Pete Doherty and Carl Barat used to have drunken “vocabulary battles” at 4 am.
The 43-year-old singer and Carl, 44, founded The Libertines in 1997, and Pete has looked back on the early years of their successful partnership.
He shared: “Carl used to go out on these drinking missions, who could get more fucked up and he used to question this and the lack of artistic pursuit, and Carl would always rise to the challenge and be like, ‘I can drink anyone at the table and still be a poet’ and all that.
“So we’d have these weird vocabulary battles. It would be four in the morning and we’d each have a dictionary and then we’d throw words at each other to see who had the best vocabulary.”
Pete was also inspired by what Carl could do while drunk.
Speaking on the ‘Up The Bracket – 20 Years of The Libertines’ podcast, Pete explained: “Sometimes you bring out the guitar and it’s like a sacred moment for me to see someone who can play guitar so naturally. I learned a lot just by watching him, I would go and practice like crazy.”
The Libertines are currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut album, ‘Up the Bracket’.
And Carl can finally appreciate the success they managed to achieve together.
He said: “I’m more blessed now than ever because of all of this. I’m starting to finally… I think I spent a lot of my time doing it thinking it’s going to be taken away from me. I always thought it’s going to be taken away from me.
“I finally got to a point where I can look at the body of work that we’ve done together and I can say ‘It wasn’t taken away from me.’ That’s there now, it’s locked down.”
