Band on the rocks

“Let’s be honest,” Sargent, 41, says when we meet for coffee in Muswell Hill, a leafy London suburb just north of where the band called home, “Carl’s not a millionaire, and Pete has got big debt problems, I imagine. God, if they’d wanted to cash in, they really would have done, but there is a consideration for the legacy of that band. They’re not Kings of Leon — with the best will in the world, nobody gives a damn about their legacy — but there’s something way more important here, in terms of the musical landscape of this country.”

If you’ve read this far, the word “legacy” may give you a jolt. You may have been expecting tales of Doherty debauchery, a mention of Kate Moss, perhaps, but such clichés are not to be found in There Are No Innocent Bystanders. “Legacy” is actually spot-on. From fashion (skinny jeans and leather jackets) to music (Razorlight, Arctic Monkeys) to the internet (the band pioneered free downloads), the Libertines were a vital band whose tabloid circus means their actual output has been largely ignored. Maybe this is the moment to listen to Time for Heroes, or Music When the Lights Go Out, or Can’t Stand Me Now — a desperate break-up duet by Doherty and Barât.

The band started in 1996, gigging wherever would take them, with their two front men as thick as thieves (ironically, Doherty would later burgle Barât’s flat), sharing dreams of “sailing the good ship Albion to Arcadia”, a utopia. “Essentially, they made people who felt they didn’t matter, matter,” says Sargent, who had given up on rock photography when the Libertines persuaded him back. “Everything hit. The first gig was a Beatles-in-Hamburg moment — it really was — and I was already quite jaded by then.”

Their success, when it came, glowed and dimmed as fast as a ­firecracker. Up the Bracket was released in 2002, then, at the height of tabloid interest in 2004, came the follow-up, The Libertines, with a Sargent cover photo of Barât and Doherty — “two of the fiercest wits in the music industry” — just hours after the latter had been released from a stint in jail. “They came to such a stuttering end,” Sargent says; but with tales of Doherty abandoning tours as early as the Up the Bracket years, it’s some achievement that they ever made the second record. “Carl started living the high life even before they’d really reached the high life, just hanging out with famous people. I remember seeing Pete outside the Garage, in Islington, openly weeping because he felt like he’d lost Carl already. That was really early on.”

To the reunion, then, the focus of Sargent’s film, which is named after graffiti the band posed next to in their early days. In the years between the break-up and reconciliation, Doherty and Barât had enjoyed only fleeting success. Barât formed Dirty Pretty Things and Doherty Babyshambles, but both knew their loudest cheers came when they played the songs they’d written together. The market was there and, after years of turning down offers, the Libertines re-formed when Melvin Benn reportedly offered them £1.5m to play his flagship Reading and Leeds festivals in August 2010. In March that year, the band met up in a London pub and, in a blur of booze and hugs, tried to start over.

“It was really nerve-racking,” recalls Sargent, who was on duty that day to snap for the NME. “Pete actually turned up before Carl, so that got the nervousness out of the way a little bit. There was a great deal of love in that room, a realisation that they never really achieved what they should have done. But everything from then on was so stage-managed to make sure that ­people turned up, no problems were ever solved. There was so much pressure. They had to make sure those gigs happened — and, in the edit, what I really got was dysfunction.”

Much in the film is shot using stills, spliced together like a flip book. There is also footage, including a long, lonely take of Carl in the back of a cab, and a scene where Pete lists the people — from T-shirt designers to tour-bus operators — making money off them, that show how Arcadia, their mission statement, had become impossible. Even a kiss from Carl to Pete at the end of the Reading set is not as it seems. “Pete, I think for a joke, told one of the security guards that he was going to start a fight with Carl on stage, so the security warned Carl,” Sargent says. “He went out on stage thinking Pete was going to jump on him. Imagine trying to play a gig like that, with that kind of tension? I think the kiss was to calm things down...”

Only boxers should go to work expecting their colleagues to pummel them, but the fans probably didn’t notice. The Libertines were sweatily, reverentially received at two warm-up gigs at the Forum in Kentish Town and during their festival sets. They were never the most polished of live bands, but the shows sounded strong, making their reunion the highlight of a Saturday at Reading, headlined by that year’s most hyped, clinical band, Arcade Fire. When they finished the set, having torn through 18 songs to the backdrop of a tattered flag, those ­discovering what the fuss was about must have been googling for further live dates.

“They could have done every festival in the country and Europe, then done a tour, like functional bands can do, but there was just no way,” Sargent says. “How bad an idea, for instance, would it be to do a gig in Spain? Would we see Pete three days later? By the end of that second Forum show, I was worried about whether Reading was even going to ­happen. I think everybody was.

“There’s so much mistrust. I think Carl fears for his health and his sanity, but the thing is, I’ve hung out with Peter a few times recently, and it’s different to how it used to be, way less fractious. He’s ­actually really good fun, but Carl hasn’t experienced that for so long. They need to sit down and write songs. That could be the biggest healing process for the band, really.”

Sargent is a big bloke, bald, mistakable for a bouncer, a music-industry man who has heard it all, but the music of the Libertines softens him. “They’re the best band I’ve ever come across — all you’ve got to do is listen to the records,” he says, rightly assuming that most of the nay­sayers haven’t bothered. “I just wanted to try to tell the truth. The ­reunion had moments of great joy, but ultimately it was a really, really sad experience, almost as sad as when the band finished the time before. They’re still young enough, they’re still ­creative enough to do something credible and exciting, but not much has changed.”

Will it happen? Sargent thinks it will, but, two years on, nothing. Given that both Doherty and Barât are 33, if they did write together again, the songs would likely be in the same vein as What Katie Did, their most radio-friendly hit, sensitive and acoustic, shorn of punk edge, but still melodic and moving. The response would be like when Nirvana released Unplugged after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and a host of new fans who had previously dismissed the band as druggie and loud started buying their back ­catalogue.

The Libertines song that the lyrics in the opening paragraph are taken from? What a Waster. Chorus? “What a waster, what a f***ing waster/You pissed it all up the wall.” The band who unwittingly wrote their own brilliant eulogy. Sums it all up, really.

There Are No Innocent Bystanders screens from April 25 in selected O2 Academy venues before a DVD release on April 30