Carl Barât thought Pete Doherty was "the most contentious little b*****"

14 October 2022, 16:32 | Updated: 14 October 2022, 16:54

Peter Doherty and Carl Barât on their first meeting

The Libertines' Carl Barât and Pete Doherty have talked about their fraught relationship when they met and admitted they "didn't get on".

Carl Barât and Pete Doherty have opened up about their fraught relationship when The Libertines started out and revealed they "didn't get on at all".

The band - completed by bassist John Hassall and drummer Gary Powell - spoke to Sunta Templeton for Radio X's exclusive Global Player podcast, Up The Bracket - 20 Years of The Libertines, where they looked back on their early days as a band.

Listen to Up The Bracket - 20 Years of the Libertines exclusively on Global Player now

"We just bickered," explained Barât. "I guess I was the same. The reason we were bickering is that we were always trying to outdo each other and impress each other with our knowledge of Coleridge and things we knew nothing about.

"And he was the most contentious little b**ger."

The Can't Stand Me Now rocker added: "[There was] a lot of rowing. And here we are 25 years later. Nothing's changed."

Though Pete's recollection of their relationship is similar to Carl's, he was determined to make it work regardless, because he'd decided the most successful bands didn't seem to like each other anyway.

"We didn't get on at all, no," he recalled. "Not at all, but I was still convinced. I thought, 'That doesn't matter.' I've done my homework studying bands and realised that most bands didn't really like each other. Even the ones that were really close as brothers and conquered the world together.

"They all ended up falling out, so I thought, 'We'll just have to suck it in and try and get along and get him to teach me guitar'."

Despite their tempestuous relationship, it was a love of writing songs together that eventually allowed the pair to see eye to eye.

Asked what bonded them eventually, he revealed: "In the end I just convinced him that he was a brilliant guitarist and we should write songs together.

"And those first few nights we wrote songs, I'm getting emotional thinking about it. We really bonded and we ended up living together and dropping out of everything together.

"In the end we just put it all into the songs"

Listen to Up The Bracket - 20 Years of the Libertines exclusively on Global Player now

To celebrate 20 years of The Libertines’ debut album, Up The Bracket, Global Player has launched a brand new podcast featuring exclusive interviews with the band: Up The Bracket - 20 Years of The Libertines.

The seven episode podcast, hosted by Radio X’s Sunta Templeton, will lift the lid on the recording process of the era-defining debut album through interviews with Carl, Peter, John and Gary, plus James Endeacott (the A&R who discovered the band) and Anthony Thornton (the band’s biographer).

Listeners will hear stories from before the sell-out shows, before the world tours, before the massive singles, before the headlines, before the highs and before the fall outs.

From the first gig to the moment they felt like they’d ‘made it’; the inspirations behind the songs and the stories never heard before, told by the band themselves.

All seven episodes of Up The Bracket - 20 Years of The Libertines are available now, exclusively on Global Player.