The Libertines’ Carl Barât: ‘I tried to get into heroin like Pete but fortunately I hated it’

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; black hair, smooth white skin, funny, welcoming, strikingly 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. “It’s a landmark I never thought I’d be celebrating,” Barât admits, “given how vulnerable and volatile our trajectory has been. I have to pinch myself.” And 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.

The delicate balance between Barât’s intense, driving force and Doherty’s looseness and lyrical gifts is restored. “We’ve been able for the first time to write topically about issues in the world and see beyond our own big toes,” Barât says. It’s “the most collaborative” record that the band, with bassist John Hassall and drummer Gary Powell, has ever made.

The long gaps between albums – nine years since 2015’s Anthems for Doomed Youth, 11 between that and their chart-topping second album, The Libertines – have meant that recapturing the spirit that defines the band “takes a little bit of work”, Barât says.

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. “I think I saw myself as the light of hope and goodness,” Barât says now, “and I thought of them as the dark, scurrilous shadows.”

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, and the latter was soon out in the cold again. Moss, meanwhile, 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 the model’s 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.

Doherty was caught on CCTV running past the fatally injured Blanco in the street before police arrived, and admitted in an episode of Louis Theroux Interviews… that he had been talking to Blanco that night “and there was a bit of friction between us”. He was questioned by police but no charges were brought against him. In the Channel 4 documentary, a guest at the party described the singer as “motioning with his eyes to Johnny and Paul in a way that they would understand to say ‘help me out here’, so they physically escorted Mark out of the flat… and there is a point at which I cannot account for the whereabouts of Johnny and Paul.”

Doherty told Theroux, “we all had an altercation with Mark Blanco, there was pushing and shoving”. In the weeks following Blanco’s death, Headlock phoned the police and admitted to his murder, but after being detained overnight in a cell, retracted his confession, and was released without charge, later blaming his admission on taking too much cocaine.

Did Barât know Roundhill and Headlock? “We crossed paths,” he says. Does he know 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. Once to be introduced to this new world, which I didn’t care to stay in, and once to go and drag Peter out of this new world, which I didn’t care for him to stay in. What happened after that is so, so tragic, and being a parent myself, it’s every parent’s worst nightmare.” He insists “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,” Barât says. “It just all seemed so wrong.”

It’s clear that at least in part Barât saw the purchase of the hotel as creating a port in a storm for Doherty, whose ongoing substance issues frequently left him without a home. But it’s clear, too, that after moving to Margate, Doherty was able to continue his lifestyle as before, “Well, you can lead a horse to water,” says Barât, who lives in the seaside town with his partner, the musician Edie Langley, and their two sons, aged 13 and nine. The idea of “creating a sanctuary” was there, “but of course England is full of crack and heroin and unspoken addictions and deprivation.” It was important, though, he says, “for me to have a closeness to this, because if you don’t have a closeness and you just write it off you can’t help”.

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 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 mean, there’s a danger for anyone who does that, that they’re just gonna fall head over heels into it and be pushing up daisies, which I’d definitely have been doing very shortly after that, given my obsessive nature. 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,” he 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. It’s something that I have to manage.

“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. It’s emboldened me and propped me up, and while it’s still insufferable, 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,” Barât says. “It just feels like a slap in the face to the universe to jeopardise that.”

It’s clear that the problems have been overwhelming at times. “They’ve been life or death serious,” he says. “They’ve been taking-a-breath-day-to-day-being-torture serious. They’ve been as horrible as I can imagine that they can be. Have I struggled as hard as Pete? I don’t know. I can’t know another man’s suffering, but I’ve certainly found it excruciating and Sisyphean for many a year.”

He 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. He and Doherty had just “shaken off the shackles of further education” and were sharing a flat near Holloway Prison. They hung out at bars where one might also encounter Amy Winehouse, Liam Gallagher or the members of Razorlight, including singer Johnny Borrell, who had been at private school with The Libertines’ bassist, John Hassall. Later, the relationship between Doherty and Borrell would turn sour when Razorlight hit the top of the charts and Doherty, by then with Babyshambles, aimed a headbutt at the singer at a music festival. Did Doherty feel that Razorlight had stolen the success that should have been The Libertines’? “I don’t think Pete ever thought that,” Barât says. “I think there was a girl involved in that fracas.”

He had his own issues with Borrell, who had rehearsed with the band as bassist before a showcase with indie record label Rough Trade – “which was the biggest thing in our life… We did two rehearsals, and then on the morning of the Rough Trade thing, I was at Earl’s Court station with a guitar and a bass guitar in my hand going ‘today’s the day’ and [Jonny] phoned me up and said, ‘you’ll never guess where I am?’ I was like, ‘Earl’s Court, I hope’. And he said, ‘I’m on Alabama Three’s tour bus in Cardiff.’ I was like, ‘Am I meant to be impressed?’ I was f---ing fuming.”

He shrugs it off. “To be honest, I still feel affectionate about Johnny. He was definitely a good sort. He’s a unique and eccentric being.”

That early Camden scene “wasn’t a smack [heroin] scene”, he says, “I think it was more knockabout fun, more Pogues-y, more roll-around-the-floor-pissed than the seedy, paranoid, awake forever, living in the shadows thing.”

Winehouse’s 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 far too much. He’s no idiot. But it’s just a pain that he put himself through it – which hurt me as his friend – and weaker people being drawn into that orbit.”

For a time, he and Doherty worked behind the bar at Filthy McNasty’s, one of the regular haunts of singer Shane MacGowan, who died last year. “I have memories of Shane from back then,” Barât says, “It was a legendary place for the Irish literati. Sinead O’Connor was staying there, another one who’s sadly no longer with us. But I remember Shane much more from the Boogaloo [pub in Highgate], where he stayed for a while, when I was living in Muswell Hill. I used to bang on the window, and Shane’d be asleep on the sofa and he’d let me in and we’d have sessions of our own.”

When he first met The Pogues’ singer, though, he admits. “I found him quite scary. He had this characteristic hiss, which was quite intimidating. It took me a while to feel safe enough that he’d warmed to me to start hanging out. And then when we did hang out, he was such a beautiful soul, quite gentle in some ways, not like his outward demeanour would suggest. And he was an inspiration, in what he did and who he was, the warts ’n’ all and the rollicking Rum, Sodomy and the Lash-ness of it all. I feel very blessed to have had a little glimpse into that world.”

“I was lucky enough to sing at his 60th birthday,” he adds. “I was in the dressing room with The Dubliners and the president of Ireland gave me a hug, Johnny Depp was there and we were chatting quite pleasantly, and when I was singing, I remember Gerry Adams singing along. It was very surreal.”

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”. It must still hurt that The Libertines imploded when they did. “At the time we couldn’t even notice what we had,” says Barât. “We were so embroiled in the endless chain of explosions and reactions in our personal world, and in a way that was the making of the band. It was exposing so candidly and earnestly the machinery and the flaws and the f--- ups, and sharing that with the world, it felt like a reality TV of bands at the time.”

Is he still cross with Doherty, though, 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

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