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From Waterloo to Los Angeles. Brazil to Italy. Oxford's Zodiac to Texas's SXSW. From Lambeth Road to Glasgow. Carl Barât's been on quite a journey recently. He needed to do the leg-work. There was a novice rock'n'roll gang to lick into shape, fresh songs to be both polished and roughened, and old ghosts that needed laying to rest. The beginnings of Barât's new band had to be more coherent than the endings of his last. Dirty Pretty Things are about music and performance and excitement and camaraderie and nothing else. Every note had to be right.

'I've always liked to tell stories in songs,' says Barât. He's talking about the inspiration behind Last Of The Small Town Playboys, a three-part song that's one of the more adventurous numbers he's written for Dirty Pretty Things. 'The vibe I was going for was lot of rain beating on your windscreen, driving particularly angrily.' He's not sure he wants to describe too much before people get to hear it. But he will say 'it's an observation, based on the state of England.

'Stories are part of my vocabulary,' he continues, 'and England is what inspires me. Even if it's just a feeling. Some songs just give you an idea, and that takes you to a different place.'

A similar travelogue vibe can be detected in The Gentry Cove. 'It's a seaman's song, and a story about a journey,' he says. 'Obviously a cove is person, and it also means a bay.' There's a lot in it, he says, a fact reflected in the music - there's a ska beat with a sea shanty undertow and a racing punk climax.

But equally, says Barât, he got inspiration from staying close to home. 'From sitting in my bedroom dreaming, from watching movies. From wandering about the place, checking up old books, looking about…' And, it seems, from taking a cool look at the hot gossip that was swirling around.

Take Dirty Pretty Things' first single Bang Bang You're Dead. 'I knew all along but I was loathe to believe, there was nothing but spite, fury and lies in the words that you read,” sings Barât over a rollicking backbeat.

'It was written before the band was together, It's an introspective thing about taking stock of a part of life that ended, a song about ch- ch- ch- changes,' he smiles. 'There's lots of things in it - it's not just about the end of The Libertines. It's not specifically about one person, one thing or one idea. It's about taking stock of a certain point of your life being over. It's a lament, but an optimistic one.'

Carl Barât had a mostly quiet 2005. It's what was required. He needed to keep his head down, recharge his batteries, take stock, think ahead. Maybe then he could write some songs.

The couple of years before that had been frantic. The Libertines had exploded onto British music in 2002, a thickety tangle of leather jackets, fraternal bonding, fan kinship and punk songs built round urban folk DNA. There was something brilliantly of-the-night about the Pete'n'Carl show. They had songs about England and Biro'd slogans on their jeans, gigs in their flats and romance in their hearts. They had followers singing songs back to them almost as soon they'd been written. They dreamt dreams of Albion and Arcadia that a new generation loved and shared.

It was a rollercoaster ride, often intensely high and sometimes vertiginously low. And soon the giddily thrilling, breakneck momentum made the wheels rattle off. The making of the second Libertines album was a clash of ideas and personalities and lifestyles. The mayhem forced out a clutch of great songs, but also opened up some serious fissures. By summer 2004 and the album's release, Pete Doherty was missing in (in)action. Carl Barât was forced to fly the Libertines' flag alone.

'I felt I had obligations - to the music and the fans,' says Barât of his decision to tour without Doherty. 'To me, the songs deserved it. It would have been horrible to have gone through everything we did making the album and then not be able to play them. I didn't want to give up on the whim of someone else. So yeah, I felt there were commitments.' He pauses and grins. 'And we would have got sued by the Japanese.'

Barât toured the world for almost six months with other Libertines Gary Powell (drums) and John Hassall (bass), and stand-in guitarist Anthony Rossomando.

'It was a very difficult at first - I was completely destroyed by everything that had gone on with Pete. But it did get easier.'

Nonetheless, by the time Barât wound up The Libertines touring in Paris in December 2004, he felt a mixture of emotions. 'Yeah, I was relieved. But it was hard… Sad… A shame. It was time to stop then and work out what the fuck was going on.'

Little did Barât know that it was about to get even more bonkers. In January 2005 the first stories about Pete Doherty and Kate Moss began to circulate. Their relationship and everything that went with it would dominate the newspapers for the rest of the year. Barât kept his powder dry and refused to become involved. But in the absence of any contributions from Doherty's erstwhile brother-in-arms, all manner of supposition and accusation filled the gaps.

'It's hard not to respond when you're being attacked all the time,' sighs Barât. Even now he'd rather not talk about it. 'I didn't mind the stuff about them in the tabloids - but it's hard to get shoved to the back and get slagged off. And I didn't like seeing The Libertines' name being dragged through it all. I could have come out fighting, but I didn't want to argue about wild accusations.'

But he insists it didn't put him off jumping back into the musical ring. Quite the contrary.

'My enthusiasm was still intact. I wanted to take the other fork in the road. I wanted to be in a band and not get involved in all that publicity game. I wanted to keep it about music and not about all the other nonsense. That was my struggle - if that doesn't sound too self-righteous,' he laughs.

Gradually Carl Barât put together Dirty Pretty Things. He spent a long time in his Waterloo flat, writing. Bang Bang You're Dead and Deadwood emerged early in this period of 'tying up loose ends and feeling productive after a long ordeal'. He played both songs to Didz Hammond, then bass player with Cooper Temple Clause. They'd first met at Reading Festival, and again on a shared bill in Germany - Doherty hadn't turned up for the latter and so Didz had stepped in. He and Barât became firm friends. During all the tabloid mayhem Didz had been someone for Barât to unburden himself too.

Gary Powell and Anthony Rossomando were already on board. 'I formed many good partnerships in The Libertines,' says Barât. Just as Dirty Pretty Things are playing some Libertines songs live, his ongoing collaboration with the drummer and guitarist shows 'I'm not shutting the door on everything we achieved. There's a lot to be proud of there.'

The new band blooded themselves with shows last autumn in Brazil and Italy - far away from Libertines mania, where audiences could give Barât's new outfit and new songs a fair hearing.

In November they went to Los Angeles, to begin work on their debut album with producer Dave Sardy (Oasis, Jet). 'It was nice to put ourselves in a new environment.'

Six songs completed, Dirty Pretty Things then went to Glasgow to record with Tony Doogan (Belle And Sebastian, Mogwai).

'That was more of a recording-the-songs-as-we-wrote them process. We'd only formed the band in September so there was still a lot of work to do. Tony was more casual than Dave, which was good - we needed room to breathe. And Glasgow was a bit of a good comedown, coming from LA - like London, there are distractions every night in LA. But in Glasgow no one bothered us.

And then the album was done. Dirty Pretty Things are bristling with urgent new songs, tunes that have already strutted their lean, hungry, invigorating stuff on the band's first sell-out UK tour and at their launch gig in America, at March's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

The Enemy has what Barât describes as a disco beat and 'a very heavy chorus. The enemy is right inside my head - it's another “realisation” song.' You Fucking Love It is a stomping punk rock anthem about 'the sleazy sex industry.' He got the idea from the 'masseuse' cards stuck in phone boxes in Soho. 'Walking around, these things come to you.' If You Love A Woman is more near-the-knuckle: 'To an extent it's about spousal battery,' says Barât, 'about bashing up the thing you love.' Whether it also has metaphorical connotations, he isn't saying right now.

Say hello to Dirty Pretty Things and the second coming of Carl Barât. He's been away, and he's been a bit battered. But now he's back, and he's fighting fit.

'I'm kinda numb to all the mayhem now,' he reflects. 'It's a shame what happened to The Libertines but I'm happy with what I've got now. And it's the sensible way to go. I don't want to grapple with ghosts and let something upset me on a regular basis. I want to carry on with doing what I always intended to do. I made some mistakes, but I was a bit of a novice then,' he grins. 'But I've been training…'

Has he got a title for Dirty Pretty Things' debut album?

'Yeah. Waterloo To Anywhere.'

March 2006