by Mcgee, Alan
I’ll give Geoff Travis his props. He phoned me up privately beforehand and said, ‘Do you know what you’re getting involved with here?’
I said, ‘I’ll be fine, I’ve had Oasis.’
‘Alan,’ he said, ‘this is not Oasis, this is way beyond anything you saw with them. Are you sure you want to take them to your house?’
I took the warning but thought he was maybe being a bit soft. And the first two days went quite well. They were talking, getting on, playing guitar and singing. I always saw Doherty as having the best initial ideas for the songs, but then Carl would come in and add something that made them better. Carl is more disciplined, adds some order to Pete’s shambolics. It’s a dynamite songwriting relationship, but unfortunately it’s a dynamite relationship full stop.
Pete would be wandering around my house, putting all my first editions in his bag (he’s a mad klepto when he’s on the gear); Carl would be following him around slowly taking them out of his bag and putting them back on the shelves, because Carl’s a good guy.
I went to sleep on the Wednesday, leaving them together, listening to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ on the stereo.
At quarter to ten the next morning, I was sitting in the lounge talking to the office when Carl came in. For about five seconds I thought he was wearing a Halloween mask, that it was a practical joke. And suddenly I realized that he wasn’t wearing a mask, that it was his actual face.
His face was completely covered in dried blood, but what really shocked me was that one of his eyes was hanging completely out of the socket.
They’d had an argument, over a girl, I think, and said some awful things to each other. It’s a real love-hate relationship – because they were so intimate and shared everything they know all of each other’s secrets and exactly how to wound each other the deepest. When Carl went back to his room he headbutted the sink, twenty or thirty times, smashed his face up and went to sleep. He did £400 of damage to my sink and nearly lost an eye.
I thought Pete had done it to him. I thought he was going to end up back in prison again.
I phoned up the farmer who rented some of my fields and got him to drive us to Hereford hospital. Of course, when I came in to the hospital with a guy looking like that, I was getting asked some pretty interesting questions. No one believed that someone could do this to himself. They were taking him to the side trying to get him to admit that I’d beaten him up. We must have seemed suspicious because we didn’t want to tell them Pete was staying at my house. He’d only just got out of prison and everyone would have thought it was him. And we knew the press would have a field day if they’d got hold of it. In the end Carl confessed he’d done it to himself.
So that was my introduction to managing them, and that was the end of the songwriting sessions, two days in. I had to take Carl to Harley Street and pay for a specialist to look at his eye. He would have lost it if I hadn’t done that.
We tried again to put Pete and Carl together to write some songs in Paris. I wasn’t going to go with them this time, but Carl came in to see me looking really anxious. He was on the edge of some serious drug problems himself and was worried he was going to fall over the edge hanging out with Pete in Paris. So I offered to come with him and be his chaperone.
The look on Pete’s face when he answered the door in Paris was classic: Oh no, the manager’s here. It was the most disappointed look I’d ever seen.
The next day me and Carl went out and got absolutely pissed together in Paris. We met a band called the Parisiennes, who recognized us, and ended up back at a supermodel’s house who Pete had made friends with. There was a tray going around with every kind of drug known to man. I knew then that I was never going to take drugs again, because I was out of my face on booze, and presented with every possible drug going, and I still didn’t want any.
So we had fun, but there wasn’t a great deal of songwriting going on. It was quite a quiet carriage on the way back home on the Eurostar and I suddenly noticed a funny smell just as we went into the tunnel. I turned round and there was Pete with his crack pipe lighting up. This really was going to be a challenge.
When we got back I booked them for three consecutive nights at the Forum. They hadn’t been doing very big gigs so far, and I was trying to prove a point, that they were a bigger group than Rough Trade thought they were. They had such committed fans. If they were a cult band I knew they were a massive cult band. And we sold the gigs out quite easily.
One of the problems with booking gigs for them was having the anticipation for them undermined all the time by Pete’s guerrilla gigs. Pete was incredibly clever in the way he used the internet to talk to his fans – he’d post demos, chat to them and declare sudden gigs in his flat. He’d do these gigs for his drug money and charge a tenner at the door.
I’d booked them three consecutive nights at Brixton Academy by then, at 5,000 people a night. And to try to stop Pete from doing his guerrilla gigs I’d put him in the smallest flat imaginable. It was big enough for a bed and very little else. But somehow he’d still manage to fit fifty people in there on some nights. He’d do two gigs a night, make a grand and run off into the night to spend it all on crack.
They were such a shambles, Pete especially. On the Tuesday before their three-night run at Brixton Academy, Pete advertised another of his little gigs for that night – Meet at Whitechapel station at 7 p.m. He managed to rope Carl into doing it with him.
I saw Carl the next day, looking incredibly pissed off. ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Only five people turned up,’ he said. It sums the Libertines up perfectly, playing to 15,000 people at the weekend and five on the Tuesday before.
I was very involved in the making of the second album. Rough Trade, though they’ll deny it, had pretty much handed them over to me by then. People were becoming more concerned about whether Pete was going to die than about whether or not he’d make another album. But I got them in the Metropole studio and for two months they recorded there.
It wasn’t a normal recording session at all. I had to hire two twins as bodyguards, each seven feet tall and three feet wide, mainly to keep Pete and Carl from killing each other. One was Pete’s and the other was Carl’s: whenever it kicked off between them the twins would pick up their Libertine and carry him to the opposite end of the room. Pete and Carl’s feet would be pedalling around in the air, trying to kick out at the other.
For all of the two months, I think Pete showed up about six times. The hardest job I had was getting him to surrender the songs he’d written. I think he knew then that the relationship between him and Carl was unworkable and he was trying to save his songs for his next band. He really didn’t care at all about the new album and if it was up to him it would have been filled with B-sides. He was at his worst stage, staying up every night, never eating.
I’d heard his new songs though – from the demos he’d post online – and I thought they were great. So when Pete arrived in the studio I’d wait until just after he’d done whatever he’d done in the toilets and say, ‘Why don’t we try this one with the band, Pete?’ He’d go along with it then and we got some of the best songs of the second album that way, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, ‘What Katie Did’, and ‘Music When the Lights Go Out’. That was what saved the album. We got versions of the new songs really quickly, because the rest of the band were all such great musicians. John Hassall was one the best bassists I’d ever worked with, he was as good as Paul McCartney, and Gary Powell was an amazing drummer too. Carl’s got a knack for really catchy guitar lines and John would quickly work out what to play alongside them and so it didn’t really matter what Pete did on top with his guitar, or whether he was in a fit state to play it. Although, to be honest, you could give Pete ketamine and he could still play guitar; he has the constitution of an ox.
Mick Jones was a great producer, he was the vibe, kept the atmosphere going. I was the logistics, suggesting songs to record, stopping Pete and Carl from killing each other and trying to
keep the hangers-on out of the studio. (Carl had as many of those as Pete; it was competitive. If Pete brought five one day Carl would bring six the next.) Rough Trade were paying for the session but were a bit petty. They were complaining about food bills. Food bills! It was a miracle these people were alive and they were concerned about food bills. Pete probably hadn’t eaten for weeks anyway.
I think I did the best job I could have done on getting that second album into shape. Before I got Pete to contribute those extra songs we were heading to a really disappointing follow-up to their debut. The first album’s definitely a better album, but the second has some great songs on it and sold a lot more copies. It’s not a bad achievement for a band with a songwriting partnership who could barely talk to each other by then. I couldn’t repair the band but even sticking them together with Sellotape was an achievement: they were always going to come apart again.
They were too much even for me, with my experience of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream and the Gallagher brothers and Kevin Shields. I realized I’d taken on more than I could handle on the British tour we went on. It was spring, March 2004. Each night I had genuinely no idea if we’d be able to play the next night on the tour. Each gig was like Dunkirk. We picked Doherty up at the beginning of that tour with one sock on, one sock off, no trousers. We’d been looking for him and found him in a crackhouse. He was in no state to walk so we wrapped him in a carpet and carried him into the van. Then we bought him some clothes on the way to Birmingham to play the first gig.
The next night, in Manchester, staying at the Britannia Hotel, Pete decided he was going to do a Keith Richards. He was with a Liverpool band at the time, the Bandits. We were all standing around in the hotel room. Pete was smacked off his tits and picked up this crap old TV. He staggered over towards the window and hurled it at it, but it hit the wooden frame in the middle, bounced back, hit him in the face and knocked him out cold.
I was sat over him, slapping his face – ‘Are you alive?’ I was quite worried. He was knocked out for about five minutes. Everyone else in the room was freaking out, going, ‘He’s fucking dead!’ I was thinking how ironic it would be if it wasn’t the drugs that killed him but the rock and roll.
I had some great times with the Libertines. Mad, mad moments. They were great fun to be with. But it was so hard to manage them. It wasn’t just the drugs – it was Carl and Pete’s relationship, how intense it was, how volatile and damaged.
One of the things that really helped blow that band up was the support from the lads, the football fans. I suggested when Nick Love was filming The Football Factory that ‘What a Waster’ would make a perfect song for the soundtrack. Phonogram got in touch with me and asked me to find them music that ‘sounded like acid house for 1998’, whatever that meant. Can you sort it for us? I put in Mogwai, who I was managing then, to soundtrack the end of a blow job scene, and ‘What a Waster’ to soundtrack a scene where little thieves nick a character’s phone and get kicked off the bus. Very Libertines. The central scene of the film really. The DVD sold 600,000 copies and suddenly all those football fans were interested in us.
We delivered the album, The Libertines, and then James Endeacott told me my next job was to try to get Pete sober. Well, that was clear to everyone at the time. It was Pete’s business if he wanted to take drugs, but we all really thought he was going to die if he kept it up. He was so skinny that he looked malnourished. He was hanging around with Peter Perrett, an old punk and the lead singer of the Only Ones in the 1970s, a complete smack and crack fend back in the day. I remember a gig they’d played together: Pete came out of the toilet and there was a mirror and a doorway next to each other. Pete tried to walk straight through the mirror and then slid down the wall. It was at that point I realized I didn’t trust him to still be alive in a month. We all just thought we were going to lose him. It was really sad.
So we tried to rehab him in the Priory. I picked him up in a crackhouse, in bed with a girl, as ever. Hang on a minute, I’ve just got to chase this, he says, and finished burning a load of heroin, sucked it all up and blew it straight in my face. I couldn’t move for about fifteen minutes. I could taste the heroin. My mind was floating off. I had to stick my head out of the window of the room we were in. Finally I landed back on earth and we took him off to the Priory.
A week later his mum rang me up to tell me he’d escaped. I found him in a crack hotel in the East End and then we put him back in the Priory again. The road leading to the place is called Rocks Lane and we found lots of rocks of crack on the back seat after we’d dropped him off. After eight days he clucked again and left. It was gutting. I knew what potential he had, how he could be the biggest star in the world. I still think he could. The Stones are too old. Bono’s going blind, Chris Martin’s a geography teacher. If the Libertines or Babyshambles came back with a straight Pete Doherty, or a straighter Pete Doherty, not totally sober, just functional, a Doherty that’s transportable – it would be a clean-up job. Nearly all the world could be his. They won’t let him into America, that’s obvious. For now anyway. But once people get clean and have stayed clean for a while, then you can start to get lawyers in.
But he’s done it over and over again. Got clean for a while then clucked. It’s the heroin that’s the real problem, and he loses it completely when he’s taking it.
While we were trying to get Pete clean we had touring commitments we had to fulfil, and we did them with a replacement guitarist. We took a huge amount of flak from the fans for that, saying we were abandoning Pete. I was seen as evil Machiavellian McGee who’d thrown Pete out of the band. So the gigs we honoured really harmed the band, and probably sealed the end of the Libertines. But I thought we had to do the gigs. We’d have been sued otherwise. It was a payday for everyone, including Pete, and there was no way on earth he would have survived the gigs. He was in no fit state to show up at the office, let alone go on an international tour.
One of the last gigs on that tour was to 20,000 people in Brazil, with Primal Scream as support. That many people even without Pete. With Pete, when he had his head together, they were the best live band in the world. The Saturday night at Brixton Academy was incredible. They had the world at their feet; we’d genuinely broken them worldwide. But when the tour ended that was that, there was no more Libertines.
The Libertines could only ever be Carl and Pete and reconciliation between them was impossible. Unless their personalities have changed a huge amount, I don’t know how they could ever work together. When it was clear we couldn’t get them together in the Libertines, it was tempting to manage Pete with Babyshambles. But there was no way I’d fuck Carl. Carl is such a fucking nice guy and I couldn’t let him down. He’d be expecting me to let him down, and I wasn’t going to do that to him. So Carl moved on to the next chapter with his new band Dirty Pretty Things, and I became their manager.
At Poptones, we had our big success with the Hives, and also did quite well with Cosmic Rough Riders, who went silver, and then Telstar went bust in 2004 – a disaster. This was when I was riding high managing the Libertines, and we attracted interest from Universal. It wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped being independent and so we did a deal and licensed the Poptones’ name to Lucian Grainge at Universal, the man who pretty much controls the whole music industry. He takes no prisoners, Lucian Grainge. His attitude is that A&R men are like oil fields; if they’re not producing, shut them down. I was never at full speed when I worked for him. I came down with anaemia (the second Libertines manager in a row to get anaemia) and so I was working at full speed for only half of the year he gave me to prove himself. It was too short a time to find anything. After that, he tried to renegotiate the deal and we walked away.
It was a bad decision for Lucian Grainge to pull the plug so early. I discovered Glasvegas just after the deal had collapsed. James Allan’s sister Denise kept getting in touch to tell me her brother was a genius and was going to change music from the working classes – I’d heard it all
before. She heard I was in town mixing the Dirty Pretty Things album with Carl Barât and dragged me along to see them, in Glasgow in King Tut’s again. He was a professional footballer at Dumbarton but they sacked him because of his song ‘Stabbed’, where he sings ‘I’m going to get stabbed’ over and over again. They got really good and years later in 2008 they got a deal and their first album Glasvegas was a hit.
But Lucian Grainge missed out on Glasvegas, and Boxer Rebellion, who we found that year too. They’re both big bands, and he could have had the pair of them if he’d had more vision.
21: LOS ANGELES
I started escaping the English winters by going to Los Angeles every year for a few months. I went out there to mix the Dirty Pretty Things album with Dave Sardy in November 2005, and immediately remembered how much I loved the place. Maybe it’s because I’m Scottish. The climate is the exact opposite to Glasgow, clear, bright and hot every single day. You could live a lifetime in Glasgow without seeing the sun you see in a month in Hollywood. I decided I’d stay there for the rest of the winter and was there – apart from some trips home to see the family – until April 2006. I did it every year for the next three years. Perhaps that was my midlife crisis.
I’d always go on my own and stay at the Standard on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. I’d been flying to Los Angeles for years by now and I had loads of pals out there. It was great not having to face the winter. The English pound was really high and it made it quite affordable.
Charlie was young enough so she didn’t really mind me being away. One day, though, I was about to go out there again when she was seven and she grabbed my arm and said, Don’t go. She was still young enough then that she would crawl into bed sometimes. You’d wake up and there she’d be, looking at you, Hello.
I don’t want to miss her growing up. I like being there to say hello when she gets in from school, watching how she grows up. My whole life until Charlie was very indulgent – I just pleased myself. I used to think, if you’re not pleasing yourself, then you’re doing something wrong. I still do. But the best way to please yourself is by taking care of those you love.
