Peter and I had a month to immerse ourselves in [New York] city, and there’s a photo of me swinging off a lamp-post on Broadway that for me sums up our optimism. We really felt like we could make things happen but, us being us, being in town for a month simply meant we had plenty of time for things to go really tits up.

There are moments like these in the history of The Libertines when even I can see the car crash coming. It looms so vivid and dense that there’s no denying it. Peter was floating away from me and I was there, remote and useless, tethered to the ground…We were trying to work on demos, but things eroded and fell apart and I’d lose him, literally; he was just disappearing all the time…There was the occasional respite, the sense of trying to claw something back. We got our Libertines tattoos in the city, my spidery handwriting on both of our arms in some sort of attempt to bind us together…

And later, he came to me for help at the apartment when he couldn’t clear out the junkies who had gathered in his room…he looked scared, wide-eyed and a bit lost…For no good reason other than he’s my best friend I went down there—while he sat it out in my room—and there were about six of them sitting in a circle with the lights out. It was like going into a squalid cave…I’d just had it by this point, and, it sounds strange to say, as I told them to get out I felt a white light around me. It felt like opening the curtains on a summer morning: the light just went through them, these horrible black shadows, and they dispersed.