THE LIBERTINES

Time for heroes: high jinks and open flies from The Libertines’ Carl Barât (left) and Pete Doherty, The Met Lounge, Peterborough, June 14, 2002; (right) the debut album.

Suits you: (from left) original Libertine Steve Bedlow, AKA ‘Scarborough Steve’, Barât and Doherty in the latter’s flat, Whitechapel, August 2001.

“WE SIGNED FOR £50K… AND BLEW LOADS ON

COCAINE.” Carl Barât

➣ John Hassall: I was in the band in the earliest days. We were getting nowhere, so I had started studying again, Sociology. CB: Pete and I had this vision of a ship, The Albion, sailing to an imagined Arcadia. Nostalgia for a time that never existed was always our thing. The things we celebrated and championed about England only existed in mental projections of the romance of the past… We used to play the 12-Bar club with the forge [behind the stage] from the 1600s or whatever. It’s timeless. Steptoe’s horse is still clattering over the cobbles somewhere. PD: Everything was done with The Albion and Arcadia in mind. It was like a trance – I really believed in Arcadia. A Bohemia that never was. I needed this fantasy world because I wasn’t getting much from modern life in London. I was living in these poems and these songs and this Arcadian dream, and thought we’d recruit more dreamers to help us do our bidding. Gary Powell: I was introduced to Pete and Carl by [music lawyer] Banny [Poostchi]. Our local boozer was Filthy MacNasty’s [in Islington] and the frst thing Carl said to me was, “Have you ever tried a David Niven’s [whisky cocktail]?” The Libertines were just Pete and Carl at that point. James Endeacott (Rough Trade A&R): I was given a demo and met the group. Peter and Carl had their own little world going on. They liked WW1 songs, Chas & Dave, Victorian music hall. They were into that nostalgic, English seaside vibe. GP: Did I buy into The Albion and Arcadia? No. That was Pete and Carl’s dream. It was a little too white for me (laughs). JE: The fact Gary was a black guy immediately stopped the Union Jack fags and [later] the guardsmen’s uniforms being a racist thing. It wasn‘t deliberate in any way, but it became important. JH: Pete and Carl invited me back in. They had written all those great songs and now there was more urgency about the music. Lyrically, you could hear it was the same band but now it was presented diferently. JE: A lot of people just didn’t get it. They said, “Rough Trade have got The Strokes, why do you need this band?” They’d already been around for a couple of years, remember. But The Strokes were New York and The Libertines couldn’t be more English. You had to meet Pete and Carl – that was the key. You instantly fell under their spell. CB: We signed for £50k. We got a new Albion Rooms out of it [a fat at 112A Teesdale Street, E2] and blew loads on cocaine. It was like those programmes where they throw a stack of money in the air and do a jig around the room. We drank London dry. PD: We bought some guitars from Denmark Street. We’d been banned from most of them for nicking stuf, but it was like, “No, we’ve got some money!” I bought a 1957 New York Epiphone Coronet and Carl bought a couple of Gibson Melody Makers. The rest we took out in £50 notes and kept in the fridge. That paid for the knees-up that’s… still going on, really. We were woefully reckless. GP: Once we signed to Rough Trade, we started getting really serious about the music. We rehearsed all the time. Carl had that Kinks thing going on the guitar, Peter was raw and bluesy. John was amazing as a bass player, with lots of feeling. They created a soundboard unknown to me at that time.

JH: We went in the studio with Bernard Butler to record a single [What A Waster/I Get Along, released June 2002]. It was an eye-opener. We hadn’t had much recording experience and Bernard was a very professional kind of guy. PD: With Bernard there was a lot of pushing and pulling trying to get his sonic vision. I didn’t want guitar pedals – just plug the Epiphone into the Marshall. I had to fght Bernard of with a mike stand to stop him putting FX on the guitar. JE: Bernard was going to produce the album but he couldn’t for some reason. So I was talking to Jeannette [Lee, at Rough Trade] about a suitable producer. I still had in my mind a guitarist from a London band, and she said, “What about Mick Jones from The Clash? I can get a message to him.” I was like, “Wow!”, I wasn’t thinking that big. CB: We met up at a rehearsal place in King’s Cross. Mick turned up with a bag of cans and sat on the sofa and said, “Play me the songs.” We did, and he fell asleep. He woke up, so we played them all again, and he said he loved it. I was expecting a gangster and it was the opposite, nothing but a beacon of positivity and understanding. It was all in Mick’s eyes, he’d seen it all before. JE: Pete came in 15 minutes late on an Italian scooter with no number plates and a Chinese takeaway hanging from the handlebars. The band played some songs – Up The Bracket, Time For Heroes, I Get Along, Horrorshow maybe – and Mick was dancing around, grinning ear to ear, going, “Let’s do it.”

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

● Carl Barât (guitar, vocals)

GP: We were booked into RAK studios to make the album. To me, it was mind-blowing. On the frst day we were meant to be there at 11 in the morning to set up. I arrived at nine. I sat having tea with [RAK owner and music biz legend] Mickie Most and he told me his whole life story. Paul McCartney popped in; the receptionist is telling me about the time they went to Belgium to fnd Marvin Gaye. I thought, “This is my life now!” JH: Mickie Most sat there in a blazer reading yachting magazines. An old-school gentleman. JE: Mick thought they were funny and loved their youthful energy. It was pretty much recorded live, with him in the middle of the room dancing around with a can of Stella and a splif. He was a vibes merchant as much as anything else.

Mick Jones (speaking to the A.V. Club, 2006):

I sat around the frst few weeks and didn’t do anything. They went, “What kind of producer is he?” I just sat and gawked through the studio window. In the end, I decided to just record them as-is. Build the band up and get them to the right moment, then make sure the tapes were running. It should be all about the feeling. CB: Mick was good at harnessing our chaos; whereas Bernard – who I was very fond of – wouldn’t have been so good at containing our mentalness.

MJ: Pete and Carl reminded me of myself and Joe [Strummer] in the early days. That same push and pull. JE: Mick came into his own during the mixing at Whitfeld Street studios. Pete and Carl didn’t know much about him to begin with. He talked a lot about recording The Clash’s frst album there. It was a magical time. CB: There was a kung fu incident [at Whitfeld Street]… that was me being over-exuberant.

PD: Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that. It ended badly. I had a fat lip and didn’t make it to a gig in Scarborough [on August 3, 2002]. High jinks… CB: There was a great deal of mental illness in the early years of The Libertines – and a lot in the later years too (laughs). We may have been in the middle of a manic episode, but we were defnitely on an upswing. It’s rock’n’roll, really. You pull back the curtain and on one hand it’s unity and bliss, on another it’s a manic upswing. JE: When Up The Bracket came out in October [2002], the reaction from the critics and the press was quite muted. No one was saying it was one of the great albums of all time – which they did about The Strokes’ frst album. A lot of people thought it was a bit scamble-y, a bit under-produced. But that’s what makes it great. They had everything a great rock’n’roll band should have – energy, comedy, beauty, unpredictability. PD: I was a bit disoriented by the impact. We had lots of coverage in the NME and did TOTP [with Time For Heroes] but I was a little bit gutted. It wasn’t the revolution I was braced for. That’s probably why I went a bit mad. I’m still waiting for the revolution now. CB: The album got to Number 35. Not much changed, we weren’t exactly stopping trafc in the street. We played on [TV show] T4 with Girls Aloud. The gates rattled open and there were six taxi-bikes, each with a band member on it. I said to James Endeacott, “Why can’t we have taxi-bikes?” He said (broad Yorkshire accent), “Taxi-bikes?! You can get the fuckin’ tube for 90p!” JE: They went on tour and it just got bigger every week. The album sold more as the momentum grew around the country. You knew it was happening when kids started turning up to gigs dressed like Pete and Carl. CB: The songs captured the energy of the time. That record means a lot to a lot of people. What more can you ask? MJ: A group like that only comes along once in a generation. I love them. Pete and Carl are really talented, and so are the others. We were looking forward to doing the next album… CB: After the frst album came out, things took a darker turn. I was quite mentally ill for a number of years and lived each day as if it was my last. Peter was on his particular journey… yes, it did get quite decadent. JE: We were all living the dream. Then the crack appeared. So the second Libertines album [in 2004] was a very diferent story. M

● Pete Doherty (guitar, vocals)

● John Hassall

(bass)

● Gary Powell

(drums)

● Mick Jones

(producer) The push and pull: Barât and Doherty on-stage at the Forum, London, December 18, 2003.