The Strokes’ Is This It: ‘We are still feeling the cultural impact it had 20 years later’

As the quintessential Noughties New York rock album celebrates a milestone, Mark Beaumont talks to producer Gordon Raphael and The Libertines’ Carl Barât about how it set up the next great guitar movement

With ‘Is This It’, which was released 20 years ago, The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas and his bandmates inspired a generation of millennial alt-rock (Alamy Stock Photo)

When the gang of shabby-suave retro kids – all flea market chic, Avenue A made flesh, an East Village Rat Pack – first left Transporterraum late in 2000, Gordon Raphael thought they were bound for nowhere. These were young guys playing old guys’ music. Emulating the no-fi garage rock of Television, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, but with Frank Sinatra’s melodic panache, in the age of drum’n’bass and baseball cap rock. Out of time, he thought. Out of step. Out of their minds.

“I just thought it’s gonna be another CD on my shelf,” says the resident producer at the downtown boho basement studio, recalling the day he filed away the three-track demo they’d bashed out there over one intense weekend as just another hopeless howl from obscurity. “Rock’n’roll was pretty much an ‘over’ movement, nobody was talking about it. Here were these young people with the world of possibilities – why are they focusing on this particular generation of sound? If they hear those guitars at any labels, they’re going to just frisbee the CD into the bin. I felt a little bit sorry for them.”

Raphael didn’t realise that in “The Modern Age”, “Last Nite” and “Barely Legal” – the first serious recordings by The Strokes – he had a cultural grenade sitting on his shelf. When The Modern Age EP, as it became known, reached post-Britpop Britain a few months later, it hit like an H-bomb. Out of nowhere came a band who, with their vintage leather jackets, skinny ties and jutting model cheekbones, looked like they’d stepped straight out of a CBGB’s photo shoot in 1975. Their songs were refreshingly classic, encapsulating the elan of Fifties teen idols, the subway rattle of prime New York post-punk and the production values of a sewage plant. Amid a characterless rock landscape of Stereophonics, Starsailors and Seahorses, The Modern Age EP sounded like a dormant volcano erupting.

Is This It, the album that followed 20 years ago today, only intensified the clamour around The Strokes and further inspired a generation of millennial alt-rock. In New York it thrust a thriving underground, spanning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio and Interpol, onto the international stage. And in the UK it lit a fuse for a guitar pop explosion that would reverberate for the best part of a decade, with The Libertines, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and The Cribs leading an indie scene rejuvenated by The Strokes’ wild and wiry lo-fi rampages. Critics might argue over whether it ranks as the album of the century or merely the best debut album of the modern age, but its impact as the record that kick-started 21^st Century Rock is undeniable.

Famous Five: The Strokes were snapped up by UK label Rough Trade in 2001 (PA)

The modern age, fittingly, began with a hustle. In 2000, out to drum up some business for Transporterraum, Raphael followed a tip from a New York party girl named Kerri Black that a band playing the Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side that night might be looking for a producer. The Strokes were an insular gang of five: singer Julian Casablancas, bassist Nikolai Fraiture, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr, and Fabrizio Moretti on drums. On paper, their story was soaked in advantage: their exotic names hinted at backgrounds involving high fashion and music – Casablancas’s father was the founder of Elite Model Management, his mother 1965’s Miss Denmark; Hammond Jr’s dad was a renowned 1970s singer and songwriter – while several of them met at a Swiss finishing school.

They weren’t, however, riding out their privilege. Two years of relentlessly ploughing Manhattan rock clubs like Luna and HiFi Bar and rehearsing every spare night, dedicated to their singular garage rock vision, had only earned them the support of a manager in Mercury Lounge booker Ryan Gentles and a half-enthusiastic crowd of around 50.

“If they were playing at Luna Lounge, that meant free admission,” says Raphael. “Drum’n’bass and jungle, trip hop and acid jazz, that was really the buzzword of the couple of years around that time period. The few live bands would play these very small venues and basically play for beer or for free. This was the level they were at.” The idea of a unified New York band scene in 2000, he argues, was a British rock media fantasy.

“That wasn’t my experience at all, living there,” he says. “As far as I knew the bands didn’t know each other. At that early stage it wasn’t like The Strokes were hanging out with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol was having coffee across the street. There was a vibrant youth culture, you’d go up and down Ludlow Street and there were many cool bars, but it wasn’t kids in tight jeans and leather jackets and guitars on people’s backs. It was gold chains and backwards baseball hats.”

Raphael wasn’t sure about The Strokes at first. “I thought, ‘there’s a lot of swagger there. There’s a lot of great style, and they seem very sure of themselves’. But the music didn’t really register with me.”

Nonetheless, he handed them his card, and Hammond Jr got in touch. When the guitarist came to scout out the dark basement of Transporterraum, with its red and purple glitter walls, beaten up amps and drum kits, and mysterious metal tube from the ceiling (“I always joked that it was a drip feed for the musicians from the methadone clinic upstairs,” laughs Raphael), he instantly knew this was where The Strokes’ magic would happen.

The Strokes’ lead singer, Julian Casablancas, playing Atlanta in 2004 (Getty)

“He told me that many other studios had become very corporate,” says Raphael. “Whereas our place was just a dungeon with cool lighting that was made for rock’n’roll.”

When the full band showed up to take advantage of Raphael’s standard three-songs-in-three-days demo deal, their cryptic brief of making them sound like “taking a trip into the future and finding a band from the past that you’ve never heard before” baffled the producer, but their music floored him.

“There was some violent intensity going on that I didn’t pick up at the show,” he says. “Right from when they set up their instruments and started playing, they were, quote, serious as a heart attack. It wasn’t like a bunch of guys slapping each other’s back who couldn’t wait to get to the pub across the street, they were playing that music like their life depended on it and playing it over and over again and focusing.

“They had a certain sound in mind and we kind of found our way together. Within an hour or something, we had this basic sound that was going to be there for the next few records. When they left the studio they were very celebratory, ‘this sounds cool’. They really did seem like best friends and brothers. They always had their arms around each other and they were always walking around as a team. It was really a little family. These guys lived their band.”

A few months later, in January 2001, Raphael arrived at his studio desk to find an issue of NME open to The Modern Age EP as Single Of The Week: “That blew my mind.” Via Matt Hickey, the booker at the Mercury Lounge, the demo had reached the ears of Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis. Legend has it that Travis decided to sign The Strokes after hearing just 15 seconds of “The Modern Age” down the phone from New York.

“It was one of the most exciting moments I can remember,” Rough Trade’s chief A&R man James Endeacott remembers of the day the tracks arrived. “It sounded quite retro but it also sounded like the future in a weird way. All the bulls*** seemed to be stripped away… it was gritty, energetic and exciting. They were five of the most beautiful men you’d ever seen, and they played great rock’n’roll music. Rock music every now and then needs a shot of adrenaline, and that was definitely a shot of adrenaline. From that moment on, we were all hooked.”

Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes playing in Pennsylvania in 2003 (Getty Images)

Travis and his Rough Trade partner Jeannette Lee flew out to secure a deal with the band the very next day, and within weeks the same excitement spread like wildfire across British music. The Strokes would grace several NME covers in a matter of months and industry and fans alike scrambled for tickets to their first UK shows in February in Portsmouth, Bristol, Brighton and London. Their reception was rabid, in more ways than one.

“They used to get into fights,” says Endeacott, recalling one night he took the band (“the five of them were literally one entity”) to the launch of a new bar in Islington. “We get there and these drunk indie kids gave them a hard time, ‘you come over here from f***ing New York wearing your f***ing Converse, who the f*** you think you are?’. Fists were thrown, it was all handbags. It was quite aggy at the beginning.”

Yet, in an age dominated by bombastic acoustic rock (Travis’s The Man Who and The Verve’s Urban Hymns had shifted over 13 million copies combined) and Radiohead’s cyber-miserablism, the inspirational impact of The Strokes’ raw-boned pop was immediate. At their show at The Lift in Brighton, Andy Huxley of The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster – a deranged swamp punk band already born as an antidote to the deluge of post-Oasis drizzle drowning the British rock scene – saw a band of trans-Atlantic brothers in The Strokes.

“I remember talking to Albert Hammond Jr and saying, ‘We’ve got to do some shows together!’.” he says. “We thought it was our destiny to play some gigs with them.”

Carl Barât of The Libertines, a band who’d been carving their own niche as riotous squat troubadours, took a little more convincing. “They came to a pub and Pete [Doherty, Libertines bandmate] was behind the bar,” he says. “He was on about these guys who turned up and they bought some acid or something – I don’t know if they made that up. They looked cool and he got their demo and I refused to listen to it because I was a Stones fan. I just thought it was a total [Stones] rip off at the time. I grew to love it over the years but at the time I wasn’t having it. Pete kept trying to play it to me and then eventually I acquiesced.”

‘The five of them were literally one entity’: The Strokes burst onto the scene in 2001 (Getty)

By the time The Strokes returned that summer to play festivals including Reading and Leeds, The Libertines had been won over to the extent of jumping a train to their sold-out show in Liverpool and blagging their way in pretending to be support act Moldy Peaches, hell-bent on – literally – stealing The Strokes’ sound.

“I remember a very heated conversation with the doorman,” says Barât. “When we saw first-hand, point blank what The Strokes were doing and what they were getting out of it, I think the touchpaper was well and truly lit. After the gig we went backstage to investigate how these things work, thinking ‘we want to do this’. Pete got caught walking out with [one of The Strokes’] guitar pedals, which meant we were instantly ejected from the building. We saw them outside afterwards buying fish and chips, and we advised them on which banknotes to use. We headed back to London with full bellies, full bullets and full of dreams.”

In the meantime, following disappointing sessions with Pixies producer Gil Norton, The Strokes had returned to Transporterraum to recapture the spark of The Modern Age EP on a debut album. “They weren’t different, but the situation and the psychological atmosphere was 100 per cent different,” remembers Raphael. “When they walk in the door to make the album it’s like we can hear the whole world with their ears up to our door waiting for this thing to happen. They already wanted to focus very hard and obsess about everything, so now they had seven weeks of obsession.”

During “murderously hard” all-night sessions involving “a massive amount of effort and concentration”, Raphael was particularly pleased with the way he created a drum machine sound for Moretti on “Hard To Explain”, the “raw, in your face” recording of “New York City Cops” and Hammond Jr’s explosive solo on “Take It Or Leave It”. “He did it in the room with the band playing around him and it just started bouncing off the brick walls and creating this cacophony of sound,” he says. “It sounds like the walls are crumbling right there, that blew me away. Then when Julian opened up his mouth to do those roaring vocals on that song, I was like, ‘Oh my god, that is aggressive, that is just pounding you in the face and he’s screaming like a bear’.”