Julian is back from the jukebox and there are new drinks lined up. He's chosen three dollars of music: some from The Harder They Come, some not. 'Some Johnny Cash, some Patsy Cline,' he says. 'I'm in a country mood tonight. A let's-get-drunk-and-remember-the-good-old-days mood.'
He is being wry. He insists that he remembers almost nothing of his early life. 'I have a really vague memory', he murmurs. His parents had met in Paris, his mother was a model from Denmark; his Spanish father was setting up a modelling agency. They moved to New York where his father started the Elite model agency and a single son was born.
When he was about 7, his parents' marriage fell apart. This is what he says about it: 'Basically, when my parents got divorced...I don't know...everything was, I don't know...I'm not trying to say that's like why...it's just, they got divorced. My mum was fucking miserable and I just lived with her crying every day and that was my life, so I fucking didn't hate my dad but - I don't want to say that now because I get along with him now fine, but I did, I did.'
Did you see your father much?
'No. I would see him sometimes, but I didn't like the whole vibe of it because my mum was in hell. And I was living with my mum. And you know, walk into the bathroom and your mum's fucking crying and you start crying and it just fucking sucks you know. Whatever...'
He offers other occasional flashes of his youth. When he was 11 or 12, at school in New York, he realised that his role as the class clown didn't work for him: 'being the clown meant that girls just wanted to be my friend'. So he changed. 'I remember all of a sudden just being really serious and all of a sudden girls would like me. it was strange.' He was doing badly in school and his father suggested he went to the posh Swiss boarding school his father had attended and loved. His father was European and loved sports; Julian grew up in New York. 'It was a total clash', Julian says. 'He didn't know. He doesn't like New York that much. See, I love New York. Hanging out in the street, that's what I wanted to do.'
He hated Switzerland. The weekends were the worst. 'All these kids would go out to town and I guess my parents didn't give me pocket change or whatever these other kids had, and the whole weekend was me sitting in my room by myself', he remembers. 'I was just fucking depressed, you know. I'd walk around. Sometimes I'd play basketball by myself. I did that a lot'.
It was his stepdad, a painter called Sam Adoquei, who showed him the way he would go. He hadn't been much interested in music, though there was one moment the previous summer when Nikolai played him a Pearl Jam song, 'Yellow Bedletter'.
'I was like, "Wow, that's pretty and it makes me feel something special that I don't usually feel that I like to feel",' he recalls. 'It made me feel stronger'. His stepdad gave him a CD: The Best of the Doors. One weekend he lay on his bed, listening, and he felt like he understood it: 'There was so much different shit - cool instrumental shit, cool lyrical shit, there was some cool singing stuff. I said "fuck that's what I want to do"'.
Back in New York, released from his Swiss exile, his stepdad would talk to him about art, and about what makes you a great artist, and about how hard you had to work. he got more into Pearl Jam, and into Nirvana. 'Everything to do with my life', he says. 'teenage...angst. I'm using the usual word. I was just totally alone. Totally alone. So many people had friends or were hanging out, and I would like talk to some people but it was a very alone experience, and hearing Nirvana and Pearl Jam made me feel...positive about shit. Because beautiful music with lyrics about the truth of how things can be not great is a powerful thing...It made me feel like, if I put my mind to it, I could make myself happy. Like I had some help. I hate music where it's, like, "it all sucks, fuck this,we're gonna die, fuck you, kill yourself", and I hate shit where it's "it's gonna be alright, everything is just fine". The most powerful aspect of music is that it can open your eyes to the frustration of everything and give you the adrenaline and faith to gon on with the ideal that you can make it better if you do your thing.'
By then he'd also met Nick, who played guitar, and taken some guitar lessons himself. The first song Julian could play, just the bass notes, was Nirvana's "Polly". He went through a phase of interviewing himself while he was in the shower, as though he was famous. 'I think everyone does that, don't they?' he says. He would pretend he was making some kind of political speech. One was about the price of cigarettes.
In the world outside the bathroom, he ran into some problems. The first time he got drunk was when he was 11, swiping fruity alcohol residues off the table at his father's house with a friend. (" I think I liked it', he recalls, and adds,'I got all my sins from my dad: drinking, cheating on women..."any others?' Yeah I don't know lets not talk about that') At school in New York he would ask friends who had aces to their parents alcohol to bring him drinks, and he would get wasted in the mornings. 'I got caught drinking whiskey or tequila at 9 am', he remembers. 'Two days a week after school I had to go to some kind of rehab type place. It was called Phoenix House. You know, rise from the ashes. It was stupid. They'd give me urine tests and stuff.'
At school, he also started studying music. 'I took it so fucking seriously, ridiculously seriously', he says. 'The only class I got an A in was music.' He got a scholarship to music college by writing a short classical piece; he asked this Korean guy he knew to play violin and he borrowed a keyboard from an electronics chain during a 'return it within a month if you don't like it' promotion. 'People don't understand', he says 'how hard I worked. Really hard, you know what I mean?' He studied classical composition. 'I always felt that you need to learn the rules before you could break them. It wasn't like it helped me in rock at all, but it made me realise what was cheesy, what was typical, what typical chords and scales were, it gave me a foundation where my original thoughts could actually be original... The one thing that made us good now is that I realised my whole life I sucked. Always. Everything I did. it sucked. That was the motto of everything: I suck, I gotta do better. I gotta work harder. That was the motto of music.'
Aside from a one-show band with Fab, Nick and himself called Half Pipe, The Strokes was his first group. He now dismisses the early strokes songs exchanged by over-eager pop archaeologists on the internet as "garbage". The first song he wrote which he thought didn't suck was 'Soma'. So far there have been a little over a dozen of them. But he's not exactly satisfied with these. 'Never', he says. 'That's never going to happen. It's like an exponential curve. You'll get close to it but you'll never do it.'
Though he writes all of the Strokes songs, he shares all the money from them five ways. 'It wouldn't work any other way', he says, 'I just want to write great songs, and if they're great songs I want them to be played great, and I think that we can do it, the five of us, better than anyone else.'
How equal are The Strokes?
Nick: Completely. Obviously when we're doing musical stuff Julian has the definitive last say but that doesn't mean it's a dictatorship. We all listen, we all contribute and we all have the same goal, and when something's good we all agree that it's good. We disagree about small, stupid, irrelevant things - whether we should fly or drive to Chicago for a show, shit like that.
Fab: There's an understanding between us. There are times when we step back and let one person make a decision. Different people for different stuff, but a lot of the time it's Julian, I guess. I'd be an ignorant fool if I didn't realise that Julian is primus inter parus. First among equals. We are all equal, and Julian is probably the one who most recognises that because he's the one we all look to.
Albert: Obviously, as of now, Julian writes the songs, and it's probably the most important thing. I wouldn't want to say how equal we are apart from that though, because that's between us. When you see us as a band, as an image, you see all of us and you know all of us; that's very important.
Nikolai: It's like the toy Voltron - a big robot that turns into five animals.
Julian: We're all equal; five different guys. As friends we argue and fight, but when it comes down to it we all want to be on the same page. Sure I write all the songs. I try to push some ideas that I feel strongly about. But I don't think there would be a time where they'd be 'you're wrong, Julian' and I'd just be like 'no, this is how it is'. It just doesn't happen that way. You try to agree on the same best thing and at the end of the day you're all way stronger.