The British tabloids love a train wreck, and musicwise, no band since the Sex Pistols has misbehaved in as spectacular fashion as the Libertines. Headlines about co-frontman Pete Doherty have ranged from HE WILL DIE LIKE HIS HERO VICIOUS to THERE'S SOMETHING IRRESISTIBLE ABOUT CRACK. Doherty, 24, and singer-guitarist Carl Barat, 25, have come to blows in the studio (security guards were on hand during the recording of their second album, The Libertines), and Doherty has been in and out of rehab; most infamously, he was arrested and served two months in prison for breaking into and robbing Barat's apartment.

None of this would be incredibly consequential if the Libertines weren't also a terrific band. The Clash's Mick Jones produced the group's 2003 debut, Up the Bracket, and the album works the sort of twitchy freneticism one might expect from the title. (Bracket is band slang for cocaine.) The Libertines were quickly dubbed "the U.K. Strokes," but the vibrancy and intelligence of their sound belied easy comparisons, vaulting them past overhyped peers.

The Libertines, released in August, opens with the remarkable single "Can't Stand Me Now." It's a love song -- working the classic "we're so terrible together, we'll clearly never part" theme -- with the key twist being that the song's protagonists are heterosexual men. Barat sings, "You twist and tore our love apart," with Doherty responding, "No, you've got it the wrong way round/You shut me up and blamed it on the brown." In the chorus, the pair harmonizes, "I know you lie/I know you lie/I'm still in love with you. . . ./I'll take you anywhere you wanna go."

These days, Barat sings "Can't Stand Me Now" alone. At the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia in October, he seemed to slightly change his voice when he performed Doherty's lines. The song sparkled live -- if anything, it had more energy than the recorded version -- but Barat played with a grim intensity, as if he were racing toward the end of a tunnel.

The band has been touring without Doherty, pending his ability to clean up. The same week as the Philly show, Doherty graced the cover of NME, Britain's weekly music magazine. He has been touring the U.K. with his other band, Babyshambles. On the cover, he was shirtless and slit-eyed and covered in sweat, holding a cigarette lighter in one hand, a microphone in the other and appearing entirely wasted. "To be honest," Bar?t tells me, "the hardest thing in the world is to tell someone you love you don't want to be around them -- to tell someone you love very dearly to fuck off. That's a trial of the soul."

Before the Philadelphia gig, Barat decides to sample the local cuisine, so we head to Jim's Steaks, a venerable Philly cheese-steak shop. Barat is wearing a black leather jacket, a blue scarf and tight black jeans. "You might need a mumble translator with Carl," someone warned me, and it's true; that or subtitles might have been helpful at first. Barat is both hyperarticulate and seemingly unable to speak a complete sentence without using some form of obscure British slang, his voice generally dashing along at low volume and high speed. At the moment, Barat is trying to wrap his mind around the concept of Cheez Whiz: A steak sandwich with onions and Whiz is the most popular item at Jim's. "Looks a bit pox, donnit?"

Barat is from Basingstoke, a grim industrial town that he describes with the question: "Have you seen The Office?" His parents were hippies. After they split up, Barat's father got custody and a proper job, and his mum remained a true believer. "She was mad as a bag of chips," Barat says. "She'd come to my school in a green cape playing a penny whistle." Barat's mother took young Carl to cruise-missile protests and rock festivals, though today, at fifty-five, she's more into techno -- "hard house, actually," Barat clarifies. His time was divided between his father's estate and hippie communes with his mom. "I had my first spliff when I was eight. I first tried Ecstasy when I was twelve. I was surrounded by so much howling-at-the-moon debauchery -- walking in on weird sex scenes with hippies, getting nostrilsful of whatever -- I would long for the tranquillity of my dad's place."

Doherty comes from a more stable background: His father is a British Army officer who recently served in Iraq. Barat met Doherty's sister at Brunel University, in Middlesex, where he was studying drama. Barat had been playing guitar since he was fourteen but was very shy. (Even today, he opens Libertines concerts facing the drummer and rarely engages the audience.) At school, rugby players tormented him and called him Crazy Carlos; they stopped if he played Oasis songs on his acoustic guitar. Doherty, an extrovert who loved attention, persuaded Barat to teach him to play. They formed the Libertines in 1997. "We couldn't get proper gigs at first," bassist John Hassall recalls. "We played weird pubs, old people's homes, kebab shops."

As the band's fame grew, Doherty's use of crack and heroin spiraled out of control. Barat tried to help his friend, even picking him up at prison after the break-in and playing a welcome-back show together that night. But the drug abuse continued. The Libertines are hardly straight-edge -- Hassall had been a junkie, and Barat says he himself developed a "mental addiction to charlie [cocaine] and booze" after the band was signed.

"Yes, I did come out of a drug problem well before Pete got into his," Barat says. "But I stood by him the entire way. Now, he's utterly cocooned in a world I wouldn't want to have to trudge through. I doubt I could even meet him without all of his harpies around. You know what harpies are? Nasty little winged beasts. People who'll take you straight to hell."

Doherty, sitting for an interview in the basement office of 1234 Records, the East London label that released the first Babyshambles single, rebuts the band's charges. "Of course, the official reason I'm out of the band right now is because of drugs," he says. "But part of the reason I've been made unwelcome by Carl is that I've been writing songs with other people, and doing Babyshambles with as much, if not more, passion than I was doing the Libertines. The Libertines has just become a big blow-up doll. If it's not me and Carl together, then it's not the Libertines. It's just a big con."

Though Doherty is well-dressed, in a spikey-hair, elegantly wasted sort of way, he does not look well. His complexion is pasty, and he has trouble sitting still, at one point going upstairs to buy a Coke and fifteen energy bars. Still, he's soft-spoken and quite intelligent, if easily distracted. It's difficult to say how much of his spaced-out demeanor is natural and how much is drug-related.

"Alan McGee [the Libertines' manager] said, 'But you promised you'd give up drugs,' " Doherty continues. "Which is a ridiculous thing to say. I'd never make a promise like that. I could only try my hardest."

Doherty holds up a finger, which sports a nasty-looking scab. The Babyshambles' manager, as if he's done this a million times, quickly produces a tube of antiseptic ointment.

"It's, like, I've cut my finger," Doherty says. "It's nasty, quite deep and it's probably infected. But it will heal in time. Even if it's a nasty gash, it'll heal."

Throughout the Philadelphia show, Barat swigs from a bottle of Jameson whiskey. Drummer Gary Powell does not drink at all while performing -- but the moment he steps offstage, he pours the remainder of the whiskey, about a third of bottle, down his throat in a matter of minutes. This trick is known in band circles as a "Gary gargle." In the upstairs dressing room a few minutes later, Powell is wearing a red Snoopy sweat shirt (backward) and shouting, slurrily, "I'm bangered! I'm so bangered! I'm lean!" He turns to me and asks, "Did you get lean? That's when you're so bangered you start to lean. I am, right now, pretty much lean."

As I leave the dressing room, he shouts after me, "I can play Scrabble like a demon when I'm bangered! Nobody can beat me! I have complete control of the English language!" Then I hear the thump of someone falling down and a series of curses.

Barat is sitting in the club's unadorned production office, absently flicking an extremely sharp hunting knife open and closed. The first thing he tells me is "Some cunt was shouting at me." He's referring to the show's only sour note, a fan who yelled, "Babyshambles!" and "Where's Pete?"

"I didn't want to show any emotion, but part of me wanted to say, 'Would someone please beat the shit out of this guy?' " Barat says, sighing. "A lot of people come to sneer."

What would you say if you saw Pete tomorrow?

"I'd say, 'I love you very much. And my concerns remain the same, my ambitions remain the same, my objectives. Of course, I hope to work with a great partner and a great friend. But I can't while I feel this peril is distorting you and eating away at you and coming between us.' "

Doherty would say the Libertines are not the Libertines without him.

"Yes, together we're the Libertines. But every night of this tour has been meant, every beat. It's been embodied. I'm finishing commitments. We've got more gigs, and we're going to finish this year up. I would speak to Pete immediately if I was convinced he didn't have a problem and wouldn't use our joint work to his own ends. Then it could be back to square one. We could share a vision again."

Check out exclusive performances of "Can't Stand Me Now", "Time For Heroes", and "France"