Oscar Wilde, the comings and goings of My Fair Lady, I romanticized it out of all proportion and it took me a long time to realize that it was a modern-day tourist trap. When I was working at the theatres I used to go down to the Piazza in my lunch hours and watch the performers, and I’d see people in sleeping bags waiting to perform for the tourists and people a little too drunk for lunchtime, and I realized that the only place that the romantic Covent Garden lived on in was in the hearts of people like me. And, little by little, the lustre faded. The world inside the theatre, however, still held some magic, and I particularly liked working at the Old Vic. It was near my spiritual home of Waterloo – the portal to this new world for a country boy like me – and I loved its tradition and its history; it signified something and felt real to me. I had one pair of blue trousers and a horrible matching waistcoat that I wore for all my theatre work; the trousers were a pair of flares that were so worn that they shone. They never got washed because I had nowhere to wash them, and at one point I had impetigo on my legs that I couldn’t help rubbing, and the trousers eventually blended with the scab. But those trousers carried me through, from my initial days among shadowy aisles pointing patrons to their seats to the day our Rough Trade deal finally allowed me to fold them neatly along their thinning creases and put them away for good.
That might make everything sound very purposeful, but the truth was that I didn’t have any sense of where we were going while I was at the Old Vic, though Peter and I were increasingly inseparable and working more and more intensely on our lyrics. Peter was always very optimistic but somehow – and this is probably indicative of the insecurities that would dog me all the way through my performing career – I never thought I’d make it in a band. For me, it was an impenetrable world, and playing in front of a small audience was already intimidating enough. Peter’s attitude was different: We can do this, you can be that. He was full of faith, life and vitality, and that sustained me; it was a real part of the magic of the time. Peter surprised me at work at the Old Vic one night, when we were meant to be rehearsing but I’d taken the paying job instead. Separate worlds – music and theatre – colliding momentarily, almost causing one to spin helplessly out of orbit. I was in my trusty trousers, probably gleaming in the theatre lights, serving a platter of vol-au-vents as part of a reception for Marcel Marceau. It was an after-show as far as I can remember – as much as great mime artists have after-shows, anyway. Then Peter just appeared, lumbering into sight, red-faced with tears in his eyes. I can’t imagine what the guests must have thought as a stranger button-holed one of the waiters, and the quiet of the theatre bar is shattered as he screams: ‘What are you doing here? Can’t you see these people are cunts? We’re meant to be writing songs!’
The room screeched to a halt, a hundred heads turning towards us, now centre stage in the encroaching silence. I was livid. How I kept my job there is still a mystery.
As well as the Old Vic, I did stints at the Aldwych, the Apollo and the Lyric. Ushering is a funny job, mostly populated by hopeful actors and musicians, a lot of whom fall by the wayside and get stuck in that routine. The idea is that it’ll subsidize your earnings and allow you to pursue your dreams during the daylight hours, but the reality is that you all end up going to the same cliquey bars after the show, spend all your money and then sleep all day. Many people get stuck in that for years. It wasn’t entirely without merit: I got to meet Harold Pinter and Michael Gambon, an impressive man who seemed to have a glow about him. I even had a chance to speak with him too, and he gave me some advice.
‘What is your purpose?’ he asked.
I mumbled something about going to drama school, breaking into acting – I was still very young and shy – and he looked me directly in the eye and said: ‘Don’t worry about that bullshit, just lie. I got an agent on the strength of saying I did this thing at the Old Vic and it was a total lie.’ He was quite encouraging, and pleasingly unprincipled, too, as far as I could tell.
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For a short while we called the band The Strand, principally because, during my breaks as an usher at the Aldwych Theatre I used to walk up and down the Strand wondering when it was I would be randomly offered a part in a film or even to be scouted to be a model. Those were the kind of dumb things I’d sometimes do. London for me back then was limitless, and I was naïve and silly. I just assumed that there was a chance anyone could make it, get lucky. Funnily enough, it never happened like that, but the band name stuck for a period, one of our many awful names, along with The Cricketers and The Sallys. Then I suggested The Libertines: we’d had a well-thumbed copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Lusts of the Libertines floating around the band for as long as I could remember. That name was, briefly, rejected, though I can’t imagine why: none of us was particularly enamoured with the idea of being called The Sallys or The Strand.
Later, by utter coincidence, we found out that the Sex Pistols used to be called The Strand. I met Glenn Matlock backstage when we supported them at Crystal Palace and the only conversation I could think of, while he’s sitting there drinking herbal tea and I was drunk and looking for drugs, was to tell him that my band used to be called The Strand, too. It must have sounded like a complete lie, the sort of thing you’d make up just to cosy up to him, to let him know that you really knew all about the Pistols. I felt a ridiculous need to make conversation because I was a fan, and really wanted to talk to the Sex Pistols. He, meanwhile, simply regarded me quietly over his tea. It was at a football stadium, and so we were standing in our dressing room, trying not to worry too much and just enjoy it, and the Pistols were in the room next door. I could hear John Lydon saying, and I think he was talking about Keith Flint, ‘I was doing that, I had that haircut twenty years ago, cheeky sod.’ That made us roll about with laughter, deliriously happy just to be a part of it, to be that close to the inner circle.
Even though we were playing in front of all the Sex Pistols’ gear, the stage was a vast expanse. It was a magnificent day, perfect for a festival, and the crowd was made up of families and lots of blokes in their late thirties and forties, out for the day reliving their youth. Punk pomp with pushchairs. We had our matching red army jackets on in the blisteringly hot sun, and we tried to get them going, but they all started to sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ at us, I think on account of our jackets. That just fired us up, so we ripped off our tunics to expose skinny bare flesh, this pasty punk flesh, which for reasons I’ve yet to fathom always goes down a treat. Suddenly they seemed to be on our side. Fear and adrenalin meant that we were going mental, fucking giving it as hard as we could and we really, really meant it. I think that came across, and our enthusiasm was reciprocated by a very partisan audience. They were there for one band and we weren’t that band. Later on I remember reading Steven Wells’ review of the gig and I think we got a quick mention, which I was pleased about. The Sex Pistols are a pretty hard band to support.
Afterwards, I bumped into John Lydon and I asked if he’d seen the show. ‘Libertines!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘I don’t miss a trick,’ he said and shot off.
We were pretty much ordered to go to the after-show party. I remember someone who might have been Lydon’s minder pointing his finger at us and shouting at us to do so. I’m assuming that John Lydon’s quite into drum and bass, because the party was at a rough drum and bass place in Wandsworth High Street, which I found a bit odd. Peter took a chair from the Lydon group, and he’s a massive Lydon fan so he was crestfallen when Lydon said to him, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Those chairs are for us; they’re our chairs. Be fair!’
The drink and fervour of the day had taken their hold when I started asking Lydon if he could get us any drugs. ‘I’m not your drug dealer,’ he said, ‘but I shall speak to the proprietor and see what I can do.’ Looking back, I doubt he did, and I must have asked him another four times that night before he took our manager to one side and said, ‘I am not his drug dealer.’ I stopped asking him after that. At least I hope I did.
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