table behind us. ‘I’m terminally ill with cancer.’ We were shattered. All I could think about was an empty stool, another face fading from the scene, and the Mixer, Camden, London, everywhere being the poorer for it. It got very sad, and slow, and we started to exchange stories, buy drinks for the fellow, reminisce about the good times we’d had and the good times we’d dedicate to his memory when he’d gone. At the end of the night, we were all mellow and drunk, giving hugs and saying goodbyes, and Rock Paul, on his way out, admitted he’d made the whole thing up. That he just wanted us to buy drinks for him. We were horrified and dumbfounded, but slightly in awe that he’d play the cancer card just to get free drinks. Passing him in the doorway, Welsh Paul gave him a level look that suggested he’d best not try that again, but I think that even he admired the gall of it. Cancer in exchange for a few drinks: how do you meter that out?
∗ ∗ ∗
That was the Camden that made us, formed The Libertines, but the centre of my world, the heart of Albion, was undoubtedly Waterloo. It was where the city first came into sharp relief for me when I was fifteen, where, with a few friends, I came blinking into the light as we descended from the train for the first time. We were country bumpkins at their most inoffensive and wide-eyed, innocence personified in Jim Morrison T-shirts and old German army boots. It felt like the whole world was watching us as we slunk into dodgy bars in Soho, tentatively asking for that first drink then suddenly cocksure when they served us. We trawled the illegal twenty-four-hour joints along the back of Archer Street and felt as if we were in a film, though the magic waned briefly for me when I walked into a toilet and saw someone jacking up as he leant against a tiled wall. I was equally freaked out and awed. From a distance, London had always been faded glamour and drinking underage; coming face to face with hard drugs in a sleazy bar was all I could have hoped for, a ridiculous notion that really does lend weight to the phrase ‘Be careful what you wish for’. At fifteen the rush was almost physical. The three of us then went to a peep show in Soho with about three quid between us, and squeezed into a single booth, the smell of cleaning fluid making our noses wrinkle and our eyes red. Then, as our tingling anticipation built, the screen slid up to reveal an empty room with an old bike propped up against the wall. The emptiness was almost a relief … and then something moved in the corner, a woman you could best describe as tatty, reading a paperback, with part of Spider-Man tattooed across her face. She stood up, her book still hanging from one hand, and gyrated momentarily before us. Then the screen came down, and I think we were all secretly pleased it did. Strangely, I was glad the moment wasn’t sexy. My dream of London was of decaying beauty and a brittle, tawdry sheen of glamour. I had wanted to see the workings beneath the surface and that afternoon in Soho they couldn’t have been more visible.
∗ ∗ ∗
After I dropped out of Brunel and Peter came to town, we set sail together around London, moving from squat to flat, to mates’ houses and then back again. Peter found the first important place: DeLaney Mansions, 360 Camden Road. Our landlord was just like Del Boy, had Del Boy been Greek and fond of shell suits and gaudy chains heavy enough to sink him if he fell in the Thames. It was a sixties bedsit that time forgot. The front door didn’t work, so we had to exit and enter via the window, which we half-heartedly secured with a bicycle chain. Not that we had anything worth stealing. We had so little, in fact, that we shared a mattress on the floor and a kitchenette, and that was it. We had two cyberpunks for upstairs neighbours, a couple who looked like characters from a William Gibson novel: plastic straws in their hair, huge shoes, multiple unappealing piercings. They practically lived on speed. He was a computer programmer (ironic, given that he looked like he belonged in Tron) from Philadelphia; she was an Israeli, quite mad, and with a rather strange sideline. People would pay her cash to go into their houses and beat them up, which I found both creepy and enterprising. The cyberpunks would clomp around above our heads all day, but if we made the slightest sound on our acoustic guitars they’d start screaming and banging the floor. One night a brick came through the window. We looked out through the jagged hole and it was the Israeli, screaming in at us, shouting, ‘Fuck you!’
We called the police, the first and only time we ever called them, I think. But nothing much could be done about it and the upshot was that we had a broken window for the next four months. It was winter, naturally.
We then moved along Camden Road to number 236, where Peter sweet-talked a family who had bought a big house there who we helped move in. The house was a mix of old bedsits and small flats and sat atop a huge basement. The basement was a real mess, but you could see the potential in it, and they gave it to us to live in while they made the place into a home. So we had this glorious subterranean Victorian expanse with a garden, and a grand old toilet cistern; it reminded me of ringing a church bell every time I pulled the heavy chain to flush it. That was where we began to forge our legend, where we started throwing impromptu gigs and parties. We’d flyer Camden and invite people back there and play for them, revelling in the randomness and the unexpected that this brought. At the first ever gig there, we’d decorated the place with lots of candles, and Peter had been to visit his parents in Germany and come back with lots of beer and cigarettes, which we’d put out for people. Everyone sat expectantly around, waiting for us to begin and, as soon as we played the first chord, all the lights went out. We had to ask around for a pound for the meter, but got things going again eventually and it turned into a very long, debauched party. Irish Paul shagged someone in the bathroom, which at the time we thought was particularly impressive, and that first night created the template for all the gigs there to come. The locust swarm would descend, we’d play, and they’d leave us, sometimes days later, with only debris and hazy recollections to show for it. The flat would be wrecked, but we’d be happy. Later, after we were signed, the so-called ‘guerrilla’ gigs would take over the mantle. They came about because, by that time, the internet was becoming a force in everyone’s lives, and we were knocked sideways by the way you could post ‘Gig tomorrow night’ on a forum somewhere and, as if by magic, people would turn up. The guerrilla gigs were chaotic and disorganized because there was no time to sort anything out, and precious little money, too, but the fact that people would turn up was a real buzz. They were a continuation of the impromptu gigs at 236 Camden Road, in the same mi casa es su casa spirit. They were about anyone being able to reach out and touch the people in the pictures on their wall, the musicians they were listening to at the time, about pushing all the boundaries, seeing how far that was possible. It was the best fun imaginable, and everyone was invited.
Remarkably, the family upstairs at 236 Camden Road looked on us as some kind of novelty. They never batted an eyelid even when we serenaded up to seventy people at a time below them. Then we hit upon the idea of sub-letting the space under the stairwell to a French conceptual artist who we charged twenty pounds a week. He was happy there in our basement. And so was I, for a while.
I was always much happier on Camden Road than I was later, living on the top floor of a townhouse in Holloway, which, looking back, was an exercise in making myself feel edgy. Some nights I even slept in a cage, in the spare room of a prostitute we’d made friends with, a woman we’ll call Natasha. Natasha worked from home, I suppose you could say; she ran it as a sort of brothel and, when she wasn’t working, she hung around Camden a lot, a face at our shows. Someone said she knew one of the guys in Blur, but I don’t know. What I do know was we needed somewhere to sleep, and she had the space, so we took her up on her offer, despite its pitfalls. Natasha looked like a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy: skinny, emaciated and striking, and she was an enigma. She thought it would age her being outside too long, took cabs everywhere, and wouldn’t leave the house without applying sun block – a very paranoid girl, and quite lonely as far as I could tell. The bedroom I was allocated had a big iron cage in it, halfway between an outsize birdcage and a medieval torture device, which I often ended up sleeping in. I think her clients used to spend their hours in there paying to suffer, but it afforded me a degree of security I enjoyed. Natasha was our drummer for a few hours; we liked the notion, but she really couldn’t drum.
When she had a client, Peter and I would sit in the next room holding pellet guns and talk in gruff voices so that, through the wall, one might think that she had
