The Albion Rooms. Queens of Noize. The Hawley Arms. A musician remembers London in 2002.
‘It was an amazing explosion: photos from the epicentre of indie sleaze’ blazed the headline of the magazine article, forwarded to me by a friend enquiring, ‘OMG… is this you?’ Flicking through the gallery of images snapped by the producer Gordon Raphael in the early noughties, I was instantly transported back to my most thoroughly misspent youth.
I spent my childhood as a music-obsessed loner in a variety of ever-more-depressing backwater towns and villages, until my mother decided I was a nonstarter and threw me out at the age of 16 to live with my father in London. On my first day in the city, I went straight to Camden and got a job in a store that sold latex dresses, hoping that, if I offered my dad some rent, he’d let me stay. Sadly, he was in the late stages of alcoholism, and after an argument, he chucked me out too. But no matter – a beautiful goth named Felicity, who I’d met at the fetish shop, told me of an ‘artistic squat’ on nearby Prince of Wales Road, and I moved in that evening.
Within six months, I had fully immersed myself in the alternative music scene through a buffet of drugs, gigs and clubs. I followed in Felicity’s footsteps, got a job at Stringfellows, and was able to rent a damp Victorian basement flat in Kentish Town, primarily chosen for its ten-minute walking distance to my stomping ground: Camden. The grimy streets (which always looked so great in the rain, like a lo-fi music video) catered to the subcultures of goth, indie, punk and alternative and were a hotbed for the grassroots music scene. I found my bandmates on the sticky dance floors of the Camden Palace and Electric Ballroom. In these clubs you’d find lots of beautiful displaced youth gathered in their black PVC trousers, smudged eye-liner and glitter, dancing and romancing to the likes of Placebo and Nine Inch Nails, which was musically and aesthetically my vibe. However, the goth/emo scene seemed to be on its way out and was being replaced with something altogether more… back to basics.
First came The Strokes with their stripped-back post-punk New York sound and classic cool-boy combo of skinny jeans and leather jackets. There was a great New York-London crossover at this point, not seen since the 70s and punk culture. The magazine NME was incredibly important back then, it could literally make or break a band, and they were absolutely psychotic about the UK’s answer to The Strokes: The Libertines. (There were a fuck-tonne of bands whose names began with ‘the’ during this period.)
Soho played a big part in our nightlife too: the Astoria on Shaftesbury Avenue (said by many who played there, including me, to be haunted) was previously a cinema and a concert hall, and the most atmospheric, outstanding place to watch a band play. Then, around the corner to the Metro Club for the after-party, and the after-after party at the Columbia Hotel – rites of passage for every rock star. I have a photo of me and the singer from Interpol downing pints of wine together there after my band had opened for them at the Astoria. After snorting bugle until the early hours, the Americans were appalled when their British counterparts pulled out tinfoil to chase the dragon.
Everything felt like a film. A normal day would consist of me sitting at the bar of the Good Mixer slating heart-breaking indie boys (Blake) with Amy Winehouse, before Pete Doherty rode in on his moped, whisking me away on the back like some junkie Top Gun. Ah yes, Pete. Integral to my tour of nostalgia, The Libertines singer and I first met after my show at the Rhythm Factory in Whitechapel. By this point, the scene had decidedly moved east.
Suddenly, every night out involved getting off at Old Street. It was quite a pretentious scene, which is ironic when you consider a great part of it involved smoking crack. ‘The Albion Rooms’ was the flat of Libertines bandmates Pete and Carl in Bethnal Green: a den of iniquity strewn with musical instruments, vinyl and books such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and volumes of Byron, Keats and Shelley. And we actually read and firmly believed in the doomed poet lifestyle, that the heroin we were smoking was actually opium and we were like Thomas De Quincey in Regency London. It was all very romantic.
For a short while, we flourished in a somewhat blissful state of creativity and songs. Both playing and attending gigs were a quasi-religious experience due to the intensity of riotous energy, and it was easy to get carried away with the chaos. Every epoch has its drug, and for the noughties it was smack and crack. What started as a moronic bit of William Burroughs tourism had turned into a full-blown addiction, bringing with it a nefarious gallery of dealers, thieves and poverty voyeurs. Some came to soak up the atmosphere, doing what the Victorians called – look it up – ‘slumming it’ and walked away unscathed. I watched a top-but-down-on-his-luck songwriter sell a song for a couple of bags of brown, and I saw my own struggles get turned into a top five single. ‘What you gonna do Katie? You’re a sweet, sweet girl, but it’s a cruel, cruel world’ kind of oversimplifies a teenage girl’s gruesome drug addiction, but I was glad it could be of some inspiration.
At this point, I had been sapped dry, and after telling a major label head to go fuck himself when he offered me a huge record deal if I ditched my bandmates and went solo, I became utterly disillusioned with the music industry (John Niven’s novel, Kill Your Friends, is a pretty accurate representation) and the romanticised drug culture had become a lucid nightmare. There was no way I could get clean while I was in that scene, and, as dramatic as it sounds, I unequivocally saved my life by splitting up my band and moving to Italy. Others were not so fortunate.
Looking at these photos from 20-odd years ago, before the drugs, I remember those elysian hours playing sweaty, mental shows to a crowd of kids high on the music in amazing venues that don’t exist anymore except in photos.
It’s hard to explain just how cool it was.
