Rak Studios NW8: as the publicist unclips a guitar case to reveal Mickey Most’s cherry red guitar, something stirs in Carl Barât’s memory. “I remember Mickey Most [who ran Rak Studios] from when we were recording here with The Libertines. I hadn’t been to bed, and Most starts banging on about how Jimi Hendrix was the beginning of rock & roll. I wasn’t having any of that, so had a fucking blazing row with him with my whisky breath. I think I fought our corner.”

The dissipated shade Barât cast over Dirty Pretty Things has had its jags filed down for his next release. A solo record, Barat moulds “the music hall and the scrapyard” for an altogether more ballad-led effort that still conserves dark flashes. Leo Abrahams, Brian Eno’s protégé produced the album, and it was then mixed by Andrew Wyatt from Miike Snow.

Over a pint of Stella in a sunny pub in St John’s Wood, Barât seems light years away from the glamour pallor he is known for. Stocky and tanned from a rather fraught family holiday in Greece with his girlfriend, he wears a heavy leather jacket despite the late summer heat. He is slightly disappointing intellectually, speaking like a humble countryside philosopher, quaint musings delivered apologetically.  

 Barât is also working on a memoir; pretty premature for a man only 32 years old, but then one that will get the garage rock knitting circle talking – unresolved Doherty niggles are exorcized as are romantic relationships. All but one of the songs that Clash heard were referencing love, and he speaking to us he is keen to apologize to “girlfriends in the past forthwith” and mention the “stellar rush” he feels with his current bird.

On the unspeakable conceit of a 32-year old writing his memoirs, he is self-aware and unpretentious: “I was thinking how conceited it would seem to do my autobiography, I just thought that if I were to be hit by a comet tomorrow then it would be good to get what’s inside my head, out. Purely for catharsis in some cases…That whole notion of fame, with dirty words like celebrity – that’s all dealt with in the book – how a lad from Basingstoke in Clarks hand-me-downs ends up on stage.”

Focusing on one track, The Fall, he says: “The Fall is about past loves – but then that downfall is applicable to my relationship with Pete as well. It would be really fucking boring to write an album about Pete stuff and say ‘this is about Pete’s stuff’ of course what happened with Pete affects and tempers my daily life. All expression is an expression of something that is within and if that’s still rattling, which it very much is, then yeah it’s about that too. But there’s more to my life than just Pete; I guess it’s just not been exposed or people aren’t interested.

“In terms of sound I’ve been moving on and growing up. I’m interested in more things than fizzy guitar sounds – always have been – even though that’s been my chosen modus operandi. I know who I am a bit more now.”

I ask Barât if he got his song title Magus from the John Fowles novel, and he says he is a fan of the writer: “I really like The Collector, his previous book. I love the word Magus. It’s an ancient word – the three wise men – and it means the soothsayer, or the clairvoyant, and I think it’s the root of the word magic itself.

“I’ve been reading a lot of William Blake too, and the Mervyn Peake big trilogy – he was an artist too, when they sent artists into the Second World War to paint…He sketched Belsen and that sent him potty.”

He has calmed down since his Libertines days although he admits that he occasionally has “nights where I get very loose and throw myself into reckless freefall, and if it’s all good I come out smiling… He smiles, and adds: “I just make sure I factor into that a moratorium on ghouls.”

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