Threepenny Memoir: The Lives of a Libertine

Signing for Rough Trade was amazing, as well as a real relief after all those years of slumming it with our intricate little melodies and beautiful words. We’d come back with an attitude and anger, as if on the rebound after the years during which people hadn’t wanted us: a very genuine sense of frustration followed, suddenly, by that incredible connection, and we weren’t going to let it pass. Thanks to Rough Trade, Peter and I moved east to Bethnal Green, to the next Albion Rooms, and it was domestic bliss after a fashion. We shared a business bank account and the flat, a beautiful place that had one big room upstairs and one tiny little cupboard. Nevertheless, it was spacious and bright, and the main room – Peter’s room – housed the most amazing brass bed. I know that because I saw it every time I went through it to get to my bedroom (the cupboard). All I ever wanted in that flat was a proper door to my room. Peter’s room was always filled with noise: records or guitars or repeats of Steptoe and Son and Rising Damp on TV. We had a modest fridge, which never housed anything other than booze and £50 notes. We’d never handled large amounts of £50 notes before so we luxuriated in them, ironing them and placing them in the fridge. It was very cinematic opening up a fridge and seeing all that money in neat, colourful piles. It sounds vulgar in hindsight, but it was actually quite innocent. When the Dollar Man, our dealer, came around we’d pluck a couple of fifties out of the fridge, press them on our faces for that cooling sensation and hand them over. We liked him: he had a gold tooth and wore shades, just like you’d want a drug dealer to. It was while we were in Bethnal Green that I came home one day and saw our record contract sitting on the table. And I thought that Peter must have been getting nostalgic, revelling in the moment when we got picked up, looking at the paperwork that sealed our deal, and thinking how far we’d come. And then I saw my chequebook, open, with a cheque missing; and next to that a piece of paper with lots of different versions of my signature directly lifted off the contract. Peter hadn’t even tried to hide the fact that he’d forged my signature; I quite admired him for that. I admired his spirit.

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Even when Peter wasn’t forging my signature, I’m about as adept with money as the World Bank – by which I mean not at all. I started off being frugal and I’ve always been a hard worker. I went out to work as soon as I was allowed, and had a whole range of awful, dangerous or soul-destroying jobs, factory jobs cleaning sump oil, or tossing salad in a huge warehouse under barbaric lights. Nevertheless, they got me out of the house, and they were happy hours. It was great to be alone and isolated even in the company of others and the idea of actually being paid opened up a new world for me. Earning your first wage is an amazing feeling, even if I wasn’t great at the jobs I unearthed.

There were rumours in that salad-packing factory that there were black widow spiders in the crates, and part of our job was to pick fat moths out from between the green salad leaves, put them in a polythene bag provided expressly for that purpose and not give them a second thought as they expired. Someone found half a frog once, and they had to stop the whole load, shut everything down, and there was another enduring rumour that a frozen body had once fallen out of one of the crates of imported leaves. Some poor bugger had been trying to get into the country illegally and had chosen the wrong method of entry. I imagined him shattering on impact with the floor, like someone caught in liquid nitrogen in a movie, shattering into a thousand pieces, shining limbs skittering away across the factory. The reality, if it had ever happened, had probably been an urgent call to HR and a screaming workmate being led quietly out of the door.

The factory was about three miles outside Whitchurch, and I worked the graveyard shift, which meant cycling through country lanes with no streetlights, and I’d hope for nights with a full moon as that made my journey easier. I’d zone out and use my peripheral vision to sense where the road was, my gears snagging as I puffed my way to work. I’d arrive around ten in the evening, the salad factory floodlit and looming before me like a UFO that had dropped out of the sky, white clouds drifting upwards, glowing eerily in the halogen lights. I’d climb into my white overalls and wellies, feeling like the sperm in the Woody Allen film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, pull the hairnet tight over my head and apply some alcohol rub. The latter was easily the most fascinating aspect of the job: get too close, inhale too deeply and the strip lighting overhead grew briefly, if brilliantly, bright and my heartbeat would fill my head. Then I’d trudge towards the gigantic fridge, where the conveyer belts ran on an endless loop and huge bins of salad sailed by like a low-rent Generation Game. The strip lighting that bloomed with alcohol rub made everyone look gnarled and zombie-like and cruel. Features washed out, eyes glinting like cheap glass; smiles became grimaces, a cheery wink an indication of impending evil. Admittedly, I was seventeen and sleepless, but it wasn’t just my imagination that was making ghouls of the workforce. I did that for a year and the thing that stays with me the most isn’t the sheer inanity of the tasks I was asked to do or even the chemical rub: it was the piped music that came in through the refrigerated walls. Alanis Morissette’s ‘Jagged Little Pill’. It had just been released and what was worse than hearing it over and over again was only just being able to make it out and then it got lost in the drone of heavy machinery. In reality none of us had a clue what we were doing, but the salad would slow in front of us on the conveyor and we’d toss it and then send it on its way to who knows where. I’d imagine people unpacking their lunch and biting into their sandwiches across the country, never giving a thought to the aimless shuffling of salad leaves by drones like me on quiet nights in the Hampshire countryside. You couldn’t really talk to anyone unless you were willing to shout so I’d get lost in myself, just thinking of elaborate ways to entertain myself. At first, I pretended to the woman who did the coat checks that I had a mental disorder and I always had to wear two of everything. So I started off by wearing a watch on each wrist and slowly added bits and pieces until, by the end of it, I was wearing two pairs of trousers and two coats. On reflection, I might have taken it too far, but that’s where I went when I got lost in my thoughts. All there was to do was think, reflect on where you were, how you had got there and how you could get out. I’d just think and think, until it was five in the morning and the day was reaching in and I made my weary way home, the bike’s spinning wheels beneath me.

When I finally got out it was on my own terms, even if I was wearing three layers of clothes. Unlike in my first job from which I’d been fired, aged thirteen, for my own good. At £2 an hour I’d been cleaning the bins and machinery in a plastic mouldings factory. The sun used to come in through the ventilation grills in the ceiling, as did the rain that collected in gleaming, oily puddles on the floor. Years later I’d see the Alien movie and recognize the interior of the Nostromo, there among the greasy steel moulds and unmoving machines that bent plastic to their will. I’d run a rag carelessly along them, the only movement among the stillness, a strange, and in retrospect, dangerous and illegal idyll.

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Once I’d escaped the sleepy, dulling routines of Whitchurch, and Peter and I were living together, just starting to feel our way with the band, my grip on money loosened. I remember the day the Giro came we’d go mad. Suddenly we’d be dining like kings on oysters and champagne for twenty-four hours, and I recall once taking tea at an upmarket tea room, all porcelain and sponge cake and cucumber sandwiches without crusts. Peter had looked at his watch and said, ‘We’re late, come on. We must go.’ And, at that, he stabbed his cigarette out in his tea, took a final sip, and then upped and left, no doubt whisking me along to our next money-burning appointment. To me, that was just devastatingly cool. Then, when all the benefit money was gone, we’d slum it for a fortnight. It’d be back to minesweeping drinks in Camden. I don’t know how we didn’t go completely mad when we first made any real money. I think, on my part, it simply came down to base avarice. Peter used to joke about how much I loved my DVD collection. So, when I first had some spare cash, I bought a computer that played DVDs, and a new suit, and then dived straight into another shop for a Fawlty Towers box set and some David Niven films, too.

The importance of those old British films to me shouldn’t be underestimated. I’ve only ever written songs about escape – I don’t write about the here and now, I want to be transported, and to take people with me to some fantastical place – and that’s what cinema has always represented to me. Peter Sellers, the inimitable David Niven, Sir Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, they all knew how to take me away. To a generation, Alec Guinness is the righteous knight at the heart of Star Wars, but to me he’s the ultimate comic actor and chameleon: the D’Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the shadowy villain in The Ladykillers. There’s something about him, something so quintessentially English. It’s strange to think that a leading man these days is rarely out of his twenties and they were all pushing on into their late forties. Some would say change is for the better, but I’m not sure I’d agree.

All of those actors were role models but David Niven stands out because, when I watched his films, I couldn’t help but see my grandfather on the screen. They looked the same to me, sounded the same, carried themselves in the same way, so much so that, when I was little I truly thought Niven and my granddad might be the same man. I found Niven’s autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon, in a charity shop when I was living in the Albion Rooms, sharing a basement with Peter, and it became a treasured possession, taking pride of place in our one big room with a mattress on the floor, and I’d sit there, reading it by candlelight. The whole book is charming: even when he’s talking about blundering into his first sexual experiences, the death of his father, his friendship with a prostitute, he has a certain grace. He was a noble and dignified gent, a symbol for me of a lost art, a lost way of being, a lost Englishness. Like Niven, the Marx Brothers have the power to make me feel momentarily elated. They found the goodness in things, too. When my glass is half empty, when I’m trying my damnedest to see the light and failing, I can watch Niven come up that beach in A Matter of Life and Death or watch the Marx Brothers horse around in Animal Crackers and feel their rare magic jolt me back to life. Peter liked the Marx Brothers, too, and we’d watch their films on the bus, to help us forget the relentless miles slipping by under our prone bodies.

DVDs, then, were my first vice with Peter, the first thing I splurged money on, and it seems strange to me now that it took me a while to splash out on a nice guitar. I remember the day I did, however. Peter and I went down to Vintage & Rare, the pair of us as pleased as punch and practically glowing with pride, both very naïve. The proprietor must have seen us coming, because he was standing behind the counter rubbing his hands together with glee. I bought my Melody Maker, which I still use, and Peter bought the Epiphone Coronet, which I believe his father impounded for reasons that still escape me.

Even though he’d ultimately kick my door in and try to steal my stuff, Peter gave me security and confidence to go out and do that, to believe that I could go out on a limb, even in prosaic, financial matters. When we were really firing on all cylinders and were together then it really felt like no one could touch us, and that nothing else mattered. As much as I try to deflect it, play it down and be English about it, there was a very powerful romance and beauty to our friendship. At the beginning it was pure and uncomplicated; there was a chemistry. Together we were a complete unit, in each other’s company quite different from how we were with other people. I can sit here as the shadows get longer and be diffident about it until the sun comes up again tomorrow morning, but the fact is that if that dynamic between us hadn’t existed none of this would have happened, I wouldn’t be lamenting what I lost – what we both lost – I wouldn’t be writing it all down. When we’re together and we can forget about bullshit, we become two old souls, kindred spirits in seclusion.

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Enough of lamenting what we’d lost, though. When we signed to Rough Trade, it was all just beginning, and before we’d had a chance to realize what was happening, The Libertines were on the cover of the NME. The new deal with Rough Trade had brought us a new family, not least in the shape of our press officer, Tony the Tiger, a lovely man whose mum knew him better as Tony Lincoln, a man who always wore a backpack, even with a suit. I found that charming. He made an effort to take us aside just before our NME cover photo was due, when the single was getting played on radio stations, and he said, in the nicest possible way, ‘You do you know, after this Wednesday, that things are going to be very different, don’t you? As soon as this cover comes out you’re going to be very, very famous. I’ve seen this before, so just prepare yourselves.’

How did we prepare ourselves? You can get the NME in the West End on a Tuesday, a day before it gets sent around the country, so, come Tuesday, Peter and I reconvene at home in Bethnal Green, suited, booted, sunglasses, acting absurdly cool, and take the Tube to Tottenham Court Road station. Sure enough, there we are, on the front cover, on display on a little news-stand opposite the Astoria. So we ask for a couple of copies, give a knowing nod to the woman behind the counter and then … nothing. Peter very slowly takes the change from her hand and tries to meet her eye, and she just smiles at us and moves on to the next customer. We spent all day walking around clutching copies of the NME, cover out, and nothing happened that day, or that week, not a sausage. It was a fallacy, a funny one, but a fallacy nevertheless.

I’m not quite sure what we were expecting, but, when we broke, we broke big and we broke quickly. We stepped up to the plate and swung, as an American fellow told me as we stepped off stage at the Astoria, the very place, only months before, we’d been to buy the NME. We were supporting The Vines; it was meant to be their first headline show at the venue, but they pulled out and we got top billing by default. That’s when I realized that we were breaking – no one, but no one, gave their tickets back, and as we stepped out it was if they were there to see us. Even the balcony was a mass of adoring silhouettes. We stepped up to the plate and swung. These are the inescapable moments.

All of a sudden, we were recording our first single for Rough Trade with Bernard Butler. Initially, Peter was in thrall to Bernard: he placed him on a pedestal in many ways. As a young man Peter was an NME boy, a letter writer, and Bernard was the cover star, someone who, as part of Suede, helped change the musical landscape for a while. I remember Rough Trade brought him along and he was wearing his Converse and had a big parka on; he was looking very Bernard Butler, which endeared him to me. I sometimes want people to look and act like my perception of them, like the picture I hold of them in my head. When I meet people, fans who stop me for a photo in the street or people who just want to say hello, I always hope that I come away and leave with them the impression they’d hoped for. So, in one way, Bernard was the man we hoped he’d be, quite a player, amazing style. He was also very, very methodical and slightly schoolmasterly in his production approach, which I also found charming. He was like some cool, floppy-haired teacher whose lesson you always secretly looked forward to. And we needed it at first, that hands-on approach, making sure all the boxes were ticked.