Threepenny Memoir: The Lives of a Libertine

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After I dropped out of Brunel and Peter came to town, we set sail together around London, moving from squat to flat, to mates’ houses and then back again. Peter found the first important place: DeLaney Mansions, 360 Camden Road. Our landlord was just like Del Boy, had Del Boy been Greek and fond of shell suits and gaudy chains heavy enough to sink him if he fell in the Thames. It was a sixties bedsit that time forgot. The front door didn’t work, so we had to exit and enter via the window, which we half-heartedly secured with a bicycle chain. Not that we had anything worth stealing. We had so little, in fact, that we shared a mattress on the floor and a kitchenette, and that was it. We had two cyberpunks for upstairs neighbours, a couple who looked like characters from a William Gibson novel: plastic straws in their hair, huge shoes, multiple unappealing piercings. They practically lived on speed. He was a computer programmer (ironic, given that he looked like he belonged in Tron) from Philadelphia; she was an Israeli, quite mad, and with a rather strange sideline. People would pay her cash to go into their houses and beat them up, which I found both creepy and enterprising. The cyberpunks would clomp around above our heads all day, but if we made the slightest sound on our acoustic guitars they’d start screaming and banging the floor. One night a brick came through the window. We looked out through the jagged hole and it was the Israeli, screaming in at us, shouting, ‘Fuck you!’

We called the police, the first and only time we ever called them, I think. But nothing much could be done about it and the upshot was that we had a broken window for the next four months. It was winter, naturally.

We then moved along Camden Road to number 236, where Peter sweet-talked a family who had bought a big house there who we helped move in. The house was a mix of old bedsits and small flats and sat atop a huge basement. The basement was a real mess, but you could see the potential in it, and they gave it to us to live in while they made the place into a home. So we had this glorious subterranean Victorian expanse with a garden, and a grand old toilet cistern; it reminded me of ringing a church bell every time I pulled the heavy chain to flush it. That was where we began to forge our legend, where we started throwing impromptu gigs and parties. We’d flyer Camden and invite people back there and play for them, revelling in the randomness and the unexpected that this brought. At the first ever gig there, we’d decorated the place with lots of candles, and Peter had been to visit his parents in Germany and come back with lots of beer and cigarettes, which we’d put out for people. Everyone sat expectantly around, waiting for us to begin and, as soon as we played the first chord, all the lights went out. We had to ask around for a pound for the meter, but got things going again eventually and it turned into a very long, debauched party. Irish Paul shagged someone in the bathroom, which at the time we thought was particularly impressive, and that first night created the template for all the gigs there to come. The locust swarm would descend, we’d play, and they’d leave us, sometimes days later, with only debris and hazy recollections to show for it. The flat would be wrecked, but we’d be happy. Later, after we were signed, the so-called ‘guerrilla’ gigs would take over the mantle. They came about because, by that time, the internet was becoming a force in everyone’s lives, and we were knocked sideways by the way you could post ‘Gig tomorrow night’ on a forum somewhere and, as if by magic, people would turn up. The guerrilla gigs were chaotic and disorganized because there was no time to sort anything out, and precious little money, too, but the fact that people would turn up was a real buzz. They were a continuation of the impromptu gigs at 236 Camden Road, in the same mi casa es su casa spirit. They were about anyone being able to reach out and touch the people in the pictures on their wall, the musicians they were listening to at the time, about pushing all the boundaries, seeing how far that was possible. It was the best fun imaginable, and everyone was invited.

Remarkably, the family upstairs at 236 Camden Road looked on us as some kind of novelty. They never batted an eyelid even when we serenaded up to seventy people at a time below them. Then we hit upon the idea of sub-letting the space under the stairwell to a French conceptual artist who we charged twenty pounds a week. He was happy there in our basement. And so was I, for a while.

I was always much happier on Camden Road than I was later, living on the top floor of a townhouse in Holloway, which, looking back, was an exercise in making myself feel edgy. Some nights I even slept in a cage, in the spare room of a prostitute we’d made friends with, a woman we’ll call Natasha. Natasha worked from home, I suppose you could say; she ran it as a sort of brothel and, when she wasn’t working, she hung around Camden a lot, a face at our shows. Someone said she knew one of the guys in Blur, but I don’t know. What I do know was we needed somewhere to sleep, and she had the space, so we took her up on her offer, despite its pitfalls. Natasha looked like a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy: skinny, emaciated and striking, and she was an enigma. She thought it would age her being outside too long, took cabs everywhere, and wouldn’t leave the house without applying sun block – a very paranoid girl, and quite lonely as far as I could tell. The bedroom I was allocated had a big iron cage in it, halfway between an outsize birdcage and a medieval torture device, which I often ended up sleeping in. I think her clients used to spend their hours in there paying to suffer, but it afforded me a degree of security I enjoyed. Natasha was our drummer for a few hours; we liked the notion, but she really couldn’t drum.

When she had a client, Peter and I would sit in the next room holding pellet guns and talk in gruff voices so that, through the wall, one might think that she had muscle to look after her in case a client freaked out. As a thank-you she’d usually take us to the café across the road and feed us, which seemed a fair exchange. Peter and I used to spy on her and her clients, sometimes, crawling quietly around on our knees to peep through the keyhole. I remember seeing her with a Hassidic Jew and, surprisingly, the drummer from a band we knew. Not at the same time, of course. We sat back dumbfounded when we caught sight of him on the other side of the door.

However, the boarding arrangement couldn’t, and didn’t, last. A few months in, Peter found a new girlfriend, which Natasha didn’t like at all. She could be quite possessive and paranoid, and she used to have these fits and attacks that she seemed totally convinced by, but which we never quite fully believed in. We used to take her to hospital and she’d always rally and make a recovery, a little miracle every time. She claimed to be able to see auras around people, and know high-ups in government, clients, she said, who were in positions of terrible power. One night she left a note to say goodbye and perched out on the window ledge feigning a suicide attempt. There was another suicide note pinned on the door one day when we got back from somewhere, and we ran into the kitchen where she had her head in the electric oven. I’m not sure she enjoyed the sound of our laughter, and I don’t think we were laughing because we thought the situation funny. Fundamentally, we were pretty scared of her. In the end I took the coward’s way out and fled to Manchester in the middle of the night. Peter had already gone, and I was getting the fear alone in my cage. Someone told me Natasha has since moved to Ireland, but if ever I’m on the Holloway Road I still tread lightly.

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They were lazy days on the whole, though, and when there was no wind to fill our sails Peter and I would drift in slow circles, becalmed, waiting for the currents to bear us away. After we left Holloway, we moved to Dalston, where Peter had a room and I was sort of squatting. Also there was Don, whose place it was, who was eccentric at best, and another guy, Mad Mick, who lived up to his name and was always hanging around. Nothing much moved on those long hot days, cars hummed in and out of sight, and we lay listlessly in sunlit windows trying to feel the world turn. Downstairs there were a couple of French girls who spent their spare time attempting to make ketamine out of rose-water that they’d bought at the chemist. They’d spend afternoons boiling all sorts of ingredients in rose-water, because one night at a club someone had given them a bum tip that that was how you made the stuff, but they were having about as much luck with that as most alchemists have conjuring up gold. Mad Mick was from Brooklyn, and I liked him. He was quiet and self-contained, but a lunatic with it, and it was as if he lived in the shadows: you’d only see him at very strange times, like six in the morning at Dalston Kingsland train station when he really lived over in Kentish Town. We’d always meet him at the most odd, out-of-the-way places with the oddest people. We’d show up at a random squat party in Deptford and he’d be there. I was in a Jobcentre in Hackney once in an interminable wait to see someone and I suggested we start breakdancing and, without another word, he did. He was a damn good breakdancer, and it made the surly staff feel uncomfortable, which was a bonus.

During those early days we got a gig in a nursing home in East Ham because our drummer at the time knew one of the nurses there and we’d been promised £50 if we did this gig for the old people. So we trooped down and were confronted by a room of very fragile and vulnerable old people, the kind of old people, shockingly old, you don’t see on the street any more because they can’t really get around. I feel quite bad about it now. About the most suitable song in our repertoire was a cover of ‘Anything But Love’, the old jazz standard, and we tried to be quiet, but we weren’t especially good at that, and there were a lot of fingers in ears and a lot of confusion. People kept getting up and walking around, as if they weren’t quite sure what was going on, or where the door was. One of the patients there was called Margie, and she took rather a shine to us; the poor lady had alcoholic dementia and kept asking if we’d brought a pint with us. We persisted, though, and by the end of our set a few people seemed into it. Then a couple of nurses came in and quietly drew a curtain around one of the beds. It transpired that its occupant had died during our performance of ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. It was a pretty incomprehensible moment for us, but the nurses took it entirely in their stride. It might sound cold, but I suppose that’s just how it is in a hospice. It was terribly tragic, but what a pertinent song to go out on. There are, I imagine, worse ways to go.

To add to the surreal turn that the day had taken, before the gig we’d told Mad Mick that he could be our manager. We didn’t really want him to be, and of course there wasn’t a job because we didn’t really need a manager back then, but it was just a cool thing to tell people none the less. We’d said to Mick that if he ran to the gig from Dalston then the job was his. As we left the hospice after this terrible confusion, just as we were driving off, we saw Mick at the end of the road, huffing and puffing. He had just arrived, had run all the way, but there wasn’t room in the car to give him a lift back so we had to leave him there. I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and there was Mad Mick, confused and red-faced, sweating in his jeans, getting smaller and smaller until he was only a speck.

Gigs like that were clearly not going to pay, so I had a series of other, mostly crap, jobs that I sometimes enjoyed but mostly resented. Waterloo had been my gateway to the world, but the altogether less lovely Hammersmith was my gateway to the world of work. The temp agency there saw something in me that I’m not all too sure I saw in myself, dispatching me across London to push paper around like a clerk in the background in an Ealing comedy. For a while, I was at the BBC, and I looked out over west London from my office at Television Centre, a network of endless corridors and boxy rooms that held about as much charm as pleurisy. I was twenty-one, and an easily distracted employee at best. The wages were criminal and, feeling hard done by, I spent my days roaming the corridors wearing a suit and a trilby, which wasn’t really done back then, and flirting with random BBC employees, ambitious girls who really didn’t care if I lived or died, though the hat piqued their interest. I was a purchase ledger clerk, which mean paying the BBC employees, though I can’t quite remember ever paying anyone or not. At the same time, I was performing in the house band at a place called Jazz After Dark on Greek Street in Soho. The four of us played for four hours a night for the princely sum of £20 (between us, not each) and a bottle of beer apiece. Which, considering that none of us could actually play jazz, was probably fair enough. My undoing was oversleeping one morning after a gig and missing my shift. The BBC drafted in another temp to do my job, a temp who accomplished, I was reliably informed, my whole eight hours’ work in the first five minutes of the day. It was fair to say that they were on to me.

After that, I worked at Cobb’s Hall in Hammersmith, which wasn’t a place for a suit or trilby. I was on the front desk, or the front line as I came to think of it, for a building full of social workers. A lot of their clients were mental health patients, a good portion of them schizophrenics, who came in to get their injections to offset their psychosis. I won’t pretend to understand what went on in the clinic or what disorders some of the people were struggling with, but I was pretty much the first face they saw when they came in. So I had people who were overdue their injections, very interesting people, very angry people, some telling me they’re the Son of God and they need to kill me, and there’s no security. Just me sitting there in splendid isolation. I had a little black alarm cord that, when you pulled it, made a sound that I can only describe as inoffensive, and that was my only protection. All for £5 an hour. I never got hurt, although came close to it, but there was an impreciseness to their plans, so when they loomed up it wasn’t too difficult to get out of the way. In quieter moments I used to go through the computer system and see who was on file. I found a few people I knew.

Far more pleasant were the three years I spent off and on as an usher in London’s theatres. The job excited me if only because it let me in on the periphery of the glittering world I’d imagined London to be. I was still outside its walls, but I could finally see in at the windows. Before I moved to London, I’d get home from a day trip to the West End, turn on the TV and there was the city again, and it seemed fantastic to me that I’d been somewhere that was on the box, that it actually existed. When I moved there, I’d go back to places again and again, and remember standing in the cobbled square in Covent Garden early one morning with a light mist on the streets and no one around. I fancied I heard the flower market starting up across the way, blooms brought on trestle tables. I imagined Oscar Wilde, the comings and goings of My Fair Lady, I romanticized it out of all proportion and it took me a long time to realize that it was a modern-day tourist trap. When I was working at the theatres I used to go down to the Piazza in my lunch hours and watch the performers, and I’d see people in sleeping bags waiting to perform for the tourists and people a little too drunk for lunchtime, and I realized that the only place that the romantic Covent Garden lived on in was in the hearts of people like me. And, little by little, the lustre faded. The world inside the theatre, however, still held some magic, and I particularly liked working at the Old Vic. It was near my spiritual home of Waterloo – the portal to this new world for a country boy like me – and I loved its tradition and its history; it signified something and felt real to me. I had one pair of blue trousers and a horrible matching waistcoat that I wore for all my theatre work; the trousers were a pair of flares that were so worn that they shone. They never got washed because I had nowhere to wash them, and at one point I had impetigo on my legs that I couldn’t help rubbing, and the trousers eventually blended with the scab. But those trousers carried me through, from my initial days among shadowy aisles pointing patrons to their seats to the day our Rough Trade deal finally allowed me to fold them neatly along their thinning creases and put them away for good.

That might make everything sound very purposeful, but the truth was that I didn’t have any sense of where we were going while I was at the Old Vic, though Peter and I were increasingly inseparable and working more and more intensely on our lyrics. Peter was always very optimistic but somehow – and this is probably indicative of the insecurities that would dog me all the way through my performing career – I never thought I’d make it in a band. For me, it was an impenetrable world, and playing in front of a small audience was already intimidating enough. Peter’s attitude was different: We can do this, you can be that. He was full of faith, life and vitality, and that sustained me; it was a real part of the magic of the time. Peter surprised me at work at the Old Vic one night, when we were meant to be rehearsing but I’d taken the paying job instead. Separate worlds – music and theatre – colliding momentarily, almost causing one to spin helplessly out of orbit. I was in my trusty trousers, probably gleaming in the theatre lights, serving a platter of vol-au-vents as part of a reception for Marcel Marceau. It was an after-show as far as I can remember – as much as great mime artists have after-shows, anyway. Then Peter just appeared, lumbering into sight, red-faced with tears in his eyes. I can’t imagine what the guests must have thought as a stranger button-holed one of the waiters, and the quiet of the theatre bar is shattered as he screams: ‘What are you doing here? Can’t you see these people are cunts? We’re meant to be writing songs!’

The room screeched to a halt, a hundred heads turning towards us, now centre stage in the encroaching silence. I was livid. How I kept my job there is still a mystery.

As well as the Old Vic, I did stints at the Aldwych, the Apollo and the Lyric. Ushering is a funny job, mostly populated by hopeful actors and musicians, a lot of whom fall by the wayside and get stuck in that routine. The idea is that it’ll subsidize your earnings and allow you to pursue your dreams during the daylight hours, but the reality is that you all end up going to the same cliquey bars after the show, spend all your money and then sleep all day. Many people get stuck in that for years. It wasn’t entirely without merit: I got to meet Harold Pinter and Michael Gambon, an impressive man who seemed to have a glow about him. I even had a chance to speak with him too, and he gave me some advice.

‘What is your purpose?’ he asked.

I mumbled something about going to drama school, breaking into acting – I was still very young and shy – and he looked me directly in the eye and said: ‘Don’t worry about that bullshit, just lie. I got an agent on the strength of saying I did this thing at the Old Vic and it was a total lie.’ He was quite encouraging, and pleasingly unprincipled, too, as far as I could tell.

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For a short while we called the band The Strand, principally because, during my breaks as an usher at the Aldwych Theatre I used to walk up and down the Strand wondering when it was I would be randomly offered a part in a film or even to be scouted to be a model. Those were the kind of dumb things I’d sometimes do. London for me back then was limitless, and I was naïve and silly. I just assumed that there was a chance anyone could make it, get lucky. Funnily enough, it never happened like that, but the band name stuck for a period, one of our many awful names, along with The Cricketers and The Sallys. Then I suggested The Libertines: we’d had a well-thumbed copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Lusts of the Libertines floating around the band for as long as I could remember. That name was, briefly, rejected, though I can’t imagine why: none of us was particularly enamoured with the idea of being called The Sallys or The Strand.

Later, by utter coincidence, we found out that the Sex Pistols used to be called The Strand. I met Glenn Matlock backstage when we supported them at Crystal Palace and the only conversation I could think of, while he’s sitting there drinking herbal tea and I was drunk and looking for drugs, was to tell him that my band used to be called The Strand, too. It must have sounded like a complete lie, the sort of thing you’d make up just to cosy up to him, to let him know that you really knew all about the Pistols. I felt a ridiculous need to make conversation because I was a fan, and really wanted to talk to the Sex Pistols. He, meanwhile, simply regarded me quietly over his tea. It was at a football stadium, and so we were standing in our dressing room, trying not to worry too much and just enjoy it, and the Pistols were in the room next door. I could hear John Lydon saying, and I think he was talking about Keith Flint, ‘I was doing that, I had that haircut twenty years ago, cheeky sod.’ That made us roll about with laughter, deliriously happy just to be a part of it, to be that close to the inner circle.

Even though we were playing in front of all the Sex Pistols’ gear, the stage was a vast expanse. It was a magnificent day, perfect for a festival, and the crowd was made up of families and lots of blokes in their late thirties and forties, out for the day reliving their youth. Punk pomp with pushchairs. We had our matching red army jackets on in the blisteringly hot sun, and we tried to get them going, but they all started to sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ at us, I think on account of our jackets. That just fired us up, so we ripped off our tunics to expose skinny bare flesh, this pasty punk flesh, which for reasons I’ve yet to fathom always goes down a treat. Suddenly they seemed to be on our side. Fear and adrenalin meant that we were going mental, fucking giving it as hard as we could and we really, really meant it. I think that came across, and our enthusiasm was reciprocated by a very partisan audience. They were there for one band and we weren’t that band. Later on I remember reading Steven Wells’ review of the gig and I think we got a quick mention, which I was pleased about. The Sex Pistols are a pretty hard band to support.

Afterwards, I bumped into John Lydon and I asked if he’d seen the show. ‘Libertines!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘I don’t miss a trick,’ he said and shot off.

We were pretty much ordered to go to the after-show party. I remember someone who might have been Lydon’s minder pointing his finger at us and shouting at us to do so. I’m assuming that John Lydon’s quite into drum and bass, because the party was at a rough drum and bass place in Wandsworth High Street, which I found a bit odd. Peter took a chair from the Lydon group, and he’s a massive Lydon fan so he was crestfallen when Lydon said to him, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Those chairs are for us; they’re our chairs. Be fair!’

The drink and fervour of the day had taken their hold when I started asking Lydon if he could get us any drugs. ‘I’m not your drug dealer,’ he said, ‘but I shall speak to the proprietor and see what I can do.’ Looking back, I doubt he did, and I must have asked him another four times that night before he took our manager to one side and said, ‘I am not his drug dealer.’ I stopped asking him after that. At least I hope I did.

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I think if you’d said to us back when we lived on the Camden Road that only a couple of years hence, just a hop over the millennium, we’d be supporting the Sex Pistols, I would have laughed you out of town. On millennium eve, I was with Johnny Borrell and his girlfriend, Jen, and we were drunk. We’d left it too late to organize our evening, we couldn’t get near any of the celebrations so – and I’m still not sure how we hit on the idea – we went down to the Kingsway underpass knowing that it led directly to Waterloo Bridge. The crowds were milling about as we disappeared into the gaping darkness and clambered over the locked gate. We stumbled along, for about half a mile, the sound of London fading behind us, until we came out right in the heart of the celebrations, the Thames below us, the sky full of gassy sulphur. It was exhilarating, euphoric. We walked into the middle of it all with a bottle of Cava. Everyone had been wondering for years where they were going to be in 2000, and I was in the epicentre of my universe: Waterloo.

That moment seemed freighted with significance, seemed to be one of the rare times I was in the right place at the right time. Mostly, we’d just bob about, drift through London like ghosts, talk about our band and admire the city’s shape; it seemed magical to us. Sitting outside pubs in Soho on long summer evenings, climbing the park fence at eleven at night in winter, that stillness among the firs, grass crunching beneath your feet.

Other times Peter and I would just work away, on the peripheries of the scene, made all the more aware of that fact by the near misses we had. One night, I remember being elbowed in the ribs by Liam Gallagher. I was in the Dublin Castle innocently minesweeping drinks into my pint glass at the time. I looked around. He was accompanied by Mani from The Stone Roses and Finley Quaye; you could almost hear the sound of a hundred necks craning to get a better look at them all. Peter approached Liam and said something to him which I couldn’t make out, though Liam’s voice cut across the room: ‘I’m the Devil’s dick, me.’ But Liam didn’t mean anything by the accidental elbow, graciously bought me a beer and then politely declined to come back to our flat and have a jam. I can fully understand that, now that I’ve so frequently been on the receiving end of such requests. It was impossible for me to understand, then, that he was just a person in the pub enjoying a drink with his friends. Not the rock star, not the performer, just the Devil’s dick enjoying a pint.

Another night, we liberated a moped on the Kentish Town Road, a Honda Cub 90 propped up outside the WKD Café, a dive full of indie kids being scrunched by bouncers. WKD stood for Wisdom, Knowledge and Destiny, which were hardly abounding in there. It didn’t last long. The moped had been sitting outside for a while, obviously abandoned or dumped, and the third time we walked past we decided to wheel it with us. Down a backstreet, Peter was walking along and I was sitting on it, sort of wheeling it along, and then we got leapt upon. I remember this Kiwi man, a sort of angry, apish figure waving a police badge at us, the headlights of a car screaming up the road. It was like something from The Sweeney. Scary stuff, it jolted us out of our reverie and then some. We were arrested and carted off down to the cells. When they asked us what we did, I said I was an actor and Peter said he was a poet. I think it was then that they realized that we weren’t professional criminals. The police officer at the desk was from Liverpool so I instantly tried on my bad Scouse accent, trying to impress upon her how Peter and I weren’t vagrants – that we shared a house, that there were lots of books in our toilet. A little too Withnailian now that I think about it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I asked her if she read on the toilet, or did they call it the can in Liverpool? At the end of it I think we kind of charmed them, but they still banged us up in the cells anyway.

Once we’d stopped protesting our innocence, I think we were charged with the theft of an automobile. I still have the charge sheets somewhere. I think we were both shocked when they actually shut the cell doors on us. They had small chalkboards outside the cells, and on the way through we liberated the chalk next to the boards through the little shutter in the door and Peter wrote poetry on the walls. We left our mark as we thought Libertines should. We were released the next day with a caution; by all accounts the bike’s owner was less than pleased that we’d liberated his Honda.

But we were Libertines: we liberated. That was what we did. We always did know how to make our own fun.

TWO Plan A (#u65cf2be5-503e-55aa-933b-2df47ede9b8c)

It’s late at night, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. Another cigarette, another glass of red wine … there’s tea on the table, too, but that’s cooling. When I set out to write this book and this solo album I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I unearthed some journals that I’d long ago put away, out of sight and mind, and was flicking through the pages, and they fell open to reveal four photo-booth pictures still in a strip. Two of Peter and two of me: we’d shared the booth, running in and out so we could get two shots apiece. We look impossibly young; I’m cocky about something, or pretending to be, and Peter’s a shock of hair and eyes like a deer. A few pages later and there’s some truly terrible poetry, a sketch of Peter that he hated (but sketched when I was hating him so that’s fair enough) and then some words I recognize as being the genesis of ‘Death On The Stairs’.

I’ve just been watching the young me play Top of the Pops for the first time. I usually can’t face watching myself sober, so I’ll get drunk and go online to look at past glories, and am occasionally pleasantly surprised to find that some have hardly faded at all. I can’t believe it now, but when we were offered a spot performing on that British institution, we began arguing about the rights and wrongs of doing it. We really wanted to – for egotistical reasons we were dying to be on national TV, and you don’t join a band like The Libertines to be a shrinking violet – but then someone said that The Clash had refused to do it. God knows what relevance that had, but it seemed really important to us at the time, and someone else said that Pan’s People, or whoever it was, had danced to ‘Bankrobber’ in their absence, and that that was even worse … As if that had any fucking bearing on us at all: I think this was the first moment I realized how intrinsically self-important bands are. Everything has to be analysed, ruminated upon, done to fucking death. It’s all so massive and important, so Spinal Tap at times. Forget the devil being in the detail: all the bands I’ve been in are stuck in the fucking cracks.

Anyone could tell we wanted to do Top of the Pops. Who wouldn’t? We only had to talk ourselves into it. Our egos won that battle, along with me saying that if there’s one kid in Wigan who’s going to tap into what we’re doing because of it, while he’s eating his beans in front of the telly, then we’ve achieved something. We did ‘Time For Heroes’ that first appearance. It was back in the exact same BBC building where I’d stalked the corridors in my trilby trying to impress posh girls, so that was a little victory in its way. We did Top of the Pops again, a second appearance on the show, but that doesn’t get talked about so much because Peter wasn’t there. Peter hated Anthony for a while – Anthony Rossomando who replaced him for some of the live shows – because Anthony did Top of the Pops in his place. Peter accidentally saw it on telly, and he was at his lowest ebb at the time, and it understandably tore him up a bit.

Even back then I avoided watching myself doing ‘Time For Heroes’ on the TV until I was good and drunk. When I did, I watched it out of one eye while listing slightly and it was all right; it looked like we were winning. Quite soon after, I met Graham Coxon from Blur for the first time, which was a big deal for me. He’d seen it, too, and he said he loved my ‘anti-guitar solo’, which I didn’t really understand but decided to take as an enormous compliment anyway. I tried to maintain my composure, but I can’t explain the feeling of happiness it gave me. When Coxon was a drinker and he was in the Good Mixer pretty much holding up the bar, our bass player, John, had gone up to him and asked him if he was Graham Coxon. Graham said to him that if he didn’t know the answer to that then he could fuck off, which makes a lot of sense in a way. Though that didn’t help John much; he was gutted.

There was a similar frisson of excitement when we got played in the Queen Vic for the first time, too. Like Top of the Pops, EastEnders crosses those boundaries, it helps explain to your parents and family what it is you actually do because, in the real world, playing and singing in a band is not working for a living. So when your family’s sitting watching Pat behind the bar, or whoever it was running the Vic at that point, and the jukebox starts playing ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, it helps people close to you to understand. Before then, they’d say, ‘Have you met anyone famous, have you met Britney?’ But getting a record deal doesn’t give you the keys to some secret half of London, to the parties where Bono hangs out with Britney. And thank fuck for that. The Vic’s a good way to help a different generation understand another world, and maybe a good benchmark for your family, so they can start taking you seriously, and maybe get off your back a little bit. It was like giving my dad a gold disc: an affirmation I think we’d both been looking for. So I raised a glass when we snaked out of the speakers in the Queen Vic. These days, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, though I always regretted never catching sight of us on one of those band posters they have pasted up by Walford East Tube station. And this from the man who debated if being on Top of the Pops was selling out.

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My parents broke up when I was five years old. I didn’t see it coming, but I suppose I heard it. Our house was filled with shouting, things were broken, stuff was hurled across rooms. I’m sure nobody got badly hurt, though I’m certain some feelings were. I’d come into the living room to studied silence and a smashed mug in the corner of the room, shards like chipped teeth across the carpet. My mother would be staring hard out of the window, my father in the kitchen busying himself with something, the kettle announcing morning with its shrill whistle. The noise abated quickly when my mother left for good, and there was a hole in our household then that filled up with sadness. My father seemed shrunken somehow, but that must be in my imagination. I’m not sure a five-year-old could have truly understood what was going on. All I knew was that I missed my mother, and I’d stare out at the estate we lived on and imagine her making her way back towards us through the hedgerows and houses, and how she’d catch me staring and wave. Then my dad would tell me to get dressed and pull me from my reverie.

When I was born, we were living on an estate in Basingstoke, and the birth was a particularly protracted and painful one by all accounts. There were two of us; I was the unexpected twin, or the uninvited guest as I sometimes think of it. My brother died a few months later and I don’t want to labour over this, but I don’t want to deny it either; it’s something that’s stuck with me all my life. What if he’d lived, and what if he were here with me now? Did my living have something to do with his dying? I’ve always stayed close to one person since – I’m not sure if that’s coincidence, or even relevant – but there’s been Peter, and there’s been Chris and Anthony and Kieran Leonard (the lithest man I have ever met, a screaming and tender troubadour – a scruffy Cobainesque comrade in striped skintight Beetlejuice trousers, big boots and a razor-sharp wit). Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve always needed someone near. My big sister’s two years older than me – so I was born with a boss – and we grew close as cups were thrown and doors slammed shut, and our parents banged up and down the stairs.

My mother might as well have disappeared into the ether for a year or so after she left; she adopted what I’d come to think of as a happy hippy lifestyle, a transient freewheeling. We lost her to a commune, a number of communes over the years as a matter of fact, and so, for the next eight years or thereabouts, I lived between two places. School days with my dad at our house in Whitchurch, and most weekends and holidays out at a commune or in a field under the stars. It certainly wasn’t without its charms, but there was such a stark and unexpected contrast between my two lives; I’d literally feel the jolt as I made the transition between the two worlds.

I’ve come to regard those times very fondly. I was blessed to be torn between two such different ways of life, to be exposed to all of these colours; my formative palette was surely enriched by it. What I most remember about the communes at first is looking up and seeing all this hair, men with huge beards and wild, untamed hair everywhere. I go back and look at photos from that time now and it looks like fun, quite a groovy scene, but at the time I found it peculiar. I’d make them laugh by complaining about it all, about the smell and having to sit around in the dark with people farting. It didn’t feel particularly liberating, but then I suppose they were on their own journey. They used to respond to my moaning by laughing and saying, ‘Isn’t it priceless the stuff that kids come out with?’ But I reckon kids quite often come out with the truth, as they haven’t yet learnt to censor themselves. Farting and sitting around in the dark aside, there was a lot of hand-holding and embracing; spiritual meditation, New Age philosophies, that sort of thing. And lots and lots of music. I remember the sound of people meditating, the ‘Om’ reverberating through the tents as the nights drew in. There were lots of drugs, though I only ever really saw the effect they had on people – blissed-out faces all around and glazed eyes staring off into the depths of the universe. It was – and this is an understatement on a grand scale – a very colourful landscape for a young child. Very conducive to the development of an imaginative and inquiring mind. I don’t think it did me any harm; more opened me up to things. And then the inevitable jolt, the return to my home on the council estate with its well-defined rules, structured days and, most importantly, stability.

I am nostalgic about my childhood days, yes, but it’s not entirely unalloyed fondness I bounced between, feeling pretty bereft emotionally. I know both my parents tried very hard in difficult circumstances, but I was very aware that I was missing some sort of a loving linchpin in my life. I wanted someone I could turn to, someone to lean on and trust. My dad was working all the time on various artistic things and working hard to help the family get by, although he carried a simmering anger around with him, which I may or may not have inherited. Meanwhile, my mum was off being a totally different person, a different kind of parent. I think my sister and I felt cast adrift a little, as if we didn’t belong to either. I needed the stability of my dad’s world, but I was never hugged or cuddled there as a child, while, in the other world, the world of free love and enlightenment, everyone hugged you to the point that it became meaningless. In The Libertines people never stopped hugging me. I’m pretty good at hugging, actually; the five-year-old in me throws himself at it as if it’s salvation.

∗ ∗ ∗

Looking back through the fog, I’m grateful for Top of the Pops and the Queen Vic. Our deal with Rough Trade brought us that kind of presence, and saved me and Peter from bedsits without doors and other people’s basements. It was more than we could have hoped for at the beginning, especially when, at a certain point in our development, the early line-up of The Libertines fell apart. We’d been drifting like tumbleweed across London, taking our own sweet time, playing beautiful, flowery songs and singing about love’s vicissitudes, lugging amps into old people’s homes, and doing little gigs wherever we could. It all broke up, though, when Peter began to change gigs around, cancel shows and refuse to take money for performing. The original drummer and bassist were too ambitious to take this, so they quit and the bottom fell out, but we stuck with our manager and, when we saw what The Strokes were doing, we began to form a different idea of the band. I think when The Strokes broke so suddenly and so big, we were rather fancifully annoyed at them: annoyed they were shagging our women and taking our drugs, taking the space that, in our minds, was reserved for us. We decided something had to be done, and so we began to write new songs. They were faster and more driven – sexier, more tortured, funnier – and everything began to click. I remember the time well because there was a Rough Trade showcase looming on the horizon, which we were due to play in, and I was at a friend’s flat teaching Johnny Borrell the bass line to ‘Horrorshow’. It was the day the planes hit the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, and only a few weeks before the showcase. Johnny was originally our bassist but, when the day of that showcase came, I phoned him as I was arriving at Earl’s Court, to see if he was almost there. Johnny, though, was on the Alabama 3 tour bus in Cardiff, in the middle of a rather large bender, so we had to do the showcase with me playing the fucking bass. Thankfully, it still worked, and Rough Trade took us on. Gary, a session drummer who’d played most famously with Eddie Grant, was working in marketing at that point – he was our manager’s secretary’s boyfriend – and he came on board, too. Rough Trade then pointed out that we needed a bassist, so we asked John. And that was The Libertines fully formed in its second, famous, incarnation. We’d found a rich seam of new songs, which we continued to mine for the first single and album, but when we got to the second album the old ones started to sneak back in. ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ is a song that has its roots in the quieter, poetic first incarnation of the band. It was great, after the angry thing, to have such a reservoir of wonderful rich, lyrical material that we’d really wanted to sing about when we were young, fresh and idealistic.