Poets From England

"I realise it’s proved to people that I don’t love them. It’s dawning on me now that if I say I love someone… it’s like lying, really. As long as I’m taking it, the lie continues. I’ve got a lot of proving myself to do."

"With drugs, I think the sort of person that would die from an overdose is gonna die soon enough anyway, because they’ve got that will to destroy what’s left of their life."

"Drugs don’t work. They don’t even make you forget – only momentarily, because if something’s that painful, nothing’s going to make you forget it. You think they’ll fill the hole, but the hole just gets deeper… It’s like trying to fill in a hole without a spade."

"I knew I was destined for London, so I came to live with my nan in her council flat. It was the summer after my A-levels. Got a job in Willesden cemetery. I was getting a man’s wage, filling in graves. Stood around while they did the last rites. Cut the grass. A lot of the time I’d just sit on the gravestones and read and write. Scribbling away."

"I'd say exercising self-control is very important for a dissolute life. You don't need to control your drug intake to lead a free life. Whether you take no drugs at all or everything you can get your hands on, a free life is separated from that."

"I think I only needed something to hold on to. It has never been about depravity. It's always been about melody. But melody and I met in many depraved situations. Meeting melody is the victory of the empty spiralling nightmare."

"“Yeah, well, I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel is a Poet and Liam is a town crier.”"

"I’ve got a fierce passion for politics but I can’t stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I’m up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets."

"With Oasis stepping up a gear and proving they've still got it, they need to be shown there are people out there who can surpass them. Can we match them? The quality is good (in Oasis), but there really is no competition because my band is the greatest in the world and we're going to prove it."

"You can't get that feeling anywhere else. It's communion. It's like being washed away in the ocean, carried aloft on a wave."

"I think it's woken me up to a few things, and you do become complacent. As well as being anti something, you've got to be pro something. So you're anti racism, so what are you pro? You're pro community. I would put my hand on my heart and I'd attach myself to socialist ideas. Because I believe in society. And it's bollocks that black people have any less worth in society than white people, which is basically what people like the BNP say."

"It's not people in bands, is it? Why do people who take drugs, why are they in bands? 'Cos they're trying to prove themselves. To make themselves blank and numb and not able to communicate with other people."

"They left me, by the side of the road, with a plastic bag and all kinds of bitterness Well, in my mind, and I can say this forever I suppose, and people might laugh at it, but I don't think I ever really left The Libertines, nor can I ever leave The Libertines, you know, having been a founder of the band with Carl, but that sounds silly, doesn't it, seeing as they played all the festivals without me and made it difficult, no - impossible, for me to play live with them."

"Doff your cap and raise your glasses, Make a toast to the boring classes I'm burning your secrets to keep me warm."

"There's a point you reach before you're perverted and tainted by all the things that drag you into the music business, like avarice or a lust for fame. The original reason why I started was some feeling of community, equality, wanting to fight for things you believe in. Any kid who's gone to a state school knows what it's all about - bullying, racism. And you've just got to make a stand."

"If I want drugs, I don't have to do a gig to get them. I do a gig when I feel shit, because I need to be playing. There's no drug in the world that can compare with playing music"

"I mean you look in the paper and you see the bodies of mutilated people, and that's controversy. Controversy isn't saying something like 'Oh I've fucked Noel Gallagher' or something. Which I have."

"The main instinct a lot of the time is to masquerade and hide the truth at all times. Whereas in reality what happens in songs is laying bare the truth. So a lot of time it's fighting that instinct, and the songs become almost confessional. They can also be quite condescending to myself, almost like I'm putting myself down."

"I do have utopian fantasies. A lot of them are more - I wouldn't say spiritual, but they relate more to the imagination and the individual. But for me socialism is a way of trying to put far-fetched ideas into everyday use, trying to find a way to bridge the gap between that fantasy and reality, and reaching out across that gap to the people who can actually do something to make the change."

"I don't really know what "intellectual" means, but if it means you've got a desire to learn, you've got a desire to look for things that haven't been presented to you, then, maybe. I think that "intellectual" is quite an exclusive word. I think it's just for anyone that has a thirst or a hunger to improve themselves, or a yearning to escape from somewhere to get to a better place."

"I know the basic facts cause they’ve been repeated again and again across various duty desk counters at police stations over the past months and years: I’m 6ft 2in, green-brown eyes. Distinguishing features: moles. Tattoos: loads. Got a wolf, a mermaid, a heart with a K in it. They don’t go through your personality traits."

"Broken glass. It's just like glitter, isn't it?"

""Each man kills the things he loves". I recognise that in myself, in relationships, even with guitars, beautiful things that I've had and wilfully destroyed."

"Something good has happened to us. We are, dare I say it, a professional unit these days. When people get us in a room together now, they actually treat us like musicians. Before, they would treat us as anything but: pigeon fanciers, candles, dry humpers..."

"It's that mysterious thing called hype. I've looked under every rock, and I couldn't find out what it means. Certain people hear a certain melody, and they're attracted to it. I'm in love with that feeling. We're looking for fun and adventure and a bit of redemption and somewhere to live. Everything else is a blind venture into the unknown."

"I can't buy her diamonds, my dick's too small. I never know where I stand with her. It's either a black eye or a love bite."

"You've got to understand... these days I just can't afford to get involved [with the press]. People - they turn on you... on me. They write horrible things, deliberately twisting my words."

""We've had death threats", Pete says, "saying, 'You're evil and your days are numbered." What was it, "Don't panic but be scared". Someone shat on our doorstep once and nailed a sparrow to our basement door. I don't mind, me. I'll out-weird any stalker."

"The more you read and the more you teach yourself, the less you rely on something like drugs to take you to a better place."

"We have played at venues up and down the country on this tour, some of which had no security, and have encountered no problems or witnessed any aggression. I simply asked the bouncer last night to apologise for his behaviour, three times in fact, and he refused. I was very upset at his attitude and although I'm very sorry for letting everyone down last night, I refuse to play at venues where pumped up, 16 stone men feel the need to be aggressively rude and to bully teenage kids around."

"I have a very bad relationship with the future. We don't get on. We just ignore each other."

"There are three things that I know a bit about in my life and that's QPR, my guitar and drugs. I know QPR are the best football team in the world, my guitar is the most beautiful thing I own and that I don't take enough drugs to kill me. It isnt drugs that I need to get rid of; it's the demons that fill my head. Once I have come to terms with my demons, maybe I'll be able to get clean."

"I made this big statement saying, "I've left The Libertines." A couple of people said, "You can't do that! You're such a great band! What are you gonna do about Brixton?" And some people said, "Well, I'd rather be here than Brixton." There's no reason you can't do both. If I was 16 or 17 and Morrissey opened his front door to me and let me go and listen to him and chat to him it would be a joy. Why not? It's possible. I don't really have that much else going on in my life."

"Nooooooah. No, that was a big joke in the family. When I was 16, 17, I started drifting away from everything else and picking up a guitar, and it was like, "What are you doing? You can't sing and you can't play a guitar", right up to the day we got signed by Rough Trade. And then it was like, "Go on play us a song", whereas before it was, "Shut up, fucking racket.""

"‘You can only be so thick-skinned. You can only pretend not to care for so long before you have to admit that you hate being made to look like an idiot. I hate seeing myself misquoted. I hate being linked romantically with girls I’ve been close to for years but never slept with. It’s just upsetting, isn’t it? My nan reads and believes these things. I say, “Hiya Nan, how are you getting on?” and she’ll say, “Are you all right? What about that cat you injected with crack?”’"

"Basically there’s a gulf between truth and untruth, I don’t want to be too mathematical about it, because I’m not very good at maths. But it’s a divide between, I dunno, a film and a cartoon. I’ve just become this cartoon character. I try not to follow it, but when you see pictures of yourself that have been photo-shopped to show you doing something you didn’t…. that’s wrong. It’s my worst nightmare – and being misquoted, too, especially as I’m so precious about words."

"I'm not going to be hardened by these people, to these things, I'm not going to let them destroy my feelings or my emotions."

"Until I was nine years old I thought 'cunt' was a term of endearment"

"The story of The Libertines starts for me when it was me, Carl Barât and Steve Bedlow sat on the side of a canal, throwing stones at a bottle and we had a game where whoever hit the bottle first with the stone got to choose the name of the band - I can't even remember who it was that hit the bottle but, yeah, from that night onwards we became The Libertines. We ended up throwing ourselves into eternity, as we called it at the time"

"Arcadia? The realm of the infinite? It's a poet's corner... It's not a cult or a religion – it's an awareness of your surroundings; you're not going to force yourself on anyone and, equally, no one's going to force themselves on you. And it's about community and pleasure. It came from a whisper through the trees. It came from a crack in the pavement. It can also come when you open a bag of crisps, or when you kick a football against a goalpost. Even if I was winding you up, it would still be true, because Arcadia and the Arcadian Dream is so deep, is so true to our hearts... It can be as powerful as your imagination can allow it to be. But, it can also be as dark and twisted as your soul... Arcadia encompasses the infinite, and that's why it comforts me."

"Just when you get really wound up, you turn a corner and you're somewhere else completely. You find an Arcadian glade - a glimpse of paradise in the middle of it all. And that's why you persevere. That's why you don't chuck yourself off a building or shoot yourself at the same time as someone else, like he [Carl] wanted us to."

"I still do. It's changed a lot. It started off as something ancient and forgotten; and became something modern and real. I just couldn't swim. The tunnels get narrower and narrower."

"Has there ever been a musician of cultural significance who's been aware they're significant? Maybe it's a generation whose parents came from a working class environment and because they were rootless in a way, like me and him, they latched onto that as an identity. Maybe we romanticise what our parents wanted to escape from. We're, like, fantasising out a living."

"I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race."

"I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away."

"The mountain sheep are sweeter But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it...As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything."

"Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond."

"There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical."