ONE Raising the Colours

      The room looked like the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album come to life: the great and the good, the infamous, the notorious and the inane all gathered under an opulent domed roof, lit up in blushes of colour, celebrating another year for the NME Awards. A dense bass guitar made the soles of my feet tingle as the room rubbernecked at a Stetson that was cutting a determined swathe towards the plush, red stairs Peter and I were standing on. Diminutive, and lit like she had her own spotlight, the lady beneath the cowboy hat tilted high on her head gave us a winning smile, before leaning towards us.

      ‘Hello, The Strokes,’ she purred warmly before disappearing towards the door behind us.

      It was our first ever NME Awards ceremony and Madonna had just confirmed that it wasn’t our year.

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      Looking back at The Libertines is like catching flashes of sunlight between buildings as you race by on a train. An old film reel where the spools are weathered and worn, leaving empty frames on the screen. Faces disappear and reappear, sights crackle and fade as we aimlessly walk the streets of an ever-changing London, pub-crawling, minesweeping – secretly topping up our drinks from half-full glasses left unattended by their owners. We dream of Albion and the high skies above the low ceiling of our basement flat.

      Sometimes there’s no noise and sometimes that’s all there is.

      It’s 2003 and we’re about to go on stage. Gary and John are warming up, I can hear the thrum of the bass, the ricochet of the snare. Peter takes my hand and, barely acknowledging the rest of the band: ‘Just you and me, we can do this without them. You have to believe.’ He’s almost in tears as he says it. Gary and John find something to stare at on the floor. My stomach turns over. Peter starts in again: ‘Something’s going to happen tonight’, and I envisage some sort of imminent meltdown on stage. It’s the equivalent of your girlfriend telling you that she needs a serious talk with you that evening: you know it’s never going to be good news. Then, nothing happens. Peter plays a storming set; he’s all over the stage, heralding the crowd, grinning at us three. Bumping chests, we collide at the centre of the stage, and to an onlooker it would seem like there was nowhere else we’d rather be.

      When we were performing, I used to worry about being found out, that I didn’t deserve to be on that stage. I’d swap glances with John and Gary and we’d get on with it, we’d buckle down as we always did. But then there was this other part of me that knew how lucky we were, that knew we gelled, and how lucky we were that, without trying, me and Peter had a chemistry; we fitted together completely – which made it all the more difficult when he tried to wrench it all apart. I can see those lights, feel the sweat gather at the small of my back. I’ve never been happier, I’ve never been more angry, never more fulfilled or let down. The Libertines heightened my insecurities, made me feel like I was king of the world, realized my dreams and dashed my hopes. We were that kind of band.

      ∗ ∗ ∗

      Before The Libertines, before the madness and the money, before the room started filling up with people we didn’t know, Peter and I would romanticize about Albion. I don’t even know when we first started saying it. It was something that, many years ago, Peter and I, if we were trying to motivate the other to do something, we’d say: ‘Do it for the Albion’, and it would work. It would spur us into action even if it did sound as if we were talking about West Brom. Most people wouldn’t even have bothered to dress it up: they’d just have told you they had goals, but we imagined ourselves on a voyage sailing through choppy waters, on a ship called the Albion looking for Arcadia. That might sound vaguely nonsensical or highfalutin to other people, but as far as I’m concerned that’s the voyage I’m on. If you are going to set sail, then you have to give your vessel a name, and my good ship’s called the Albion. For the sake of home and hope and glory, let’s sail to Arcadia, an unfettered place with no constraints and infinite hope. That’s the destination. We held Albion and Arcadia close, twisted it into our own philosophy; we changed and mutated it along the way. It was our own personal mythology, our idiosyncratic, romantic ideal. It was the Greek myths with England at their heart: Homer and Blake.

      The whole idea of Albion has got tangled up over the years, but the important thing was that Peter and I met in the middle with it; we chimed with that ideal. I truly believe that we’re still on that boat – at the very opposite ends of it right now, but still stuck on the same fucking sea.

      ∗ ∗ ∗

      I’ve lived in London since the summer of 1996, when I moved up to study drama at Brunel University. I wasn’t particularly popular in Whitchurch, near Basingstoke, where I grew up. I was something of a ghost, felt straitjacketed there, and had to move away. Some people pick their point of the compass and stick to it; all I ever wanted to be was at the heart of the action.

      Richmond, though, seemed very far from that. It’s where I lived for most of my two short years at Brunel, hunkered down in the student halls on campus. I met Peter there, which was important in itself, but campus life also allowed me to plug into London’s social scene and student life meant I had money in my pocket – a ludicrous notion for most students now – as well as all the time in the world to spend it. I was always annoyed that my Richmond halls didn’t have a London postcode – they were in TW1, on the other side of the river – so I ended up moving with a friend to Sheen, in the first of many moves towards the heart of London. Sheen was SW14, I think, and we had a little old house next to Richmond Park, into which we used to creep at night and steal wood to burn in our fireplace, ambling back through the darkness weighed down with piles of wood. We’d cycle into Richmond together on my bike, the two of us careering along, one of us on the crossbar like the scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ running through my head, going way too fast, two miles there and two miles back. We thrived on the bright lights of central London, and every trip home from town