gene Vincent quiff looked little more than an inglorious bowl cut. I looked like a redneck, I thought, all buck teeth and pudding basin hairdo. I glanced along the row of seats at the rest of the cast and sunk progressively lower into the plush velvet, until, when the lights came up, I realized that it was all right, that no one was staring at me. I’d got away with it – how I feel about a lot of my gigs. Overall, I was more pleased with the performance bits than I was with my lines. Even if I did only mime (and, to be honest, I hadn’t been sure of the words), I did that whole Vincent thing: the hand obscuring the mouth, over the microphone. If I ever act again, I’ll be sure not to read the reviews, because, even though they were mainly positive, every now and again a line floats back to me, something some no-mark said about ruining Gene Vincent for him. But then everyone’s a critic, aren’t they?

∗ ∗ ∗

Gradually, as I put some distance between me and my bands, as I challenged and extended myself into new areas, my songwriting began to blossom once again. I’d kept on writing all the way through, automatically, because that’s what I did and I didn’t know anything else.

I found the freedom to write on my own liberating. You kid yourself that you can do what you like with your songs in a band, but for me at least that wasn’t true. On my own, I began to write about the things that were important which never tied in with any band I’ve been in. And after a while, the songs had started to coalesce, to take shape around certain ideas. I tried a different palate, things I never would have got away with in a band – and gave myself the opportunity to play some fairly patchy piano, for starters. Sitting there, looking out over the leafy suburbs of north London, trilling away at the keys, I felt a sense of calm, that I’d connected to something I hadn’t before. I took a lot of the guitars away just to see what I might come up with, without reverting to the same old crash, bang, wallop format. A part of me needed to be naked I guess, but try walking into a rehearsal room and telling these expectant faces that you’ve been working on some new material and then plonking yourself down at a piano and start a profound lament about the dark beauty of human frailty.

I jest, or at least in part, because I think there’s a lot more humour in my songs now. My songwriting lost its humour during The Libertines – suddenly an early song like ‘The Boys In The Band’ was frowned upon because The Libertines became such a serious thing. From a certain point on, in The Libertines, or in Dirty Pretty Things, I tried to keep it all lofty, to hide the truth away. It was almost as if humour wasn’t allowed, only anger and bitterness – which was a tragedy, given where we’d come from. I think the first song I wrote that appears on the album is a ballad called ‘So Long My Lover, It’s Over’, which for me is pretty much the only link to the past. Elsewhere, there’s a bit of lightness back with this record.

∗ ∗ ∗

It took me a while to find my voice solo, to realize what it was I was writing about, and I still find it much easier to write for other people. I did two songs for Get Him to the Greek, Russell Brand’s film, and took a short trip to LA to play in his live band. For the soundtrack work the brief simply said one was to be about love, and the other was a party song. That set me on the back foot a bit – I like a bit of direction – and the party song’s chorus (‘Let’s get fucked, let’s get fucked, let’s get fucked up …’) won’t be winning me an Ivor Novello Award any time soon.

It was during that soundtrack work that Edie came along and saved me. I was working on a session in south London, and had been keeping my eye out for a cellist for Russell Brand’s songs. I liked the way she looked through the control room glass, I liked the way she played, and she told me she sang, too, though she also told me about her boyfriend. She played on the recordings I did for Get Him to the Greek, and I sent the demos over, as a first sketch, and, despite their simplicity, the film-makers loved them – at which point I did, too. What was odd was that I’d only sent them over as a prototype, simply to ask ‘Is this the right direction? ’ It had always been the intention to re-record them in LA, and both songs, in spruced-up versions, made the final cut. I was touched.

Edie and I became friends, and I used her for a gig up in Scotland – it was a solo gig I’d been planning for a while, my first in the UK, and suddenly it seemed important to factor in some strings to make it work. She was a person who, just by her presence, would make me happy, though I also felt a magnetic attraction. I thought about her a lot during my seven days awake, the longest week of my life, and she was undoubtedly a beacon who helped me make it through that, but all the while we remained friends and friends only. She was very loyal to her boyfriend, which I respected, and was surprised at myself for doing so. Given my past history with women, during which I’d often shown scant regard for any of the proprieties of normal relationships, I wouldn’t have paid his feelings – or hers, for that matter – a second thought. But even to have her in my life, as a friend, seemed to quieten something in me, and keep my trust issues and fear of abandonment at bay. When they separated, finally, she came round to watch a DVD, and we had our first kiss over popcorn. From then on, everything else just faded into the background, and all the noise that had surrounded me for so long was suddenly silent.

Life with Edie had a purpose. She didn’t like me being too wrecked, and I found that I didn’t like myself like that either. Also, as I’ve said, I’ve never been truly creative in that state, so thanks to her I began to be able to work and write again. I had someone to give my love to, and it healed me. Soon after Edie and I started going out, I went to see another therapist, because I was worried that I was embarking on this whole new thing and that my new girlfriend might be thinking I’m a fucking old depressive. I was also performing in Fool for Love, and had taken to having a quiet beer each night after the play, a quiet beer that had turned into several raucous ones, and I was worried I was heading down that road again. The therapist came to see the play, and we met several times, painful, agonizing sessions where it felt as if I was on the rack, laid bare. They’d hurt me for weeks after, and I do feel some catharsis from them.

The therapist also helped me through my fears over getting The Libertines back together. I was in the British Library, looking for John Lennon’s lyrics and wondering why they weren’t housed there any more, when I got the telephone call offering a re-formed Libertines some live festival shows. To have received the offer in a place so full of grandeur, literature and history seemed like a good omen. And thinking of the British Library also takes me back to my early days in town, when I worked for a time at the British Museum, which housed the British Library’s books long before I came on the scene. The job at the British Museum came with privileged access to areas of the museum that were closed to the public. Behind closed doors I got to look under great grey drapes covering ancient pieces of marble, and be completely alone in the gathering stillness, just me and huge chunks of history. It could be overwhelming. I was living with some of my mum’s friends in Dulwich and each day I’d put on my suit and get a taxi into work. The cabs there and back would cost me half a day’s wages but I was working in London at the British Museum: naturally I had to wear a suit and travel in a black cab. Why else would I have moved there? Somehow, re-forming the band seemed to connect with that optimism and romance once again, and to be looking for Lennon’s lyrics, connecting with English music’s Arcadian past, seemed just right, too.

∗ ∗ ∗

I always used to fret when journalists asked me to pin down the specifics of what I write about. I suppose I’m scared that if you pull out the keystone then the whole edifice collapses. So I tell them that all I can ever do is tell the truth through my eyes, and put it out there in the vague hope that it connects with somebody else. That’s the point at which they tend to look down at their notes and ask me about the red jackets we used to wear. These days, now I’ve settled down, my songs are all caught up in my family. I’m still a creature of chance, and of jeopardy, and it could be that the biggest risks and biggest successes – personally and creatively – are still to come. But now I’m standing on the edge of the precipice hand in hand with a lady that loves me, and a family to be part of. For a while recently, my grandfather (not the David Niven one) was in hospital and, coupled with the baby, it made me fret that I’d start writing like Elton John – late, ‘Circle of Life’ Elton John, not the good seventies stuff. Doctors and nurses look at me less gravely when I go to see him now, but for a while there were frowns and downward glances. He’s coming out of hospital soon, and my girlfriend’s going in to have our child, and I so desperately want them to meet, my granddad and my kid.

I suppose my songs have always been about escape, and I sang a lot about death at the end of The Libertines and the beginning of Dirty Pretty Things. But maybe that’s changing. The last song on my debut solo album, the last noise on the bar, is my baby’s heartbeat. I sampled it during the twelve-week scan. Maybe now I’m trying to sing about life.

ELEVEN Pushing On

ELEVEN  Pushing On