Carl Barat, one half of the Libertines with evidently reformed addict Pete Doherty before they broke up, says he’d rather act than reunite the popular British group that were poised for international success, but were derailed by Doherty’s then-outrageous drug habits and arrests.
“I’ve just freed myself up so the last thing I wanna do is completely burden my mind [with the reunion]. No, no right now. I got into it doing that film thing with ‘Telstar’, the Joe Meek biopic. I was in that, and I’ve got another thing coming up – I think there’s room in my life for both [making music and acting].”
As of September 2007, ex-Darkness singer Justin Hawkins
was tapped to play Alice Cooper-like rocker Screaming Lord Sutch and Barat was to play American rock pioneer Gene Vincent in the movie about the life of the famously tone-deaf, closeted and thoroughly strange British freakbeat producer Meeks. If you don’t know his work and material, and consider yourself any kind of music connoisseur, consider yourself an uninformed one and run now, don’t walk.Suffice to say his story is tragic, sad and intensely weird. He also was responsible for some incredibly off-kilter yet amazing rock n’ roll. A separate film, a straight-up documentary called, “A Life In The Death of Joe Meek” did the festival rounds in 2008, but doesn’t seem to have distribution yet.
Watch/Listen: The Tornadoes – “Telstar”