The it boys

To begin at the beginning. Once upon a time there were five young men, collectively known as The Strokes. They came from New York City. They were young and good looking and knew how to dress themselves. They had good hair, especially the guitarist on the left. Even the drummer was cute. More to the point, they could write and play a decent tune or two. They had names like Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr and Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture. They played some gigs and they made a demo and sent it off to a few record companies, one of which was Geoff Travis’s esteemed Rough Trade label. The demo had songs on it like ‘The Modern Age’ and ‘Last Nite’ that sounded a little bit like Iggy and a little bit like the Velvets, with maybe just a smidgen of Television. A lot of people thought they sounded like classic CBGBs acts like Blondie and The Ramones, but that was cobblers, they just looked the part – all sneakers and drainpipes and thrift shop jackets and skinny ties. If anything, the music owed as much to jangle-along Anglocentric indie as power pop – a point seconded by the band’s bassist Nikolai as we join him in room 233 of the Radisson hotel on the afternoon of the band’s Glasgow gig, February 2006.
“New York is so eclectic that you get exposed to so many different things,” he reflects, the quintessential solid and understated bass player with a semi-detached take on the world.
“The palette is much more vast,” he continues. “For me that’s the greatest thing about New York. You can choose what you like and what you want to use. The punk rock scene I didn’t really know until I got older. I guess it’s how music evolves – my brother gave me a Janes Addiction CD when I was a kid, and you realize, ‘Oh wow, this is influenced by this’, the Velvet Underground, Dylan, and little by little you go backwards.”
Also, late 70s punk rock was not as insular as it is now. The figurative distance between CBGBs and Studio 54 was far less than the geographical. Talking Heads made itchy white funk records. The working title for ‘Heart Of Glass’ was ‘The Disco Song’ and Blondie also made a gawky but pioneering stab at MC toasting with ‘Rapture’. Patti had a thing for reggae. The Clash shared New York shows with Grandmaster Flash and got hip to the ghetto blaster as fashion accessory.
But we digress.
We were talking about those early Strokes demos, released on Rough Trade as The Modern Age EP in spring of 2001, followed a couple of months later by the debut album Is This It, which was the very model of economy (“That’s what we were hoping for,” says Nikolai): 11 songs, not an ounce of fat, hooks sticking out of every orifice, glistening guitars and a nifty rhythm section, all topped off by Julian’s Iggy-in-a-coalmine warble and a Jonathan & The Modern Lovers type production job courtesy of Gordon Raphael.
Then it all went a bit bugshit.
But why The Strokes?
Well, consider the landscape of US rock ‘n’ roll at the turn of the century. There were no White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Killers or Interpols just yet. At The Drive-In had split. The airwaves and touring circuits were overrun by mangy nu-metal mutts like Limp Bizkit, or post grunge reductivists like Puddle Of Mudd or MOR doobie brother dullards like the Dave Matthews Band or unfathomable goms like Creed. Most of the bright young things carried themselves like jaded session men hanging around the last chance saloon waiting to get lucky.
Then along came these five young dudes who seemed like a throwback to the golden age of auteur ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll. Okay, maybe they didn’t sound much like Richard Hell or Pere Ubu or Suicide, but they had style and swagger and the British press greeted them like young gods, having been crying out for fresh young flesh since Oasis got thick around the middle and Radiohead wilfully abdicated the throne with Kid A. The Strokes were shooed onto the cover of culture supplements and style mags, Radiohead and Kate Moss and the Gallaghers started showing up at gigs, and Courtney Love name checked Casablancas in ‘But Julian, I’m A Little Bit Older Than You’ off America’s Sweetheart.
Nikolai: “I remember when Oasis came to see us in Philadelphia ’cos they were playing a show as well, and we were still moving around our equipment ourselves, really in the first phase of being in a band, and that definitely leaves an impression on your system, but for us it just made us want to play better. But it was definitely stressful. Sometimes you wonder why do we put our hearts under this kind of intense pressure. But it’s fun.”
Did they ever look around and think, this is great, but I wish we had another ten songs…?
“Back then, yeah. We had thrown away a lot of songs, those 11 were what we had and that’s what we were going on. Of course, with the hype, everyone was saying, ‘It’s only 11 songs – what’s the big deal?’”
One thing that puzzles me is how The Strokes sounded like a classic rock band and yet were treated like a Smash Hits act.
“I still don’t understand it.”
But then, the landscape has changed. It’s hard to imagine iPod addicts indulging artists to the same extent as their elder brothers or hip uncles, suffering through ten years of buying bad Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Neil Young albums.
“Yeah, I mean with the Internet and everything what I think happened is it’s really emphasizing the live show now, and breaking away from the actual record business. For a band I think that’s great because that’s what bands do, they tour. I guess it’s a bit unfortunate for record companies who are suffering, but I think there was so much abuse in the past…”
But the other side of the coin is a lot of the mystery is gone. Before the Internet, all anyone knew about bands was what was printed on the record sleeves and in the odd interview. These days you can Google up what brand of toilet paper Gwen Stefani uses. If that’s what floats your boat.
“Definitely,” Nikolai says. “With records coming out before there was more anticipation and excitement, I think now it’s kind of, at a click of a button, ‘Oh, what’s that sound like?’ I mean the only thing I regret about the whole technology advancement thing is the excitement of going out and waiting in line to buy a record with your friend and running home when you bought it, listening to it, looking at the artwork. But you just gotta move on, I guess.”
The Strokes weren’t press darlings for long. The backlash began almost before that debut album hit the shelves. Hardened journalists who’d never bought a Dead Boys record in their lives suddenly professed themselves keepers of the Max’s and CBGBs flames and got sniffy about these young whippersnappers rummaging through history’s bargain bin. There were grumblings about four of the album’s tunes having already appeared on the EP, and patchy gigs (even champions of the band conceded their first Irish show in the Temple Bar Music Centre deserved the panning it got from Kim Porcelli in HP).
Back in the US, meanwhile, the quintet were regarded as the New York equivalent of one of those arrogant limey Brit bands who play a handful of high-profile showcases on the coasts but can’t cut it in the heartlands.
“I think the reaction in Britain and Europe was similar to New York and LA,” Nikolai concedes, “but the rest of the country was pretty much – and still is – in the dark. The difference is the people in those places need to be told that what they’re listening to is cool. In the UK everyone is so ready to accept a new band and I think that’s great. Sometimes the band’s not good, sometimes they’re really good, but it’s giving chance to working musicians.”
So, in the summer of 01, The Strokes were in the unique position of being lauded as the first great young band of the 21st century while simultaneously being written off as trust fund kids who hadn’t paid their dues. Not that that bothered the usual coterie of B-list blowflies descending on the band’s various after-shows to press the flesh. For a combo who’d barely learned how to tour, it was all a bit, in the words of the New York Dolls (who knew of what they spoke) Too Much Too Soon.
Did they find themselves wondering what rock of crack all these photo-opportunistic supermodels and coke dealers had crawled out from under?
“Funny,” Nikolai deadpans. “Yeah, we were very wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. That we were all friends helped us stay together as a band. ’Cos otherwise if there was tension already there, I don’t know if we’d made it past the first record. You try to help each other, don’t let your ego get out of fucking control, try to make it so that we all have the same goal which is to keep making records and keep progressing as musicians. There are a lot of distractions that get in the way of that. It’s a matter of being able to find it before it gets out of control.”
Do they ever look at labelmate Pete Doherty these days and think, ‘There but for the grace of god go us’?
“That’s mean! No, I’m joking. Yeah, I think that all of the temptations that they have were set in front of us as well. I’m kinda glad that we were able to focus.”
The real tragedy is that the Babyshambles record, which is pretty damn good, became just a by-product of his notoriety.
“I guess it’s similar to when we came out. People were making opinions before they heard the music. It’s similar in that sense in that people haven’t really heard the Babyshambles album but they know what they think about the band.”
Can he recall any junctures where the alarm bells went off and The Strokes realized they’d ended up in Spinal Tap territory?
“It happens all the time. That movie is terrifyingly accurate. But definitely after three months of touring on the first album, we decided before going further onto Japan and Australia we wanted to take a break in Hawaii for a few days, and I think at that point everything just crumbled and caved in and the free time worked against us. We had to cancel the rest of our tour and regroup back in New York.”
So, in time-honoured fashion, the band upped drawbridge, licked their wounds and penned a few more tunes, eventually re-emerging with Room On Fire in October 2003, a scant 18 months after the debut. Mind you, on its release, it was widely held that The Strokes had succumbed to classic difficult second album syndrome, churning out Is This It reloaded. I still beg to differ, thinking it a dark and dense affair with some peachy tunes, particularly ‘Whatever Happened’ and ‘12.51’. However, the recording was far from painless. Initial sessions with Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Travis) were abandoned and the band returned to Gordon Raphael. Reports of the recording process described an almost obsessive attention to detail, with Julian particularly single-minded about translating abstract ideas and textures into sound.
Nikolai: “Yeah, at the time with Gordon, that’s how he really worked well with us. We’d have this idea that we couldn’t really describe but he was able to understand it and translate it into recording. We’d just say, ‘Make it sound like metal’ or whatever, and he would just say, ‘Like this?’ and surprisingly it would be exactly like that.”
Speaking in this very organ a couple of months after the record’s release, guitarist Albert remarked, “The first record was: ‘I wanna see the world now, damn it!’ Room On Fire is like: ‘I’ve seen the world and wanna go hide in a little corner someplace.’”
Sounds pretty paranoid, no?
“Yeah, the first record was kind of crazy, we were young and we didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t know how to tour correctly, and I think the second record was a reaction to the first one.”
How does one define “tour correctly”? Is it a matter of knowing when to lock the dressing door and not let any guys with gold teeth and Hawaiian shirts in?
“Yeah… when to do that, when to say no to a show even though it seems really appealing. Sometimes you have to say three months in a row is too much, you need some time off. I think with Room On Fire it was the opposite; we should have toured more than we did, I feel. But it was a reaction to having done too much, just being exhausted and ready to break up and not being able to deal with it anymore.”
I get the feeling the muted response to that album was less about the music so much as a general refusal to allow the band to grow up a bit.
“Yeah, I think no matter what, people were just waiting for a record to talk about and the music was secondary.”
The new album should redress that balance. First Impressions Of Earth is a strong collection, one that reflects a pretty dazzling breadth of reference in the playing, songwriting and sound. It’s also a watershed for the band in that Gordon Raphael has vacated the producer’s chair on all but three tunes.
“I think at the beginning no one could get past the sonic similarity of Room On Fire to appreciate the actual songs,” says Nikolai. “We just decided to do a drastic change, we didn’t really know what it was going to be at first, we just all wanted to do something different.”
And the third album was the place to do it, although it must have been nerve-wracking considering the close relationship they’d forged with Raphael. Not to mention the fact that those first two records were a pretty sympathetic representation of The Strokes’ sound.
“Yeah, we definitely knew that we were taking a risk, and a big risk, but we just didn’t want to be pigeonholed. If the third album had been similar in a sonic sense to the first two, everyone would be like, ‘I told you so.’ For us that would have been worse than actually trying something different. It’s a tricky thing to manage, it’s a daily effort.”
Fair enough, but Gordon’s replacement David Kahne is not the first person one would expect to make a Strokes record.
“Well, the story behind that is Albert was playing with a friend of his who was working with David, and he recommended him, he said that he had a lot of technical knowledge, and we were kind of looking for an engineer that would help Gordon, that was our initial idea for this album. Albert never told us what bands he did, I think rightfully so, ’cos we probably would have declined in our prejudiced minds if we had found out that he had worked with Sugar Ray, it wouldn’t have been very enticing to us. But we didn’t find that out until we were well into the album, and at that point it didn’t matter because we were happy with the result.”
Kahne had also worked with people like The Bangles and Stevie Nicks – maybe not the hippest kids on the block, but by god they had tunes.
“He definitely has an amazing ear, he’s a trained classical pianist and he can hear things in music that we didn’t expect. He had his way of working but he was also very open to the way that we worked.”
Besides, having had a closed set for the first couple of albums allowed the musicians the time to grow in confidence as well as ability. Which is infinitely preferable to what happens when young impressionable studio virgins get slung in with veteran producers who make them sound like production-line radio rock assemblies.
“I agree. When we started out we were put into that situation with Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters, Counting Crows), and as well with Nigel Godrich eventually. For us I’m happy we decided not to use any of that stuff, we stuck to our guns.”
Wait a minute - Gil Norton was in on sessions for the first album?
“Yeah, before we actually decided… all these record companies were courting us but there was not any real interest. We had tried four songs with Gil before saying forget it, we’re just gonna go with Gordon.”
Well, The Frames made their first record with Gil Norton. It sounded slick as gooseshit, but it didn’t reflect any of the band’s character.
“That’s exactly how we felt. It was at the expense of a few thousand dollars, but our record company helped us out. We just said that that was not us and we didn’t want to be represented that way.”
Interesting that they had to learn the same lesson again on Room On Fire with Nigel Godrich.
“Well, the first one wasn’t really a lesson, it was just a try-out. We had absolutely no idea what making a record consisted of, so we just went with what we felt the record company might know. With Nigel Godrich we were kind of looking for (the leap) from The Bends to OK Computer, we were hoping that would happen with our record. He was a great guy, he was really nice, but he wanted to make a Nigel Godrich record, not a Strokes record produced by Nigel Godrich.”
Still, it’s odd that such apparently sympathetic names as Norton and Godrich didn’t pan out, whereas a journeyman like Kahne did. Nikolai reckons the secret of First Impressions Of Earth’s variety and virtuosity is down to preparation.
“We bought some recording equipment with the advance from the record company instead of just blowing it on a $2000 a day studio; we sat down and recorded some versions that we were able to compare and contrast, it was sort of a slow, level-headed process.”
That buying your own gear thing sounds like horse sense, until you consider My Bloody Valentine.
“Yeah, well we’re five, so if somebody wants to only stay home and record, the rest of us say, ‘Well, we’re a touring band.’ And we haven’t bought the space, we’ve only bought the equipment, so we’re still not completely grounded in one place.”
So what’s the secret of surviving your own success?
“It’s similar to a marriage, or being with four brothers. It does get to a point where… I wouldn’t say it’s difficult but you do have to be sensitive to four other individuals, especially as you get older, you each develop in a certain way, and it’s not, ‘Oh, come and sleep on my couch’ anymore.”
It seems that the ability to grow up and an equal royalty split are the deal breakers…
“You really hit the nail with the hammer there.”