Carl Barat - Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

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.