A Peace Summit With the Libertines Lads

When I spoke with Carl Barât in 2022, he expressed a kind of existential disbelief that he was doing something as simple as talking with a writer about the scope of his career. “From my view, everyone would be dead,” he said. “There wasn’t a hope for us getting this far.”

The operative word is “us.” Barât, along with Pete Doherty, are the core of the Libertines, the cataclysmic British indie rockers who dueled with guitars, pens, and fists to create some of the most defining music of the aughts. (Bassist John Hassall and drummer Gary Powell, always the peripherals, round out the quartet.) The drug use was rampant. Security guards were summoned to protect one from the other. The cycle of hope and hurt kept repeating. Barât and Doherty managed to work through enough of their shit to record two albums, 2002’s Up the Bracket and 2004’s The Libertines, until an inevitable breakup put them on fractured paths. At least that’s what they assumed. “Every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step,” Barât says now. Responds Doherty, “And about a thousand cuts.”

Improbably, the lads reunited in 2015 for Anthems for Doomed Youth, an album that further entrenched their kettle-whistling relationship. But their latest release, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade finds them during what they agree is the strongest alliance of their careers: Doherty has mellowed due to being sober from hard drugs for four years, while Barât was “very conscious of keeping a continuity together in our mood and connectivity.” Hassall and Powell are even credited as writers for the first time. “I don’t think we ever really did feel unified in this way before,” Doherty admits. The band hopes to tour Stateside, although it’s proven to be difficult due to Doherty’s repeated visa denials for his past drug use. (“They’re really making me jump through hoops,” he says of the U.S. Embassy.) Until then, the duo are extending their armistice for a little longer, at least for the purposes of this interview.

Tell me something new you learned about each other while making this album.
Pete Doherty: Carl’s work ethic and sense of discipline. In the past we’ve worked hard, but it’s always been in conjunction with a jolly good knees up. This time around, there were strict instructions from Carl that there was no alcohol or drugs on the premises during writing and recording, which I went along with thinking it would be all right. He’ll give up after two or three hours. But lo and behold, he didn’t.

Carl Barât: And lo and behold, we got a record.

P.D.: I’m not knocking the system. I’m just saying it’s very difficult and I’m surprised by your puritanical adherence to it. Because after day three I was ready for a glass of cider purely as a reward system.

C.B.: After a minute, if I remember. And I had no idea Pete was so learned in that he knows every book of the New Testament in order. Is it just the New Testament or the whole Bible?

P.D.: Old Testament.

C.B.: So not the New one. There’s room for improvement. I was impressed by that. Every day I had to learn which Carl to be for which Pete. I didn’t want to fuck that up by taking any risks and coming in and going, It’s all about me. Pete’s love of his family, commitments, and responsibility is slightly less interesting stuff for the purposes of this article. But I witnessed those changes.

P.D.: I was surprised to learn it’s still, after all these years, all about Carl’s mood in the morning. That determines the whole day. It’s a bit like the life of nuclear waste. There’s a certain period that has to pass before it stops being lethal.

C.B.: I’ve learned to deal with temper and read the fucking room before I go in there.

Pete, you’ve described the album’s creation as coming from “a moment of rare peace.”
P.D.: In the early days, it was a more apocalyptic way of looking at the world and the system. We’re now rolling up our sleeves and taking it out on the road in a way we never did. I wouldn’t say it’s a plan of military precision, but there’s this vague hope that everything’s going to turn out all right and people are going to love us, which always was in the past. Now it’s come through self-love and looking after yourself in terms of mental illness and physical wellbeing. We’ve reached a point where we’re doing ice baths and breathing. We might even have to do group therapy one day just to see what it’s all about.

C.B.: Like The Simpsons and those bats and electric buzzers.

P.D.: We could use a Dr. Marvin Monroe.

Who served as a central peacemaker for you two over the years?
P.D.: Who can both sides trust? In the years when we didn’t talk, anyone who worked with Carl was automatically seen as being in Carl’s camp, and therefore, not to be trusted. Just take the headshot and ask questions later.

C.B.: It’s only through us finding a place in our connection through songs. That’s the leveler. There’s no individual who’s mutually trusted by the pair of us to wade in and settle these things in a diplomatic and objective way. I guess you’d normally say the bass player, but in a Spinal Tap way. The lukewarm water.

P.D.: John normally takes Carl’s side anyway.

C.B.: No he doesn’t. He loves you.

Your single “Shiver” has a few lines that speak to your long-held private lore about the mythos of Albion and Arcadia. They were “reasons to stay alive and not to die at 25.” Do you still consider that mythology to be a critical part of the band?
C.B.: Hemingway once described his writing as giving one-eighth of the iceberg. The lines you selected all relate to entire spheres of that. Is it mythology or is it real? Was it all just a dream? I don’t know. It feels so stacked up in that song.

P.D.: It’s not like we sit around discussing these things, but when we do sit down and write songs, they become central to everything. For the band, they’re still as important — maybe more important than ever. It’s very arcadian in outlook and in depth.

I look at your early songs, like “Up the Bracket” and “Time for Heroes,” which evoke a type of dreamed-up patriotism that’s tricky for some Americans to understand. Among the most enduring images of you both, for example, are in red guards jackets. How important was building the band in this image and contributing to a meaningful preservation of British culture?
C.B.: The redcoats are coming. I really thought that’d be our tagline when we came to America, but it wasn’t.

P.D.: It only occurred to me afterward how symbolic it would’ve been to have a group of English geezers in red coats. It was strange. Maybe the fact we’re a mixed-race band gave it a slightly different spin. I don’t know much about what it is to be American and to see a picture of a red coat, but I presume Revolutionary fervor is still alive and well in historical imaginations.

C.B.: We grew up in the antique-shop relics of the empire. The dusty bugles, the moth-eaten jackets, and tales of valor and unity. The national pride and nearly good war didn’t exist around us, so we were grubbing around in our grandma’s attic, figuratively speaking, for something to cling on to.

P.D.: War and militarization was a big part of what we did but almost in a theatrical way. I came from a military background, but I’d always preferred the idea of going around the world with a guitar rather than a gun. Everyone from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols used military imagery. I thought it was quite a mod thing as well. The Kinks, the Small Faces, that psychedelic vibe. At the time that was more what I was going for.

Your character studies always struck me as something that would be well-suited for a concept album, like what the Kinks did with The Village Green Preservation Society.
P.D.: I love that album so much and Arthur, which is much in that theme of an empire. It’s a very strange album to listen to in these times and the way people now look at empires. I think there was a period of genuine innocence where people said, Right, that’s it, it’s all over. Pack your stuff up and go home. Then when people returned, they realized it wasn’t the England that anyone had seen before.

C.B.: What’s most important is rather than just being a dumping ground for different ethnicities, there was a bonding and a togetherness in the different communities. I’ve seen that more successfully in England than I’ve seen in other countries.

P.D.: Music is the perfect way to align these things culturally. What’s that Beatles song where the line is, “the English army had just won the war”?

C.B.: Come on, man, “A Day in the Life.”

P.D.: It’s one of our favorite songs. Whenever he sang “the English army” line we’d always go, Hooray! “The English army.” Hooray! So much so that when I hear it now on a record, I wonder whether the hooray is actually there.

C.B.: Are you sure it’s not there in the original? In my head, it’s there.

P.D.: There you go. It’s the power of suggestion.

Pete, how has becoming sober affected your songwriting? Do you have a different standard for when you sit down to write?
P.D.: I suppose there’s less of a routine for me without using. I don’t think it’s changed the quality of what I do — just less late nights. Two or three in the morning always used to be the time where I would get locked into something. There are certain things I’m doing now that I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do before. I’m writing music for a film, and I just wouldn’t have the time, the discipline, or the interest to do that. I quite enjoyed all the chaos and spontaneity, which was what I was writing about a lot of the time. I’m in the moment of transition. I’d like to think it’s going to make me a lot more productive, but we shall see.

As a band, do you feel unfairly weighed down by the baggage of your legacy? 
P.D.: It depends on the quality of the interviewer.

C.B.: I’m so over it. It can feel that way on a bad day or dealing with somebody rude, but yeah, I’m learning to embrace it myself. I think I was always in denial — a bit like impostor syndrome. Now while I’ve still got the chance, I’m going to make the most of embracing it all, even the past.

To end on a moment of mutual appreciation: What would you say was the most beautiful song that the other has written?
P.D.: You’ve got plenty to pick from, Carl.

C.B.: Did you write “Salome” all on your own? Or was that a secret co-write?

P.D.: I wrote that one.

C.B.: I was a bit gutted about “Salome.” It’s more of a jealousy thing than, Well done, Pete, good on you! It was something I would’ve liked to have been on. I know that’s how we operate. So that’s uncomfortable data.

P.D.: Not at all. I can genuinely enjoy your music without the green-eyed monkey appearing on my shoulder. It could’ve been yours.

C.B.: But it’s not. The less obvious one would be “Fuck Forever.” That’s just a belter. It touches my love.

P.D.: There were many moments I put aside to listen to Carl’s solo projects. In my heart I didn’t want them to be too good, but I didn’t want them to be crap. But when I listened to them, I thought, Why hadn’t this been much bigger than it was? “Glory Days” would’ve been great as a Libertines song. “Hippy’s Son” — it was like a short burst of machine-gun fire and guitars with a spangled stream of consciousness. My get-up-and-go songs are “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” by Oasis, “Original Bad Boy” by D-Force, and “Hippy’s Son.” Oh, “France” as well. Whenever we’d find ourselves around someone else’s flat after-hours, I’d say, “Hey, you’ve got to hear my mate’s song, it’s called ‘France.’” It’s still happening. Last weekend in Cardiff, we were doing an acoustic show and I was like, “Everyone listen to my mate’s song.” But the difference was they all knew it now.

This interview has been edited and condensed.