This is just to demonstrate that Babyshambles actually played last night at Le Deferlantes Festival at Argeles sur Mer in France, and you can clearly spot Mik in this video (sorry for the wrong title, of course it's not Carry on up the morning!), so if you read any idiocy in the press today stating that Mik Whitnall has left the band, that's the proof that he's not. He can do that tomorrow but always remember that the future is unwritten, and, as Babybear said yesterday, you gotta have faith (or maybe it was George Michael).
Babyshambles should be playing again tonight in France at the Eurockeennes de Belfort Festival (expected at 8 pm CET).
The future is unwritten for Dirty Pretty things as well. Tonight we'll know something about the chart entry of Romance. Let's hope it's a bit higher than Tired of England's.
And Carl opens his mouth once again, and words start to flow. A nearly bullshit-free interview came out today on the Sunday Mail. And you can read it here (thanks to Linna and her patience). Because a bullshit-free interview with Carl Barat in these days is rarer than gold.
We Need to Talk About Pete
Carl Barat on how he loved and lost Pete Doherty
"For me and Pete, it wasn’t too different from falling in love. It’s grotesque now. I said to him, "heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate. You’ll die or live the rest of your life like Gollum". But Peter never wanted to listen. And then the tragedy began. Right now, if Pete walked in, I’d like just to sit down and have a normal conversation with him, and not have to talk about the Libertines and all the other messy stuff. But i suppose that is impossible now. It’s a long time since anything has been normal in Pete’s life. It’s a complete horror show. It stopped being about rock n roll ages ago. It’s about newspaper headlines, and he’s good at that game. Pete is very good at knowing just how much to give away and how to push the boundaries. Or at least he thinks he’s good at it. Maybe he doesn’t realise that the most dangerous part of that game is that if your’e not careful the people you think you’re playing are going to own you. Maybe he’s at that stage already".
It’s been more than three years since Carl Barat and Pete Doherty disbanded the Libertines and went their separate ways. At the time of the split, the smart money was on Doherty to emerge as the greater star. While Doherty has become more renowned for his hellraising antics and his arrests, it’s Barat who has distinguished himself musically, with Dirty Pretty Things now accepted as one of the most vital bands of this era. With Barat on lead vocals and guitar, their emotive buzzsaw rock n roll is both critically acclaimed and commercially thriving. Indeed, the new album Romance At Short Notice has been among 2008’s most eagerly anticipated releases.
Barat pauses, takes a sip of his beer, then continues. "You can’t give Pete advice, I’ve been through all that many times before. We were in Paris writing the second Libertines album and I said to him, "heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate - much bigger. If you carry on with those drugs they’ll write their own story. Because that’s what those drugs do. If you keep doing them, there are only two scenarios. Either you’ll die or you’ll live the rest of your life like Gollum in The Lord of The Rings. Quite often I’d try to shock him by saying things like that. But Pete never wanted to listen. You have to understand that this is someone I care a lot about. There’s still a lot of love between me and Pete. At least there is from my side. So when I pick up a newspaper and read the latest instalment in his life, it makes me sad and angry. I’m relieved that I’m not part of that grotesque merry-go-round. But I wish Pete wasn’t a part of it either. Pete always knew he was going to be famous. It was the only thing that was going to happen to him. When it came he revelled in it. Now he’s maybe settled for being famous for being famous. It’s stopped being about the music. It’s about the mayhem. There’s something really tragic about that".
It’s 1 am and the night is still young for the hip west London crowd, packed into the bar area of the K West hotel. But amid the party hubbub, there’s something achingly sad about my companion, Carl Barat. This quality has been present throughout our interviews for this Live piece. (I met him first in Bristol before he took to the stage for a scintillating Dirty Pretty Things show, during which he managed to consume two bottles of whisky and somehow remain on his feet, then we hooked up at the Live photo shoot; our third meeting has stretched over the course of a long evening and seen us visit numerous drinking establishments).
Barat has the demeanour of a young man who has lost the most important thing in his world. By the conclusion of our conversations, during which love and loss are mentioned as often as Doherty’s name, it’s quite clear he has done precisely that.
Each time we meet he sports the same uniform, which doubles as his stage apparel: scruffy jeans, distressed Tshirt and leather jacket. He retains the look of a glamorous poetic waster, which has been his trademark since the early days with Doherty - together they were the Byronic Romantics of grunge pop.
He talks in a low, almost apologetic mumble and his eyes are tired. He tells me that in the next 24 hours he will turn 30. He looks a whole lot better than Doherty, which obviously isn’t saying much. He’s been without sleep or food for more than 72 hours, fuelled by "Jamesons whisky and y’know, other stuff". Catching his reflection in a mirror, he winces rather theatrically and says, "my body is in ruins".
Despite this assertion, and the occasional joke about needing to curb his party excesses, it still comes as a shock when, a week loater, Barat is rushed to hospital suffering from vomiting, nausea and severe stomach pains. Diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, he’s kept under observation for six days, undergoes further tests and is put on a morphine drip. Early indications are he’ll be unable to drink ever again.
Though Barat and Doherty communicate regularly by test, it’s now more than 12 months since they last met, reuniting to record a cover of the Beatles’ A Day In the Life for Radio 2’s 40th anniversary celebration of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Two months prior to that, Barat had joined Doherty on stage at London’s Hackney Empire for a 13 song set that included a clutch of Libertines songs.
"I don’t cry too easily, and hardly ever in public. But there were a lot of tears at that gig. Emotionally it was colossal. It was the first time I’d played with Pete for ages without Kate Moss and the whole entourage around. It reminded me how great we were together and how much unfinished business there is. As to whether the Libertines could reform that’s a big maybe. It’s a question that follows me around constantly. I’ll be out getting a loaf of bread and some aggressive schoolkid will come up and ask "When are you getting the Libertines back together?". I deal with it politely, but I’m thinking, "Do you really think this is something I haven’t given a lot of thought to?"
Barat emerged with Dirty Pretty Things in September 2005, with bassist Didz Hammond, guitarist Anthony Rossomando and former Libertines drummer Gary Powell. Their debut album, Waterloo to Anywhere, sold 120,000 copies. Its punky guitar rock bore only a passing resemblance to the output of Barat’s former band, but at least some of the spite and anger in the lyrics ; ("Your’e a legand in your mind, but a rumour in your room") seemed to be aimed squarely at Doherty.
"I didnt kid myself that I could start with a clean slate. To some extent we were working in the shadow of the Libertines, the shadow of Pete Doherty. It was a really hard time for me. I was feeling dark and miserable. I suppose I blamed myself for everything that had gone wrong before. But I didnt want to change either. It was almost as if I felt I had to feel miserable and guilty to carry on writing songs."
Barat tells me that depression has dogged him for as long as he can remember. "I’ve never known true happiness or peace of mind" he says bleakly. "I’ve always been something of a troubled soul. Gorwing up, I had a constant feeling of "this is not my world".
Barat was born in Basingstoke, and spent his early years alternatively with his father, who worked in an armanents factory, and his mother, a hippy who finally settled in a commune in Somerset. "I was never much into music as a kid" he says. "But I drifted into it. In my early teens I’d hang around with my mates getting stoned, strumming the same guitar chord over and over. It took me years just to master the basics, but I always had a strange belief that music would be my life"
As a teenager he worked his way through a series of very odd jobs. "I did a stint on the front desk of a place where schizophrenics went if they’d missed their injections. I did the night shift in a salad factory. It was one of the tossers. My job involved tossing salad all night, removing dead or dying animals from the lettuce. The highlight for me was diswcovering half a frog. We never found the other half"
He was studying drama at Brunel Univerwsity when he befriended Pete Doherty’s older sister. By now Barat had been doing pub gigs for a couple of years, and Doherty got in touch, hoping to be taught how to play guitar. The most important relationship in Barat’s life was born.
"Even from the start we fought. There was always a spark. Pete had all the front and I was very shy. Pete craved chaos and I longed for security. Eventually that combination is going to become volatile. Something like that is always going to implode. It’s just a matter of time. Only we didn’t realise it at the time"
Barat and Doherty moved into a squalid basement flat in Camden and plotted their course. The Libertines, they decided, would be no ordinary rock group, but a force that would overthrow the musical establishment and break down the barriers between artist and audience. Their line-up completed with drummer Powell and bassist John Hassall, they began playing live wherever they could - a condemned pub, a disused factory, even a north London brothel - and quickly built up a devoted following.
"For me and Pete it was all or nothing" says Barat. "It was either the top of the world or the bottom of the canal. It wasn’t too different from falling madly in love, when you don’t even entertain the thought that it could ever end. At the start it was fun. I’de always wanted to be part of a gang. I was part of a gang of cheeky urchins who felt they could take on the world. Then heroin enterred the picture"
It was during the making of the Libertines’ debut album in the summer of 2002 that trouble first reared its head. Doherty suddenly went AWOL, forcing the band to play a gig without him. By September, with their second single Up the Bracket giving them a chart hit, it was clear that Doherty’s increasing unreliability was linked to his flirtations with heroin and crack cocaine. "The Libertines had become my whole world, and I suppose Pete was the mate I ‘d always wanted. But there was a Steptoe and Son side to it.You watch Steptoe and it’s brilliantly funny but it also makes for uncomfortable viewing, because you can always sense the tragedy of their lives. For me and Pete, the tragedy began when he started using those drugs. That’s when the dignity of the Libertines went straight out of the window. It started to become dark and squalid. Being in a band and getting messed up in order to have a good time, that’s one thing. Then there’s the kind of trouble that drugs like heroin and crack bring to the party. I didn’t want that life. It didn’t appeal to me on any level. The bottom line is that it’s boring being a junkie ***up. It probably makes for a great read of you’re not involved. Up to a point the chaos of the Libertines was enjoyable for me. Then very sinister agendas took over and it became the opposite of fun".
Following the release of the debut album, Barat opted to take a "tough love" approach with Doherty, refusing to let him record or perform with the band until he’d completely cleaned up. Doherty, his addictions now out of control, refused to take the bait. In the summer of 2003, while the band were playing dates in Japan, he burgled Barat’s London flat, making off with, among other things, a prized antique guitar.
He duly served two months in prison. Upon his release, Barat was there to welcome him with open arms and they started work on a second album. However, by the time the band reached the recording studio, their management had assigned each member a security guard in order to stop them from fighting. During this period, with active encouragement from Barat, Doherty made three attempts at rehab, including a short lived stint in a Thai monastery. He left after three days, heading to a Bangkok hotel where heroin was conveniently available via room service.
"By this point Pete had become an unstoppable train" says Barat. "Looking back, there’s nothing I could have done. I’d tried everything. I’d worked pretty damn valiantly to hold him together, to the point of complete exhaustion. The dream of the Libertines was my destiny, and I fought tooth and nail to keep it together. Even when it was a hopeless cause, it took every ounce of strength I had to pull away from it. Pete’s life had been consumed by drugs and, if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, I also had to sacrifice the band. On a personal level, it was nothing less than devastating. It should never had come to such a tawdry end"
On the face of it, Barat has mastered the seemingly impossible art of living in the long shadow of the Libertines. He’s in a successful long term relationship with DJ girlfriend Annalisa Astarita, with whom he shares a home in Muswell Hill, north London. Against the odds, he’s survived the wreckage of the Libertines and created his own successful band.
"This band involves almost as much struggle and conflict as the Libertines ever did. There are too many egos at play. We came very close to breaking up during the making of this album. A reshuffle of members was definitely on the cards at some point - it came perilously close to sackings. There have been a few fist-fights. In that way, Dirty Pretty Things is as intense as life in the Libertines. It’s still do or die for me."
Barat rolls up his sleeve to show me the Libertine tattoo on his right bicep. "you’d be amazed how many people come up to me and show me their own copy of this" he says. "It’s touching that people remember the band for something more than the drugs and the fighting. That they still believe in the music. It reminds me that I believe in everything that I believed in when I was in the Libertines. I miss the purity of what me and Pete had together when we started out. It would be great to have that back. Pete always used to say, "imagine the songs we still have to write". That thought is always with me"
Carl Barat on how he loved and lost Pete Doherty
"For me and Pete, it wasn’t too different from falling in love. It’s grotesque now. I said to him, "heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate. You’ll die or live the rest of your life like Gollum". But Peter never wanted to listen. And then the tragedy began. Right now, if Pete walked in, I’d like just to sit down and have a normal conversation with him, and not have to talk about the Libertines and all the other messy stuff. But i suppose that is impossible now. It’s a long time since anything has been normal in Pete’s life. It’s a complete horror show. It stopped being about rock n roll ages ago. It’s about newspaper headlines, and he’s good at that game. Pete is very good at knowing just how much to give away and how to push the boundaries. Or at least he thinks he’s good at it. Maybe he doesn’t realise that the most dangerous part of that game is that if your’e not careful the people you think you’re playing are going to own you. Maybe he’s at that stage already".
It’s been more than three years since Carl Barat and Pete Doherty disbanded the Libertines and went their separate ways. At the time of the split, the smart money was on Doherty to emerge as the greater star. While Doherty has become more renowned for his hellraising antics and his arrests, it’s Barat who has distinguished himself musically, with Dirty Pretty Things now accepted as one of the most vital bands of this era. With Barat on lead vocals and guitar, their emotive buzzsaw rock n roll is both critically acclaimed and commercially thriving. Indeed, the new album Romance At Short Notice has been among 2008’s most eagerly anticipated releases.
Barat pauses, takes a sip of his beer, then continues. "You can’t give Pete advice, I’ve been through all that many times before. We were in Paris writing the second Libertines album and I said to him, "heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate - much bigger. If you carry on with those drugs they’ll write their own story. Because that’s what those drugs do. If you keep doing them, there are only two scenarios. Either you’ll die or you’ll live the rest of your life like Gollum in The Lord of The Rings. Quite often I’d try to shock him by saying things like that. But Pete never wanted to listen. You have to understand that this is someone I care a lot about. There’s still a lot of love between me and Pete. At least there is from my side. So when I pick up a newspaper and read the latest instalment in his life, it makes me sad and angry. I’m relieved that I’m not part of that grotesque merry-go-round. But I wish Pete wasn’t a part of it either. Pete always knew he was going to be famous. It was the only thing that was going to happen to him. When it came he revelled in it. Now he’s maybe settled for being famous for being famous. It’s stopped being about the music. It’s about the mayhem. There’s something really tragic about that".
It’s 1 am and the night is still young for the hip west London crowd, packed into the bar area of the K West hotel. But amid the party hubbub, there’s something achingly sad about my companion, Carl Barat. This quality has been present throughout our interviews for this Live piece. (I met him first in Bristol before he took to the stage for a scintillating Dirty Pretty Things show, during which he managed to consume two bottles of whisky and somehow remain on his feet, then we hooked up at the Live photo shoot; our third meeting has stretched over the course of a long evening and seen us visit numerous drinking establishments).
Barat has the demeanour of a young man who has lost the most important thing in his world. By the conclusion of our conversations, during which love and loss are mentioned as often as Doherty’s name, it’s quite clear he has done precisely that.
Each time we meet he sports the same uniform, which doubles as his stage apparel: scruffy jeans, distressed Tshirt and leather jacket. He retains the look of a glamorous poetic waster, which has been his trademark since the early days with Doherty - together they were the Byronic Romantics of grunge pop.
He talks in a low, almost apologetic mumble and his eyes are tired. He tells me that in the next 24 hours he will turn 30. He looks a whole lot better than Doherty, which obviously isn’t saying much. He’s been without sleep or food for more than 72 hours, fuelled by "Jamesons whisky and y’know, other stuff". Catching his reflection in a mirror, he winces rather theatrically and says, "my body is in ruins".
Despite this assertion, and the occasional joke about needing to curb his party excesses, it still comes as a shock when, a week loater, Barat is rushed to hospital suffering from vomiting, nausea and severe stomach pains. Diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, he’s kept under observation for six days, undergoes further tests and is put on a morphine drip. Early indications are he’ll be unable to drink ever again.
Though Barat and Doherty communicate regularly by test, it’s now more than 12 months since they last met, reuniting to record a cover of the Beatles’ A Day In the Life for Radio 2’s 40th anniversary celebration of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Two months prior to that, Barat had joined Doherty on stage at London’s Hackney Empire for a 13 song set that included a clutch of Libertines songs.
"I don’t cry too easily, and hardly ever in public. But there were a lot of tears at that gig. Emotionally it was colossal. It was the first time I’d played with Pete for ages without Kate Moss and the whole entourage around. It reminded me how great we were together and how much unfinished business there is. As to whether the Libertines could reform that’s a big maybe. It’s a question that follows me around constantly. I’ll be out getting a loaf of bread and some aggressive schoolkid will come up and ask "When are you getting the Libertines back together?". I deal with it politely, but I’m thinking, "Do you really think this is something I haven’t given a lot of thought to?"
Barat emerged with Dirty Pretty Things in September 2005, with bassist Didz Hammond, guitarist Anthony Rossomando and former Libertines drummer Gary Powell. Their debut album, Waterloo to Anywhere, sold 120,000 copies. Its punky guitar rock bore only a passing resemblance to the output of Barat’s former band, but at least some of the spite and anger in the lyrics ; ("Your’e a legand in your mind, but a rumour in your room") seemed to be aimed squarely at Doherty.
"I didnt kid myself that I could start with a clean slate. To some extent we were working in the shadow of the Libertines, the shadow of Pete Doherty. It was a really hard time for me. I was feeling dark and miserable. I suppose I blamed myself for everything that had gone wrong before. But I didnt want to change either. It was almost as if I felt I had to feel miserable and guilty to carry on writing songs."
Barat tells me that depression has dogged him for as long as he can remember. "I’ve never known true happiness or peace of mind" he says bleakly. "I’ve always been something of a troubled soul. Gorwing up, I had a constant feeling of "this is not my world".
Barat was born in Basingstoke, and spent his early years alternatively with his father, who worked in an armanents factory, and his mother, a hippy who finally settled in a commune in Somerset. "I was never much into music as a kid" he says. "But I drifted into it. In my early teens I’d hang around with my mates getting stoned, strumming the same guitar chord over and over. It took me years just to master the basics, but I always had a strange belief that music would be my life"
As a teenager he worked his way through a series of very odd jobs. "I did a stint on the front desk of a place where schizophrenics went if they’d missed their injections. I did the night shift in a salad factory. It was one of the tossers. My job involved tossing salad all night, removing dead or dying animals from the lettuce. The highlight for me was diswcovering half a frog. We never found the other half"
He was studying drama at Brunel Univerwsity when he befriended Pete Doherty’s older sister. By now Barat had been doing pub gigs for a couple of years, and Doherty got in touch, hoping to be taught how to play guitar. The most important relationship in Barat’s life was born.
"Even from the start we fought. There was always a spark. Pete had all the front and I was very shy. Pete craved chaos and I longed for security. Eventually that combination is going to become volatile. Something like that is always going to implode. It’s just a matter of time. Only we didn’t realise it at the time"
Barat and Doherty moved into a squalid basement flat in Camden and plotted their course. The Libertines, they decided, would be no ordinary rock group, but a force that would overthrow the musical establishment and break down the barriers between artist and audience. Their line-up completed with drummer Powell and bassist John Hassall, they began playing live wherever they could - a condemned pub, a disused factory, even a north London brothel - and quickly built up a devoted following.
"For me and Pete it was all or nothing" says Barat. "It was either the top of the world or the bottom of the canal. It wasn’t too different from falling madly in love, when you don’t even entertain the thought that it could ever end. At the start it was fun. I’de always wanted to be part of a gang. I was part of a gang of cheeky urchins who felt they could take on the world. Then heroin enterred the picture"
It was during the making of the Libertines’ debut album in the summer of 2002 that trouble first reared its head. Doherty suddenly went AWOL, forcing the band to play a gig without him. By September, with their second single Up the Bracket giving them a chart hit, it was clear that Doherty’s increasing unreliability was linked to his flirtations with heroin and crack cocaine. "The Libertines had become my whole world, and I suppose Pete was the mate I ‘d always wanted. But there was a Steptoe and Son side to it.You watch Steptoe and it’s brilliantly funny but it also makes for uncomfortable viewing, because you can always sense the tragedy of their lives. For me and Pete, the tragedy began when he started using those drugs. That’s when the dignity of the Libertines went straight out of the window. It started to become dark and squalid. Being in a band and getting messed up in order to have a good time, that’s one thing. Then there’s the kind of trouble that drugs like heroin and crack bring to the party. I didn’t want that life. It didn’t appeal to me on any level. The bottom line is that it’s boring being a junkie ***up. It probably makes for a great read of you’re not involved. Up to a point the chaos of the Libertines was enjoyable for me. Then very sinister agendas took over and it became the opposite of fun".
Following the release of the debut album, Barat opted to take a "tough love" approach with Doherty, refusing to let him record or perform with the band until he’d completely cleaned up. Doherty, his addictions now out of control, refused to take the bait. In the summer of 2003, while the band were playing dates in Japan, he burgled Barat’s London flat, making off with, among other things, a prized antique guitar.
He duly served two months in prison. Upon his release, Barat was there to welcome him with open arms and they started work on a second album. However, by the time the band reached the recording studio, their management had assigned each member a security guard in order to stop them from fighting. During this period, with active encouragement from Barat, Doherty made three attempts at rehab, including a short lived stint in a Thai monastery. He left after three days, heading to a Bangkok hotel where heroin was conveniently available via room service.
"By this point Pete had become an unstoppable train" says Barat. "Looking back, there’s nothing I could have done. I’d tried everything. I’d worked pretty damn valiantly to hold him together, to the point of complete exhaustion. The dream of the Libertines was my destiny, and I fought tooth and nail to keep it together. Even when it was a hopeless cause, it took every ounce of strength I had to pull away from it. Pete’s life had been consumed by drugs and, if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, I also had to sacrifice the band. On a personal level, it was nothing less than devastating. It should never had come to such a tawdry end"
On the face of it, Barat has mastered the seemingly impossible art of living in the long shadow of the Libertines. He’s in a successful long term relationship with DJ girlfriend Annalisa Astarita, with whom he shares a home in Muswell Hill, north London. Against the odds, he’s survived the wreckage of the Libertines and created his own successful band.
"This band involves almost as much struggle and conflict as the Libertines ever did. There are too many egos at play. We came very close to breaking up during the making of this album. A reshuffle of members was definitely on the cards at some point - it came perilously close to sackings. There have been a few fist-fights. In that way, Dirty Pretty Things is as intense as life in the Libertines. It’s still do or die for me."
Barat rolls up his sleeve to show me the Libertine tattoo on his right bicep. "you’d be amazed how many people come up to me and show me their own copy of this" he says. "It’s touching that people remember the band for something more than the drugs and the fighting. That they still believe in the music. It reminds me that I believe in everything that I believed in when I was in the Libertines. I miss the purity of what me and Pete had together when we started out. It would be great to have that back. Pete always used to say, "imagine the songs we still have to write". That thought is always with me"
Just to let you know, Biggles: that thought is always with us too.
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