Carl Barat - Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

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.

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.

∗ ∗ ∗

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.