TAKING LIBERTIES

Sentenced to six months for burgling his bandmate's flat, addicted to crack cocaine. . .but Pete Doherty will always be a Libertine, band co-founder Carl Barat tells Brian Boyd

Have you ever had to listen to Spandau Ballet's Through the Barricades eight times in a row? If so, you're probably a crack-cocaine addict now. The yokel who transports me from Bath train station to Peter Gabriel's mightily impressive Real World studios has had the song on a continuous loop for the last 20 minutes, so we're a bit delirious as we pull up to the studio to be met by a sole Libertine, Carl Barat. Someone who understands better than most, our crack-cocaine/Spandau Ballet hypothesis.

Despite the blissed out, pastoral surrounds, there's a bit of a tense, nervous headache in the air today. The band have just finished recording their second album, the follow-up to the raucous delight that was Up the Bracket, which deservedly earned them giddy "the best band in Britain" superlatives. They're in Real World rehearsing for an upcoming European tour but also, one suspects, because they can't get up to much harm in a sleepy West Country hamlet.

Barat and Pete Doherty are the singers, guitarists, songwriters and chief manifesto-shouters of the East London band. They have an impossibly sub-Dickensian, street urchin, demi-monde background. The two met, bonded and forged an intensely chaotic relationship over a shared love of English icons past and present: Queen Boadicea, Disraeli, Graham Greene, Galton and Simpson, Sid Carry On James ("Up the bracket" was one of his catch-phrases), Joe Orton, Beryl Reid, Lindsay Anderson, Queens Park Rangers football club, Chas 'n' Dave, The Jam, Morrissey. Their joint mission was simple: "To sail the good ship Albion to Arcadia".

Like other notable songwriting partnerships, Barat and Doherty have a complicated and fraught relationship in which violence is a frequent fixture. The mythology that now surrounds the band has it that they paid for their first demos by working as rent boys. It's true to a point; they both answered an ad for male escorts, thinking it would just mean "taking a lady out to dinner", but were quickly disabused of that notion when they turned up at a hotel room and an old man answered the door. What is perfectly true is that their first drummer was a 70-year-old man called Mr Razzocks.

Signed to Rough Trade, which got Clash man Mick Jones in to produce the début, these "sweet and tender hooligans" went on to sack their first tour manager for "being too strict"; to date, all live appearances have been prime examples of rock 'n' roll libertinism. Gigs are staged in brothels, squats, corners of pubs; they're impromptu affairs which either end up with more people on the stage than there are in the audience, or with Barat smashing his guitar into Doherty's face - or vice-versa.

"It's only me today. We don't know where Pete is," says Barat as he shows us around Real World's spacious environs. The Libertines are now a three-piece; although all four recorded the album together, Doherty's debilitating crack-cocaine habit ("Libertines man's £1,000 a day drug hell" the red-tops inform us) has seen him in and out of prison and rehab. He is currently "removed" from the band, says Barat, but will rejoin them when he "feels a bit better".

The tension today is the result of messages that Doherty plans to rejoin the band, "as a surprise", on their European dates. As Barat fields multiple phonecalls and has frantic talks with management and band members, he apologises for the confusion.

"It's not that things are changing every five minutes, it's that they're changing every one minute," he says, bouncing around on the heels of his feet and chainsmoking. "Now I'm hearing he's planning to turn up on these tour dates and I don't know if he's still using or what sort of people he's hanging around with at the moment.

"I'm really sorry about all of this confusion happening in front of you but there's worry around. Pete is and always will be a Libertine - the two of us formed the band and the two of us write the songs. Albion and Arcadia is all about us, but we can't have him in the band with his addiction problems.

"Fuck it, there's been three failed rehab attempts, all of which The Libertines have funded. We all just felt having him on tour would only make his current problems worse, so we're doing the dates without him and we plan to carry on without him."

The conversation then inexplicably turns from crack-cocaine-addicted musicians to the collected works of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), an early 20th-century English writer whose beautifully epigrammatic stories always had a sardonic edge and a threat of cruelty.

"A bit like The Libertines," says Barat as he bizarrely but impressively acts out characters from Saki stories. "You know this whole Albion thing in our music, the way we venerate people such as Saki or Tony Hancock or whoever, I don't want anybody reading this to pick up the wrong idea in that there's a dodgy political edge to it or something. A large part of what we are about can be traced to a line in the song Time for Heroes, when we say 'There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap'. So we like to think it's more about reclaiming a sense of our own culture rather than aping a vacuous American one.

"You know, ask me what The Libertines are all about and I'll tell you that we're the musical equivalent of Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns - y'know what I mean." Jumping out of his chair, Barat then marches around the room re-enacting scenes from Ripping Yarns.

Many have claimed The Libertines to be the present-day inheritors of the classic English songwriting tradition, continuing a lineage that began with Ray Davies and worked its way up through Weller and Morrissey.

"We do get a lot of 'British' and 'English' in our reviews," says Barat. "I suppose we didn't help matters by idolising Chas 'n' Dave in our early interviews \. But we would like to get away from that 'local' thing. As much as we admire those names, we have to keep The Libertines true to ourselves musically, true to our own vision.

"I mean, what's really important to me is that on the last tour we had people come up to us and say, 'I picked up the guitar after seeing you play'. Instead of being a great British band, we'd prefer to be just a great band. Looking around me now, the only people out there I see not retreading influences are The Streets - and The Coral as well."

Happy that the new album is already being described as their London Calling and/or The Queen Is Dead, Barat says the lead-off single, Can't Stand Me Now, accurately reflects the relationship he has with Doherty.

"Just listen to the lyrics," he says, breaking into song: "An ending fitting for the start/You twisted and tore our love apart. you can't stand me now, you can't stand me now/Have we enough to keep it together, or do we just keep on pretending and hope our luck is never ending.

"The thing about that song is that when we first played it live, Pete said he saw me looking at him in a funny way as we sang the lyrics, so he beat me up with his guitar. It had taken a long, long time for the two of us to be able to sing 'can't stand me now' about each other. It was like the truth. That was a real moment in our relationship. Maybe it is finished."

A source close to the band will tell you that the album is their last. "The album is amazing, but there's a sense that it all ends here for Carl and Peter as a songwriting unit. They'll probably both do great solo stuff, but nothing like they're capable of when they're together. Pete's a great, great songwriter, but he has problems. It has been a difficult relationship for them at the best of times. Now nobody really knows".

Asked about their future, Barat says, emotionally: "It was such a terrible thing for me to have to ask Pete to leave for a while so we could get out and tour while he sorted himself out. But I want to be in a band with Pete, I really, really do. And I don't want tobe in a band called The Libertines if he's not in it. Pete is, and always will be, a Libertine".

The self-titled Libertines album is released on Rough Trade on August 27th