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.
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.
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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