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.
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