For one type of guitar-based music fan, the sort that perhaps swerved V Festival and went to Ozzfest instead, the beginning of the 21st century was very enjoyable indeed. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Papa Roach, Slipknot and other like-minded menaces had become huge. Nu-metal was a global phenomenon. Lucky you guys!
On the other side of the fence, things were pretty dire. Indie/rock’n’roll, call it what you will, was on its arse. Quite literally, in some cases, with new bands such as Turin Brakes taking to singing their whilst sitting on a stool. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a sit down. As a 44-year-old man, I love a sit down. But no musical movement has ever come about from sitting down.
That’s not to say that, if you were averse to nu-metal and its associated acts, there were no decent records released in the year 2000, there were, but for the most part they were very nod-in-appreciation records rather than ‘there’s something really exciting here I want to go and see this band immediately’ records, albums like Doves’ Lost Souls, Badly Drawn Boys’ Hour Of The Bewilderbeast, Six. By Seven’s The Closer You Get, Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows, Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, Coldplay’s Parachutes… all relatively new artists but making music fit for taking your Ford Mondeo on a long Sunday morning drive to keep the car battery healthy. Come on lads, live a little!
Everything changed in one transatlantic phone call towards the end of 2000. Rough Trade Records had employed Matt Hickey, a booker at New York’s Mercury Lounge venue, as an A&R scout tasked with informing of any promising new bands he’d come across. As it happens, not long into working for Rough Trade, a demo had landed on his desk that was a little more than promising. A three-song EP by a local band called The Strokes, it was the best thing he’d heard in ages. Alongside his boss Ryan Gentles, who would go on to become their manager, he listened to it over and over and then got on the blower.
“Matt phoned up at about seven’o’clock in the morning in the morning and played about ten seconds of the EP over the phone, and that was it,” Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis recalled in Lizzy Goodman’s excellent Meet Me In The Bathroom, a book about New York’s vibrant, chaotic music scene in the ‘00s. “That was the moment.”
Those ten seconds would’ve been the hustling opening bars to The Modern Age, a propulsive garage-rock tune that harked back to 70s street-level rock’n’roll, in the lineage of The Velvet Underground and Television, but also sounded like nothing else in 2000. As Travis was to discover, the rest of the demo more than lived up to this thrilling opening song, sliding into the wired, choppy Last Nite, to become an indie-disco classic, and then the driving intricacy of a song titled Barely Legal.
“What I heard in The Strokes were the song-writing skills of a first-class writer and music that is a distillation of primal rock’n’roll mixed the sophistication of today’s society,” Travis told The Guardian’s Ted Kessler.
The road to those three career-making songs had not been an entirely simple one for The Strokes – vocalist Julian Casablanas, guitarists Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi, bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti.
Five close friends in their early twenties, they had been around for a couple of years, gigging in downtown Manhattan, without ever writing a song that matched their look or attitude.
One day at rehearsal, though, chief songwriter Casablancas introduced the song that would signal an upturn in their fortunes. As the singer played The Modern Age to his bandmates for the first time, they were immediately wowed. It was head and shoulders above everything else in their formative catalogue.
"“What I heard in The Strokes were the song-writing skills of a first-class writer and music that is a distillation of primal rock’n’roll"
Geoff Travis
“Suddenly it was like, “Whoa, we need more like this one. We should get rid of these other ones,” Valensi remembered in Meet Me In The Bathroom. Those other early songs, he recalled, were a little more ornate and overly complex, in thrall to their love of The Doors. This was up’n’at’em, possibly inspired by the fact that Fraiture’s brother had given Casablancas a copy of a Velvet Underground best of as a Christmas present the year before.
Last Nite quickly followed, with some older songs retooled to suit the new mood. The Strokes had found their perfect form. Little did they know that by passing the demo of their new songs, recorded with local producer Gordon Raphael, to the promoters at the Mercury Lounge, they would be transforming the course of their lives.
Rough Trade released The Modern Age EP at the end of January 2001, the same month they brought the band over for their debut UK shows. Almost immediately, desperate for something exciting to write about, NME were immediately on board. Word spread quickly, news of the great indie-rock hope of the century meaning that every gig was a sold-out frenzy. The EP – originally just a demo, remember – went on to sell 30,000 copies.
Could they live up to it? You bet they could. Their first full-length Is This It followed later in the year, one of the all-time classic debut albums. For The Strokes, this wasn’t rocket science.
“I don’t want to be some brainiac band,” Casablancas explained to the NME. “I just want us to do what we do: rock your fucking balls off.”
“I just want us to do what we do: rock your fucking balls off.”
Julian Casablancas
The arrival changed everything. Without the shot in the arm that The Modern Age EP supplied, any number of huge headliner-sized band since might not have existed, from Arctic Monkeys to The Killers to Kings Of Leon to The Libertines to Vampire Weekend, whilst bands who already existed, such as The White Stripes, The Hives and Interpol, suddenly had an ecosystem in which to flourish. This was a spotlight with enough room for everyone of a similar mind.
The Strokes, of course, couldn’t continue setting the pace, releasing two very good albums, one partly-good album, and falling away, now a band who tours once in a while with a setlist leaning on the classics. But what classics to invoke. They brought rock’n’roll back from the dead. The seismic impact of The Modern Age EP should never be underestimated.
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