Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

  I was glad they were around, though, later. We were on the way to see the Aztec pyramids, which, again, we were planning to shoot for use in the video. I’d never seen death before. I’ve seen it in films and on the TV, I’ve seen graphic violence on the street at kicking-out time, but watching someone meet a bloody, violent end is not something you generally wake up thinking about: you don’t expect to have to look into the maw before the afternoon’s over. On the way to the pyramids we had to pass through an old, dangerous barrio where there was a lot of gang trouble – where, apparently, when they’d been shooting the film Man on Fire, a gang of machine-gun toting guys had calmly demanded two of the Ford people-carriers the production was using. And the film people, of course, just gave them right over. What else could they do?

  That’s the kind of neighbourhood we were in when Roger Sargent, our photographer, decided we needed to get out for some pictures. Roger was an old friend, who’d come to one of our earliest gigs at the Albion Rooms in Bethnal Green. He has a roaringly infectious laugh and a strange and unbridled passion for the Second World War, which is reinforced by his occasional resemblance to a young Churchill. He’s taken some of the most iconic music photos of a generation, so we followed him out of the car, but immediately it felt bad, that kind of bad that makes your guts itch, and I looked around and realized that even our security guys were bricking it. They knew better than us just how lawless it was down there. We were trying to look casual as we strolled down these little streets and alleyways, then Roger suddenly started shouting at us, and other people in our group started shouting too, and we quickly jumped back in the car, hearts beating out of our chest, mouths dry, and as we’re tearing out of there, there’s a young man getting lynched. He had what looked like barbed wire round his neck, surrounded by a big gang who were kicking and punching him, and dragging him along the street, off to his death. I’d say it was horrific, but that doesn’t begin to describe it. Even now, writing this, I can still see his body kicking up dust, his feet flailing uselessly as he’s pulled off towards his doom. Someone took a photo on their camera; someone else muttered about local justice, but I didn’t know how to react. All I remember is in that hot Mexican sun everything suddenly turned cold, bleached of its colour like old bones.

  SEVEN

  Truth Begins

  In hindsight, perhaps I should have packed it in when the record company called me up as I was getting ready to record our second album and said, ‘Just write another twelve songs like “Bang Bang You’re Dead” and you’ll be fine.’ Then again, perhaps it should have been when Didz and I stumbled on to the set of Soccer AM clutching our pints of milk, weaving towards an alarmed looking Helen Chamberlain and Tim Lovejoy. We’d played Wolverhampton the night before, and I was quite ill – it seems as if I’m always ill – so we’d got some extra gear in to compensate, to keep me going. I remember going into makeup early that bright morning and rolling about a bit and the people in there exchanging startled glances. We hadn’t slept and all we wanted was a drink; both of these things might have been obvious to anyone tuning in to the show as they munched their cornflakes and sipped their coffee or Alka-Seltzer. We were pursuing a rather more radical path of hangover abatement, that of pushing on through and drinking into the middle of the following week, but unsurprisingly, if disappointingly, the green room at the Sky studios in west London didn’t have a wet bar, or if it did then it wasn’t stocked at nine in the morning. Which was why we opted for milk: it came in pints and the heft of it felt good in the hand. I think when Didz spat milk all over Tim Lovejoy’s shirt that Tim was less enamoured of our idea. He wasn’t that keen on us in general, I suspect, but, to his credit, he didn’t force the bottle up Didz’s nose, only made an aside about how bad it would smell later and soldiered on. If I could have focused on him, I would almost certainly have been impressed. For respite, they cut to a montage of the season’s best goals so far, and Didz leant over to the equally impassive Helen Chamberlain as she was reading the voiceover accompanying the goals being neatly slotted in on the monitor. ‘When,’ asked the listing Didz, ‘does this go out on TV?’ His question was audible to everyone in the studio and at home. Didz has one of the most advanced senses of humour I’ve ever come across and, for better or worse, his sarcasms sometimes cancel each other out, so that it can seem like there wasn’t a joke to begin with. Helen gave him a look like he’d just kicked her grandmother.

  ‘It’s live.’

  After we came back from the commercial break they’d wisely moved us down the sofa, where I found myself next to a grinning Noel Gallagher, who was politeness and charm personified as I attempted to chew my own face off. I watched our performance again on YouTube the other night, and I look almost innocent in my admiration of the older Gallagher; innocent if you don’t count the half-pound of chang stuck up my nose. You can watch it yourself: the presenters ask me a question that bounces off like a child’s rubber-tipped arrow, and I turn to Noel, possibly a little bit in love, forgetting about the cameras, the dumbfounded studio guests and production crew. I haven’t slept for a few days and our gig in Wolverhampton the night before is a distant memory, but it is a new dawn, I feel alive and I have something important to say. It is vital stuff, I am sure. ‘That song,’ I stutter, and launch into a good three minutes of garbled, nonsensical drivel. There is an Oasis song I really, really love and it is crucial that Noel and the viewing audience know its life-shattering, life-affirming significance, but try as I might I can’t remember what it is called. I go around and around like a man adrift in a dinghy with only one paddle searching for the lever in my memory that would set its title free. Noel lays a reassuring hand on my arm. I am rapt. ‘Live Forever’, he says, to which I react as if he’s dropped a bottle of Scotch in my lap. I am delighted.

  Soccer AM told us we couldn’t come back after that. We had two producers and a floor manager shouting at us: they made it pretty clear that we weren’t welcome. So we departed, out of the doors into the bright sun and as quickly as we could to the nearest off-licence, to get back on the horse, so to speak. We were doing a BBC Radio One gig that night and I’m certain we didn’t sleep before that either: we got a day room in a hotel and just kept going, cresting waves of totally lucidity before falling apart once again. Strangely, word of mouth spread about our appearance, and the viewing figures for our segment shot through the roof; so I think they did call us up again. The next time we slept beforehand … at least I think we did.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Dirty Pretty Things reconvened on the US West Coast for album number two, with Nick Leman as our producer. We’d been introduced by Alan McGee, our mentor, friend and manager, the trilby-wearing Glaswegian who’d discovered Oasis and who took The Libertines on during their darkest hour and guided them through tempestuous waters, and I felt a bond with Nick. He was a former commando, though not so much in his manner. He was laid back and charming and I really took to him: he was an intelligent and enigmatic man and we got on well on many levels. But, and I don’t mean to slight him in any way, he also had a darkness, a thousand-yard stare, and a great sadness somewhere beneath the surface – and this assessment from a man who can be about as cheery as a wet winter’s morning. Leman was working making advertising jingles, a very lucrative gig as far as I could tell, at a place called Amber Music, which was on Stewart Boulevard in Los Angeles, but right at the arse end, between the Marina and Santa Monica. It was just a wasteland really, though we were in the same building as Larry David; all the exterior shots of the office in Curb Your Enthusiasm were done there. The oddest thing about the studio was that it was housed in an office block, so in the daytime it was bubbling, filled with people creating jingles and a real office vibe: people you didn’t know would wave at you and hope you’d have a nice day. Consequently it was vaguely sterile and really not at all conducive to making music. We were based in the complex’s central unit, a huge room with a plush pool table and a big TV, with all the little studios radiating off it like
satellite moons off a planet, but with much, much less charm. We might as well have been in Slough for all the feelings of California it evoked.

  Nevertheless, the location was bearable and Nick was fine. The real trouble came in the shape of Miguel, a Chicano drug dealer who would do you an eight ball for a hundred bucks and, like the best pizza places, deliver it for free. We called him round every evening. There was a kitchen area where, mainly at night, we spent a lot of time drinking wine and losing the will to live, Miguel coming in and out of the shadows. After a while, cabin fever broke out, madness ensued and rows started happening that just shouldn’t have. Punctuality, which had once existed, went straight out of the window and we started focusing on ridiculous things, getting totally het up over nothing: if we use this drum sound on this track it’s going to make the album it’ll be great it’ll be perfect if we don’t use this keyboard on this track it’s going to ruin the record. Endless chatter, inane, drug-fuelled crap at a million miles an hour, and Gary standing in the corner, not touching the stuff, but having to listen to all this bloody drivel.

  We’d hired a little apartment about three boring miles from the studio, opposite a strip mall and miles from anywhere, which only fuelled the madness as we had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The boredom hurt us and we were wearing on each other. My philosophy as far as that band went was a democratic one: we should all have an equal say in things, but, we were finding out, that probably doesn’t work in a band no matter how hard you try. In social terms, it was like taking a group of romance novelists and asking them to have an informed view on quantum physics or space travel. That’s a mangled analogy at best, but trust me when I say that not everyone in a band can be equal. I blame myself. I wanted the togetherness of a gang so much that I was blind to the practicalities of what I was doing. I was a lost boy and I needed that feeling, and I didn’t feel I was part of that brotherhood by being boss. I wanted that whole die-for-each other vibe, which I’d had with Peter. I just wanted it back, I guess.

  Within two weeks everything had gone pretty pear-shaped and we’d got precious little done – guide tracks to three tunes at best. The plan had been that a lot of the songs were to be written in the studio, and we had worked up fragments and ideas, but nothing was coming out and none of us were getting on. We were pretending to be a gang, but I think we were all unsure about our roles and who was running the show, or where the material was meant to be coming from. Everyone was vying for their stuff to be used, and there was no clear main writer. Things were moving very slowly, and it was getting tougher every day. What we didn’t realize was that Miguel was cutting the coke with crystal meth. A month later and things were totally out of hand.

  We knew pretty early on it wasn’t working. Ask us why it wasn’t working, however, and we couldn’t have told you. We were completely blind, just oblivious, and yet coming up with meth-fuelled, crazy-radical suggestions. At one point we decided to move back to England and finish it, and it became an ongoing squabble, but nothing ever happened. We’d troop across the road at the end of each session, thoroughly deflated and wired, to these apartments that might as well have been on a Basingstoke trading estate, and just flop down and wonder what the hell we were going to do. I feel sorry for the guy from the label who’d been sent out there to mediate; he had quite a job on his hands, and he can’t have been aware of 90 per cent of what was really going on.

  We finally came home three months after we’d left, feeling shabby from the whole experience, only to discover the entire fucking album was recorded on 8-bit instead of 16-bit, which meant the master wasn’t even up to the sound quality of a bog-standard CD. Not only that, but it was littered with various weird little oversights and errors, which meant we had to make all sorts of different mixes and loads of overdubs. It was a complete and utter ball-ache. The label had budgeted £25,000, and I dread to think how far we went over, only to come back with an album that wasn’t even properly recorded.

  For all its flaws, though, there are some beautiful songs on there. Some of the details are exquisite. There’s a song called ‘Truth Begins’ that I like very much, that means a lot to me. That’s probably my personal high point of the album. But it’s a record that’s hard to go back to; it’s like photos of the one that got away. I’ve not really been able to look at it since. Actually, there are some wonderful moments on that record, but I might need to give it another year before I play it again …

  The record company really wanted ‘Tired Of England’ as the first single, which was a song that caused us absolute murder, a perfect example, in fact, of how democracy signals the end of a great song. It happened so many times on the album: we’d start writing a song and nail the beginning. But where to go next? I’d canvass everyone’s opinion, and a few ideas would result. Maybe a couple would be promising, but because I was too mindful of getting a consensus, we’d never pursue anything to its end, to the point where everything superfluous had been pared away, and only the essentials remained. Nobody took responsibility, and because I wasn’t forceful enough at pushing everyone to make something as good as it could be, too afraid of hurting feelings or bruising egos, I let it lie. Nothing outstanding is ever created without a strong vision, and I knew that ‘Tired Of England’ was good, but in my heart of hearts I knew it could have been better. Yet for the sake of democracy I said, ‘Okay, that’s that then, that’s finished. Song done.’

  The bad decisions were also due, in part, to my laziness. It’s happened at many times in my life: people around me have said, ‘It’s fine’, and I’ve just wanted an easy life, an easy way out, and so I’ve agreed. Combine the ‘democracy’ with fear and the laziness, and I’d usually just say, ‘Okay, let’s go with that.’ Invariably, this has been the wrong decision. In this particular case, the decisions came back to haunt me when the label plucked it out of the air and announced it was going to be the first single. ‘Tired Of England’ is still to my mind an unfinished song, and it festers guiltily at the back of my brain.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Romance At Short Notice was slightly unloved, and we didn’t tour it that hard. An album not being much of a commercial success hadn’t happened to me before, but we made it work live, as we always did. We did give it a shot, took it on a journey, and it took us to some strange places, too. The five-star hotel in Moscow felt to me as if it had been built on the bones of the poor, fuelled by drug money and the blood of innocents – I was half expecting a professional hit in the opulent surroundings of the bar. It was one of the most incredible places we’d ever seen as a band, gothic and austere with brooding marble monsters mounted at the top of the stairs and busts along the hallways, but it was combined with a ridiculous level of service, plush furnishings, huge beds and grand windows with the kind of views the tsars must have enjoyed before the axe fell. From the roof terrace you could marvel at Red Square, the imperial past set free by revolutionaries, laid out down below. I found a little button next to the bed that caused a Perspex tablet to slide out, like something out of Star Trek. On its surface there were little icons, some of which – drinks and room service – were obvious; one of them, however, a picture of a woman, seemed to hold the promise of mystery. Given the decadence and licentiousness of the surroundings, we thought, Wow, that must be prostitutes. What happens if we push that one?

  We didn’t ponder on that too long, but took off into the Russian night at a clip. We went and got spangled on a Moscow adventure, hopping in and out of dodgy illegal cabs, narrowly avoiding getting bummed and drugged, finding amazing little drinking taverns, as you’d imagine in Berlin at its most decadent, sleazy cabaret bars that were just perfect for the way we were feeling. When we returned, the room felt like a palace, and we began goading each other on. It was five in the morning and we were absolutely hammered – and for once we weren’t blitzed on coke; it was all good old-fashioned Russian vodka, the kind that tears your innards apart. Like Pandora and her box, Eve and her apple, we couldn’t resist temptation – temptation w
as the one thing we could never resist – so we pushed the button, the icon of the lady, and waited nervously, laughing, for the best part of an hour. Just as we were getting annoyed at its apparent non-function, and running out of steam, there was a knock on the door. We snap to attention and tidy ourselves up and arrange our hair, then gingerly open the door while trying to reassure each other, Oh, it’s just going to be a massage, and standing there is a very confused looking cleaner. And us, a couple of goons with sloppy smiles, staring back.

  Looking back, it’s no wonder that I came home from that trip and got fucking pancreatitis. I wonder now if we all knew that the band was coming to an end, and so tried to make every night like it was our last on earth.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The turning point came, though, when we were in Brighton, due to play the Concorde II. I wasn’t happy, and was self-medicating again, blanking from consciousness whole swathes of my diary, and the unavoidable conclusion was that the band was the reason why. I kept trying to make something work that just wouldn’t, like going back to the wrong girl over and over again. I had to stop. I knew I didn’t have the confidence to go it alone, so I didn’t know what was going to happen after, but I knew I couldn’t go on. That was the important thing.

  I was walking along the front and down towards the pier, seagulls milling in the warm air against that golden light you sometimes get by the water. I could smell chips and doughnuts, salty and sweet in interchangeable gusts of sea air. Anthony was with me, fumbling for change in his pocket as we walked into the arcade, a domed roof filled with ringing bells and synthesized voices coming from the machines. I sat down and told him my decision, which was quite a big thing as I’d not told the others yet, told him first because he was my closest friend in the band and it felt like he’d been with me for the long haul. And then, as we’re walking up the pier, out of nowhere a couple of girls came running up, shouting and screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh Carl, you completely changed our lives.’