Carl Barat - Threepenny Memoir_ The Lives of a Libertine

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.