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 a hole in our household then that filled up with sadness. My father seemed shrunken somehow, but that must be in my imagination. I’m not sure a five-year-old could have truly understood what was going on. All I knew was that I missed my mother, and I’d stare out at the estate we lived on and imagine her making her way back towards us through the hedgerows and houses, and how she’d catch me staring and wave. Then my dad would tell me to get dressed and pull me from my reverie.
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,
