For music journalists, there was just one beacon of hope that appeared through the heavy new millennium gloom.
I first spied it in that short, excruciating, dead-man-walking era between being told I was coming off the features editor job and my last day in the NME office around Christmas 2000, when a PR, Tim Vigon from Coalition, came into NME with a demo to play for the editor Ben Knowles and James Oldham, who was to be promoted to deputy editor from reviews in the new year. I knew it had to be good. Nobody came in to play a demo.
Maniacally enthused, James rushed from the editor’s office after twenty minutes and put the CD on the main office stereo. ‘This,’ he said, fiddling with the tray and buttons, ‘is absolutely brilliant.’ He pressed play on The Modern Age by a band from New York City called the Strokes.
Five years earlier, James had sent me his fanzine when I was editing the live reviews. His rag had pizazz, so I invited him for a chat and a pint, minded to get him started on some reviews. He arrived from his parents’ home outside Wycombe on a spiky winter’s afternoon, pale with inky hair, skinny, dressed entirely in black, an Oxford-educated ex-goth with a dry, flinty sense of humour. He was clever and funny, cheeky and inquisitive. He had an anything-goes attitude. Massively into books and music. People enjoyed spending time with him, as did I. We soon became good friends.
There was now to be a slight readjustment in the balance of our relationship, as I left the office staff and he was elevated up the masthead. Once, I’d have snaffled this exciting new band’s demo tape, but now it was James’s time to shine in that light. It was the cycle of editorial life. I was getting used to that idea. He already was.
As the music played, we could hear the plug being pulled on all the scummy, stagnant American rock music we’d been forced to editorially bathe in in recent years: Korn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, the Bloodhound Gang and other groups whose names I do not wish to repeat lest we meet again. Their time in NME was over.
The Modern Age was pumping through the twenty-fifth floor main office like a laxative: guitars a jagged mix of two of the greatest New York rock bands, the Velvet Underground and Television, drums that resembled thumped cardboard boxes, no cymbals, motorik, soulful, urban, the mysterious baritone poetry of the voice:
Up on a hill, here’s where we begin
This little story, a long time ago …
It was the start of something. Please be as charismatic and handsome as the music. James took a plane to New York to find out alongside photographer Pennie Smith, famous for her work with the Clash amongst others, who was there to ensure that whatever they discovered had the requisite smudgy, classic-looking black and white documentation to illustrate it.
In June 2001, timed for the band’s first single, ‘Hard to Explain’, the Strokes appeared on the cover of NME: story by James Oldham; pictures by Pennie Smith. Five beautiful boys in thrift shop denims, canvas and leathers, leaning on a lamp post in New York City. The slate was wiped and the cover flew from newsstands, a cool, refreshing drink for parched indie and college kids across the land. It’s not a huge leap to imagine that the arrival of the Strokes saved the life of the magazine (see the 2001 NME cover run as detailed in ‘The Bay of Ligs’). It certainly changed the window display in Topshop.
In July, James called me at home.
‘We’re doing the Strokes on the cover again, for the album in August,’ he told me. ‘They’re taking us to Los Angeles for a show and a couple of days hanging out. Do you want to write it?’
I thanked him and accepted the commission.
From around 1990 onwards, my dad would tell anybody who asked, and many who didn’t, that this was the greatest ever time to live in New York City, in Manhattan.
‘Enjoy it,’ he would say. ‘It’s never been better. And it may not last.’
The city was no longer bankrupt. The streets were cleaner. You were much less likely to be murdered. The cultural and culinary life of New York was in the absolute pink.
‘I’ve seen the worst of the city,’ he’d say. ‘Now, right now, today, this is the best.’
He’d grown up in Queens, in Forest Hills, post-war, and in Manhattan in the sixties. ‘More spicy,’ he’d say simply of both comparative experiences.
He’d returned to the city of his youth after a sixteen-year absence in 1985. First, he lived in a small Midtown apartment where I’d sleep on his sofa when visiting. Then in 1989 he got a short-lived job teaching journalism at New York University. Through this, he managed to snaffle an NYU apartment, a sweet first-floor, two-bedroom corner spot in a university building on Bleecker Street by LaGuardia, right in Greenwich Village. His wife Jair began a job working for the French Institute at NYU and so, with my sister Gaby growing up in the second room, they stayed in that flat for over thirty years, long after my dad left NYU. There was no way they’d give up that place, subsidised, in my old man’s dream location and otherwise out of their budget if on the free market. It came to define them, in so far as bricks arranged in a particular location can.
In the mornings, he had a ritual of making a pot of powerful coffee very early, by 6 a.m. He’d bring in the New York Times from the mat outside the door, slap it on the dining table and then he’d stand for a few moments watching the sun appear over Lower Manhattan, the light rippling, reflecting across the buildings and settling upon the central attraction from my dad’s living room, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center just a mile down the road. Each tower was 1,350 feet high, 110 storeys, once the tallest buildings in the world. They dominated his landscape. They were right there. Dead ahead.
That morning, 11 September 2001, my middle brother Mark was in his office on Park Avenue, towards Union Square, where he worked at a literary agency. As usual, he was there by 8.30. He was drinking coffee at his desk as he watched American Airlines Flight 11 streak noisily across the city and slam into the North Tower of the World Trade Center soon after, at 8.46. He was still there half an hour later when United 175 flew into the South Tower.
He remained in his office until the afternoon, watching the aftermath of the attack upon those towers a short subway ride away on TV with his colleagues, as well as American Airlines 77 flying into the Pentagon. After he spoke to my mother who was locked down at NBC in Washington and my dad at his apartment, he left work and snuck beyond the security cordon to meet up with our youngest brother Daniel, who lived beneath the line.
Slave to caffeine, Daniel awoke that morning jonesing for his usual first fix. His boss Laurence Bell of Domino was over from London staying in his home office, so Daniel left him to negotiate his jet lag and stepped out on to 3rd Avenue to buy breakfast with his girlfriend, Danielle. As they walked down the avenue a large plane swooped above, making Daniel jump. Danielle chuckled at him. ‘What’s up with you?’ she asked.
‘Didn’t you think that was flying low?’ he replied.
As they ordered their coffees and food, Mark called to say they should make them takeaway. They’d want to get in front of a TV immediately. Back home, they awoke Laurence and watched the second plane hit the tower live together.
After Mark met up with Daniel, they wandered through the streets, punch-drunk, walking by the soldiers erecting barricades, air heavy with smoke and dust, the unusual silence of Down-town regularly punctuated by sirens and wafts of something new and dreadful on the breeze. Eventually, they wound up at Max’s Fish, a favourite East Village bar frequented by their friends and many of the band members who’d go on to make their names in the coming decade. Somehow, Clinic, who had been due to play in New York that week and the reason Laurence was over, had made it to Max’s too. The Liverpudlian band’s resourceful tour manager Morgan Lebus had managed to uncover a way back into the city from Boston when all the routes in were supposedly closed off. Everyone gathered around the pool table, seeking something abstract and familiar to distract from the new reality beyond the door.
After some fraught emails with both of my parents, I managed to speak to them on the phone in DC and NYC in the days after. My mother was on a high-alert war footing. She told me she was considering retirement. I suggested she take a few days off, not to make any irreversible calls right now.
My father was more phlegmatic about the whole thing. ‘My God, what a thing to witness,’ he said. ‘In New York, of all places.’
After years working as a Middle East correspondent, reporting wars and subsequent peace talks, the irony of watching a new conflict unfurl so horrifically from a window in his living room bit deeply. Three thousand deaths, just in front of him. I asked him how he was.
‘I’m fine, but the city,’ he replied. ‘We’re in a new era now.’
Before the eras changed, just before the old America abruptly passed and the modern US came to be, I went to Los Angeles for a final sip from that cup.
It was 3 August 2001, and the Strokes were living the best version of their young lives, poolside at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood as one day tumbled warmly into the next. At the time, it felt like a silly dream you awake from laughing. Now, I can only remember it as a final, carefree dance in America before the disco lights were unplugged.
Earlier that evening, they had played an extremely sold-out show at the Troubadour, with hundreds left out on the pavement and everyone from Sofia Coppola and Keanu Reeves to Joe Strummer and Courtney Love crammed inside. I’d seen them play half a dozen times in England that year, in London, Oxford, Colchester, and the response had been increasingly lovelorn, but the reaction that night in LA, the week their first album Is This It hit racks, was overwhelming. The band appeared taken aback.
‘Fucking A!’ exclaimed singer Julian Casablancas, a soft-cheeked twenty-two-year-old, shaking his head and taking a puff of his cigarette between songs beneath a prominent no smoking sign. He laughed and pulled the collars of his white suit jacket together. At this, a front row filled with young girls screamed at him, like in a movie from the 1960s. ‘Incredible,’ he said, before counting in the next number.
Afterwards, there was a record-company party in a long, dimly lit bar attached to the Troubadour. The bar was free but nobody other than the band seemed to be drinking, which made the aim of being invited back to their hotel that much easier for everyone else present.
Soon after Casablancas stuck his tongue in my ear at the bar and asked if he could kiss me, I hopped in the minibus back to the Roosevelt with him and wide-eyed drummer Fabrizio Moretti. As we awaited twenty-year-old guitarist Nick Valensi to gather his bag from the dressing room, I made small talk with Valensi’s mother at the stage door. Danielle Valensi held my hand throughout our chat, keen for her message to cut through.
‘Only write nice things about my son, sir,’ she implored. ‘Don’t take advantage of their good nature.’
‘We have this under control, Mom,’ said Nick upon his return. ‘Love you!’ he called, as we waved her off. ‘I bet Bono never introduced you to his mom.’
He climbed into the bus. ‘OK. Let’s get wasted.’
Back at the hotel, Fab Moretti stripped down to his underwear alongside NME photographer Ewen Spencer and climbed into the warm pool. They started to execute slow, happy lengths in the under-lit water.
The rest of the party got business under way in Valensi’s room, but he soon narrowed the guest list down to two so people wandered off to different poolside cabanas to continue festivities, to the hot tub, to the pool.
Fittingly as a member of the press, I found myself landlocked in the driest venue: the management suite. There, I shared awkward chat and the damp end of a joint with the band’s manager Ryan Gentles (who carried himself in the manner of someone just a little too neurotically nerdy to be in the band itself), their Australian soundman, their UK press envoy Jakub and Ryan’s assistant, Jules. All of the room’s lights were on. We could hear laughter from the pool area, but we were discussing tour routing.
Suddenly, the door reverberated to a loud thumping. The handle wiggled and then clicked. The door swung open. Julian Casablancas stood in the hallway, legs apart. He slowly raised a middle finger.
‘Fuck you!’ he shouted.
The room laughed. He was not laughing along.
‘Fuck YOU!’
‘Come and have a joint, Julian,’ called his PR.
‘Fuck you!’ he repeated, swaying.
‘Jules,’ he called, imploringly, ‘please come with me.’
She walked to the door and helped manoeuvre him drunkenly down the corridor towards the hot tub. In four years, they would be married. In fourteen they would be parents to two children, and in eighteen they would be divorced. At that moment, though, at 3 a.m. on 4 August 2001, they were going to join some friends in the spa.
I followed them down the corridor, out into the pool area, which was now filled with refugees from the Troubadour party lolling on loungers and lying on the grass in the warm LA night air, smoke billowing upwards through the soft lights.
This was no time to introduce myself to strangers. I removed my shirt and trousers, my shoes and my socks, then I climbed into the water next to Fab and Ewen, dipped beneath the surface and kicked off towards the deep end.
Back in London, I composed a follow-up email to my new friends at Life, the Observer’s magazine supplement. The subject line had the same two words in it as my previous email, sent just before I left for LA: The Strokes. This time I added a question mark: The Strokes?
In January, I’d pitched Billy Childish as a profile feature on a whim and the Observer Magazine had gone for it enthusiastically, the editor telling me that if I kept bringing them good music pitches we’d be in business. It was very encouraging. I was very encouraged. So I pitched them other feature ideas.
The relationship was nevertheless opaque. Some ideas stuck, others didn’t, but I was never quite sure why. It was unpredictable. Unknowable. Sometimes, even being commissioned to write a piece was no guarantee of seeing the work appear.
I went down to Billy Childish’s house in Chatham, shared some herbal tea and asked him to lay his mystical-punk philosophies all over me. Then I wrote 3,000 words as prescribed for the following week. Eighteen months later Life published them. I hadn’t had to supply a single rewrite in that time. They were just waiting for the right moment to unleash it upon their readers, leaving me to field dozens of quizzical, increasingly enervated phone calls from Childish who’d agreed to the interview in order to publicise a particular release and exhibition.
In March, I got on a plane to Nassau at Life’s behest to spend a week hanging around beach resorts in the Bahamas with correspondents from the Evening Standard and NME – my old colleague John Mulvey – while I awaited a thirty-minute audience with Missy Elliott in Lenny Kravitz’s house on Love Beach. Though the Observer had negotiated the access with the PR, they were distraught upon my return to learn about the presence of other members of the press. So they held the piece for several months as I desperately tried to get five minutes with Missy after her London show to add the bespoke material they required to run the article. There was a long moment when I thought my only payment for spending a week in the Caribbean was going to be spending a week in the Caribbean.
(I’m sorry, this tiny violin appears to be out of tune.)
The Strokes seemed like an easy win to me. There were other Sunday newspapers interested in them, but the band were signed to venerable indie label Rough Trade and everyone there wanted to start with Life, as at that time it was the most handsome supplement. It was printed A3 on heavy paper, unlike all the flimsier glossies. It had a bit of heft, even if it sold less.
I couldn’t understand their hesitancy over the Strokes.
‘I’m not sure,’ said the features editor.
‘About what?’ I asked. ‘They’re the most exciting young band in years, your readers and their kids will be mad about them. They’re silly and messy. They look fantastic. The album will be number one.’
‘There’s always a hot new band,’ she replied, dismissively. ‘This is the Observer Magazine. We can’t just do the latest. What’s so different about them?’
‘They’re joyous,’ I explained. ‘All under twenty-three, living every moment like it’s their last. They’re having sex and taking drugs and partying like they’ve just invented good times, but it isn’t their motivation.’ It was a by-product of their collective alchemy, I told her. They’d written eleven concise songs that had instantly connected with an enormous worldwide audience. Their lives were dreams coming true. Rock mythology was begging to be described in real time, I said.
‘Sounds like a great music magazine story,’ she replied. ‘We’ll keep our eyes on them.’
I told her I’d be in touch again about them. She sighed and hung up.
A week later, the Strokes appeared on the cover of The Face. That afternoon the Observer Magazine commissioned me to join the Strokes on tour in Philadelphia and then Pittsburgh on 15 and 16 November 2001.
The country had irreversibly darkened in the ten weeks since I’d last been in the USA, as had Julian Casablancas. There was no going back. It was a new era. He sat at the bar in Pittsburgh after their second show, his face on the counter, a beer by his head. He was no longer happy, carefree.
‘I miss New York,’ he said. ‘I miss the life that created this album.’
Throughout those three days with the Strokes, the atmosphere was disjointed, fractious, tired. This was not the piece the Observer wanted me to write. They wanted the Rolling Stones on tour in 1965. They wanted mayhem, mischief. I’d witnessed all of that in Los Angeles: orgies, drunk-driving, a punch-up, some very goofy repartee. The story had now moved on, though.
On 11 September that year, the Strokes had been booked into their rehearsal room in Manhattan. Instead, they found themselves wandering through the same downtown streets and bars as my brothers that evening, similarly dazed.
They still had a long US tour lined up until the new year, but nothing would ever quite be the same again for them. The window had closed. They were suffocating in their success and the sudden rearrangement of their city, the approaching war.
Casablancas in particular appeared deflated, depressed. The other band members were upset about 9/11, but they were nevertheless getting on with the business of being single young men in a successful rock band on the road. For Julian, the game was up already. He looked broken.
‘Right now in my head it’s like living in a dirty room,’ he explained. ‘Once it’s nice and clean again, I’ll be able to think straight, but it’s way short of being clean right now.’
He didn’t want to be on tour any more. He’d fallen asleep the night before in his bunk on the bus to the sound of guitarist Albert Hammond Jnr and Fab watching porn at full whack through the stereo in the lounge just behind him. He was changing his mind about a lot of things.
‘I never had the rock-star dream,’ he said, with a swig of his beer, raising his finger to attract the barman for refills. ‘I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer.’ The reality of playing shows across the States, across Europe, was hardening his ambitions. ‘I want to be one of those people,’ he said sadly, ‘be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. That’s my aspiration.’
He didn’t think he could do that on an overnight bus to Cleveland, no matter how many girls would be waiting for him to climb down the steps at the other end.
When I eventually got back to London via the many new unsmiling security checks, a pioneer of paranoid transatlantic travel in the immediate post-9/11 moment, I tried to write two pieces in one. I wrote about the arrival of the most exciting young American band in a generation, and I also wrote about their end. Neither story rang entirely true. The most exciting young American band in a generation had already left the scene before I’d arrived in Philadelphia. Their time had been between the group’s baby steps in England in January and that first plane hitting the North Tower. But they weren’t over, either. The Strokes carried on for decades. They’re still going. They’ve written some very good songs subsequently, as well as releasing some occasionally disappointing albums. There have been long tours, drug addictions overcome, marriages, divorces, children, too. But they wouldn’t be any less loved, their influence smaller, if they’d split on 11 September 2001. Those first nine months in the public eye still define them.
When I left the full-time NME gig, I suddenly remembered that if you don’t arrange to meet people then you drink alone.
At NME, you just walked out of the office into a social whirl, something that a lot of the time you tried to escape, but which was available on tap nonetheless. You were never lonely. You just chose to be alone.
Those rules were now different for me. I could always find entertainment in the week, a trip to the office, a gig, maybe a drink with a pal, but as a homeworker the weekend loomed.
I did not want to break from sending desperate pitching emails from the kitchen table in the week by instead standing in the bedroom, looking from the window at weekends. Everyone I knew had jobs, relationships, so at the weekend they combined a day away from an office with shopping, DIY, some kind of binge.
I had to get away from my flat. I too had a relationship, but it was not providing as much diversion as I required. Escape from home at the weekends became a key to my sanity.
So I went to every QPR game, home and away. When I’d first moved back to England in 1985, going to the football was the only link I had with my time before we’d moved to Paris. The stadium was still there, in the exact same space in Shepherd’s Bush, down the same streets, past Shepherd’s Bush market, along Uxbridge Road, on to Loftus Road, through the turnstile, up the steps, behind the goal: a literal journey down memory lane to an unchanged place of nevertheless unpredictable adventure. I didn’t have a childhood home to return to and I hadn’t stayed in touch with primary school friends, but what I had was Loftus Road, the QPR stadium. That felt like home, that was my ancestral base, the one thing that I had happily done with my dad and continued without him. When I returned to the city, I went every week, on my own but never alone. Since the mid-noughties I’ve gone to games with a tight group of friends, but for decades football was something I attended alone. I have never felt lonely at a football match.
That season, 2001–02, QPR were on a tour of the lower divisions, so on alternate Saturdays I found myself on trains to Bury, Peterborough, Colchester, Blackpool, Port Vale, Huddersfield, Northampton, Swindon, etc. with just a newspaper, a small green pocket radio and a light sense of adventure for company.
On Saturday, 15 December 2001, I climbed from the train at King’s Cross in the early evening on my way home from Chesterfield. QPR had won a thriller 2–3 in front of a raucous away following, but the policing after the match had been more laid-back than the mood of the locals and I’d had to run from men in ropey jackets waiting in the shadows to kick departing cockneys on their way to the station. I was glad to be back in the smoke.
As I walked through the King’s Cross concourse to the echoing cheers of fans similarly pleased to be home, I noticed the newsstand was filled with Sunday’s papers.
There, splashed across the top band of the front page of the Observer, was the promise of the Strokes in the magazine, alongside my name.
I grabbed a copy and pulled the magazine supplement Life from its guts.
A black and white photo of the Strokes adorned its cover. There was nothing else. Just these words:
The Strokes
On the road with the new gods of rock
By Ted Kessler
I laughed. I knew they’d come round.
One can easily mistake moments of great elation as the beginning of something, that hard-fought personal achievement marks a moment of lasting consequence. Really, though, this cover marked the end, a carriage clock for my youth. No story would prove to be as carefree, as joyous as that first adventure with the Strokes in LA in the summer of 2001 again. The Observer story was like the space capsule falling back towards Earth, watching the moon disappearing through the window.
Down below, the new era was already under way.