by Carl Barat
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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.
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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.
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.
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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 lik
e ‘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.
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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 ro
utine 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.
