Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

by Carl Barat

  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.

  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 start
ing 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.