The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘I tried to get into heroin like Pete Doherty, but I hated it’
As The Libertines return with a new album, Chris Harvey talks to Carl Barât about drugs, depression and the group’s fractious central relationship
It’s a day of sunshine and showers in Margate and the lead guitarist of The Libertines is fretting about the future headline on this piece. He doesn’t want to open The Telegraph and see “How Pete Doherty Ruined My Life by Carl Barât”, he says, referring to his tabloid-famous bandmate. “I’ve got such an enormous love for Peter and I always have done.”
We’re in The Albion Rooms, the darkly opulent boutique hotel owned by the band, perched above the Kent coast overlooking the sea. Barât, 45, is dapper in a suit and chain; funny, welcoming, articulate. He talks fast – “I’m having a mega ADHD day” – spinning stories and literary references a mile a minute.
He’s buzzing because he’s just got off a tour bus after six weeks on the road with The Libertines – and because they’re finally about to release their fourth album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, 27 years after they first got together. On songs such as Merry Old England and Shiver, it feels like the band, so long frozen in a moment of early glory, has begun to evolve again. “It’s a landmark I never thought I’d be celebrating,” Barât admits, “given how vulnerable and volatile our trajectory has been.”
You can say that again. The most widely known part of The Libertines’ story to this day is that after their incendiary debut Up the Bracket in 2002, Doherty developed a crack cocaine and heroin habit and was suspended from the band. “Carl does not want to play with me, in my current ‘condition’,” he told the NME in 2003.
When The Libertines went on tour to Japan without him, Doherty broke into Barât’s basement flat, burgled it, and was sent to prison for six months. But it was the guitarist who was waiting for him outside Wandsworth prison on his release two months later – before the “hard-hitting pipe posse” got there, as he put it. The band played a legendary gig that night at a pub in Kent. For Doherty, though, it was just the beginning of his years in and out of the tabloids, for drug busts, prison sentences and his relationship with supermodel Kate Moss. The Libertines managed to record a second album, but Barât and Doherty each had bodyguards in the studio to stop physical fights erupting between them. Moss dumped the singer repeatedly over his crack habit. Had she at least been a good influence on him? Barât snorts at the idea. “No, not at all. It seemed like pushing the envelope, really, doubling forces and doubling the eyes on, doubling the risk,” he says of her fame. “It ended up being good entertainment, I suppose, but I found that a worrying period for sure.”
I ask him about the death of 30-year-old aspiring actor Mark Blanco, who had been at a gathering at the east London flat of Doherty’s “literary agent” Paul Roundhill in December 2006 (two years after Barât dissolved The Libertines), along with the singer and his minder Johnny Headlock. Roundhill saw the flat as an intellectual salon but others viewed it as a crack den. The circumstances of Blanco’s fall from the balcony outside Roundhill’s flat – resulting in fatal head injuries – were explored in the 2023 Channel 4 documentary Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son? in which the actor’s mother Sheila Blanco demanded answers about the events. Did Barât know Roundhill and Headlock? “We crossed paths,” he says.
Does he have any idea what happened that night? “I wasn’t there,” he replies. “It could have been ugly and something like that. It could have been misadventure… I know what a f---ing messy scene that whole thing is and how there’s no one in control in there. It’s just a chaotic f---ing nightmare that I chose to avoid. I went round there a couple of times.” Doherty was questioned by police but no charges were made. Barât insists that “the things that Pete’s been accused of are not consistent with the Pete I know”. Does he think the events of that day weigh heavily on Doherty? “I’m sure they do,” he says.
I wonder how it feels to know that Doherty, who has built a new life in France with his wife Katia de Vidas and their baby daughter, is no longer around those people? “Honestly, I feel I can let my shoulders down and breathe again,” says Barât, who lives in Margate with his partner, the musician Edie Langley, and their two sons, aged 13 and nine. “It just all seemed so wrong.”
Barât admits that at the very beginning he contemplated following the singer into that world. “I was really lucky in the fact that I just didn’t actually like heroin,” he tells me. “I did try to get into it – that sounds ridiculous to hear myself say that – because I
‘The things Pete has been accused of are not consistent with the Pete I know’
wanted to do what my friend did. I didn’t know if I could fully bang the drum of why not to do it if I hadn’t been there. Otherwise, it would constantly have been, ‘you don’t understand’. “And fortunately, I f---ing hated it. I wouldn’t have been a clever, functioning user, I’d just be dead.”
In the 2010 film about their reunion, The Libertines: There Are No Innocent Bystanders, Doherty says that when they first met, he saw Barât as the unstable one. “I’ve always suffered from depression and my own drink and drug issues,” Barât says. He’s talked about his problem with “powder” – cocaine – but depression, he notes, “is something that I have to come to terms with. It’s not something that I think will ever, ever go, unless my brain chemistry changes.
“Ever since I’ve had children, I’ve never allowed myself to do myself physical harm,” he adds, “because I have a responsibility that is bigger than me. I no longer have the get-out option, or even the self-harm option – you could argue that some of the drinking episodes I’ve had away from the children in that time could have been likened to self-harm, but nothing like it was. Since I met my Edie, my muse, it’s changed everything,” says Barât, who had therapy the morning we meet.
Barât grew up mostly with his father on a council estate in Whitchurch, Hampshire. His mother left when he was five. “I didn’t see my mum again for a while,” he says. “It’s tough for every kid who goes through that.” By the time he did, she was living in “hippie communes and camps”. He could enjoy the “buck wild” freedom, he recalls, but he remembers his life then as one of “starkly opposing worlds – coming back from a commune stinking of wood smoke, with flowers painted on my body, to a rough school and a council house and rules”.
We chat about the period he met Doherty and they lived together in Camden, north London. “It was a sort of Mecca for misfits,” he says. Amy Winehouse was there but her problems with crack, heroin and alcohol were from a later period, he says. “Amy lived at the bottom of my road, a few doors down, and that’s when it seemed like a darker scene.” Winehouse died in 2011. Had he expected to one day receive a phone call telling him the same about Doherty? “I used to worry about it,” he says. “But I didn’t believe that he’d ever come to that. I think he wanted to be alive too much. He’s no idiot.”
Is Barât all in these days with The Libertines? If he does write a great song, he says, he knows it will find a bigger audience “fired out through the cannon of The Libertines than the f---ing ping-pong-ball gun of my solo projects”. Is he still cross with Doherty for what his lifestyle did to their band? “Yeah, it kind of p----- on your chips a bit, doesn’t it? When you build a world with somebody, and they say, ‘Oh, by the way, half of our world is f---ed.’ That’s kind of how it felt.” Now, at least, it’s whole again. And two Libertines are better than one.
‘All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade’ is released on April 5