that rock 'n' roll, eh?

“My friend Peter, who I started the Libertines with, he was studying - well, I say studying in the loosest sense of the word - at QMC, across London, out near Whitechapel, and I used to go and visit him and we used to sort of roam around the city. We didn’t really know what we were doing, we just knew that what we wanted to do was something that wasn’t very palpable in the surrounding atmosphere. He was in a university full of medical students who used to chase him round and beat him up, I don’t know what he was doing there. And I was across town at university with loads of people who liked golf and dance music. So we used to meet… we used to go to the old derelict buildings in Whitechapel, we used to sit up on the roof, just with a bottle of wine smoking rollies, just thinking ‘What do we actually want’, y'know what is this all about, and there was just one moment I remember, we broke into this library, it’s called the Knutsford Library, and just sat there with a candle, picking through the books, which seemed incredibly wild at that time, it probably wasn’t. And we just decided that we were going to make a pact, this was going to be our life, and we were going to *not* be at university, and we were going to miss out on all the security and comfort and all of the things that our friends had, and take that leap into the abyss, just the unknown. Our families would fucking hate us even more than they already did, all of our friends from previous lives would carry on learning and growing and achieving, and we would make that sacrifice and we said, 'Top of the world or bottom of the canal’. And that’s that moment, this hunger and not knowing and desperation actually had a point on it, that we actually had something to work towards.”