The birth of The Libertines: the moment Carl Barât met Pete Doherty
Pete Doherty and Carl Barât’s friendship has been a rollercoaster ride over the last 25 years. Despite the infamous fall-outs, arrests, and tabloid mania, their relationship is underpinned by music and brotherly love. The Libertines founders met in peculiar circumstances, which undoubtedly set the tone for their story.
Barât is a year older than Doherty, and the pair came from distinctly different backgrounds, but they had an overarching commonality. While Doherty was raised in a military household and moved around the country due to his father’s work, Barât’s father was a former artist, and his mother was heavily involved with the counterculture movement. Both Barât and Doherty were striving for a creative anchor in their life, and as a result, their dreams carried them to London.
They both enrolled at university, with Barât studying at Brunel and Doherty instead opting to read at Queen Mary’s University. Although they were studying at universities in opposite areas of the capital, fortunately, Doherty’s sister, Amy-Jo, was on Barât’s course. The two of them struck up a close friendship, eventually leading to him meeting Pete. Writing in his autobiography, Threepenny Memoir, Barât explained: “Amy-Jo was the one person I met there who seemed engaged with the sort of things I was looking for. We became best friends, and she’d often tell me fantastic stories about Peter, an aspiring poet who was a year younger than her and still lived in the sticks.”
When they first met, Carl was tasked with babysitting Pete because Amy-Jo needed to attend a night class, and the pair immediately hit it off. Both were in a lonely place, looking for companionship, and from their initial meeting, they viewed the world through the same lens. Barât recalled in his book: “Straight away, we began to talk about music. He was a massive Morrissey and Smiths fan, and his sister had asked me to write down the tablature to ‘This Charming Man’, but I didn’t know anything about The Smiths, and I’d transcribed ‘Charmless Man’ by Blur, instead. He didn’t play guitar very well, so I showed him a few things, and he played me his one song, ‘The Long Song’, which lived up to its name. I had some songs with terrible lyrics, and we started doing musical things together; we bonded over music very quickly”.
“That first night, too, we had an argument over the meaning of a word. I can’t even remember what the word was now, but finally, it felt as if I was getting the intellectual stimulation I’d been searching for and had been expecting from University. For me, it was a joyful moment.”
The musician poignantly added: “I was learning things from him, too, although I wouldn’t have readily admitted it. I was performing the role of the older, experienced guy, and I’d try to play it like he was the little’un nipping at my feet. But in reality, Peter knew a lot about the world I wanted to know. He’d read and read, and searched for authors to inspire him, and, by helping this passion come alive in me, helped me become more the person I wanted to be.”
After their first meeting, visits from Pete to see Carl became more regular, and slowly, they began to get the wheels in motion for The Libertines. Although they always promised to start a band together for two years, it was merely a topic of drunken conversation before finally sitting down one evening to make music. That fateful night, they wrote ‘The Good Old Days’, which started a wild journey still thriving today.
