They gather in a trailer on a parking lot round the side of the stage. (The real backstage dressing rooms are taken by more important bands.) Julian works on today's set list. It includes two unreleased songs, 'The way it is' and 'Meet me in the bathroom'. After he opens a bottle of red wine and wanders off, Fab and Nick come in and study the print out.
'It's 11 out of 15', Fab notes. It takes me awhile to realise what he means, which is this: The Strokes musical career involves just 15 active songs. These are the 11 on Is this It? CD, the song 'When it started' on the American release after the September 11, and three new songs (the third of which is still simply known to them as "ze newie")
It's nearly time to perform. Julian says something about needing to puke, but he doesn't. He often used to, before they played. The last time was at Reading last year. 'Extreme fear', he explains it to me, 'of us being terrible and sucking'.
I stand in the audience as they take the stage in the bright afternoon sunlight. 'You guys are gay', shouts someone from behind me. A large bouncy ball is being thrown around, back and forth, above the audience's heads, and many of them seem more interested in this than in the Strokes. They sound great, but this is not the place to hear them; even with a sympathetic audience I'm not certain that their music, all frustration and tension and release, would make sense here, by the sea in the sunshine. Applause ripples between the songs and there is more of it by the end than there was in the beginning, but they don't seem to make a huge impression. Afterwards, a plane circles overhead, trailing a banner advertising the forthcoming strokes/white stripes concert at radio city music hall.
'I guess we all feel a little bit shitty and disappointed by ourselves', Albert says afterwards. He says it's difficult playing to people who barely respond. 'The craziest people in the world to go play a show in front of'', he notes, are in Glasgow'.
Backstage awhile later, I find Fab and Albert punching each other, pretty hard. 'It's a whole thing explains Fabrizio between blows and yelps, 'It's love, right?' 'No its not', retorts Albert, 'It's violence!'
The band is gathered in the trailer when I walk in there. There is barely room to stand, and nowhere to sit. Julian suggests I sit on his lap. I demur but he is insistent. It's comfy enough there, though after awhile, being considerably heavier than he is, I inquire how his leg is coping. 'My third leg?' he says, 'It's getting pretty hard.'
They're now enjoying a pleasantly drunken sunny afternoon. 'How much more fun have we been having since we got offstage,' laughs Julian. He asks how they seem to me, but doesn't wait for me to answer. 'Pretty rich boy homos', he says. 'Yeah, their musical is basically Seventies rip-off stuff by vain, spoiled assholes. Rich and Vain: The Story of the Strokes. Someone wrote all their songs for them.'
Afternoon slips to evening. I overhear Fab talking about Kierkegaard, and about how he used the tale Abraham and Isaac as an analogy about Christians in general; he is relating this to the rock audience and the way they are spoonfed certain kinds of bands. 'His name was Soren', says Fabrizio, 'Soren Kierkegaard. he had a strange love for thought'. He is mortified when he realises I have heard this. 'You can't write that', he pleads, 'Say Nick said it.'
All of the band except Julian and Fab take the first bus back to Manhattan when it gets dark. I find myself in System of a Down's dressing room talking to Fab, Mike from Incubus, System of a Down's singer and Jack Osbourne. When there is a 'who has the best afro hair competition?' Jack Osbourne passes round his wallet which shows a ninth grade photo of him with a huge afro, he threatens to grow it back.
Everyone dozes on the way back into town, until Whitney Houston's I will always love you comes on the radio. Julian stirs, 'Can you make it much louder"' he asks the driver, 'Painfully loud'. The driver refuses, and they row about it. Julian sighs when he spots me writing this down, the shuts his eyes.
Earlier in the day Julian had taken my notebook from me and written a greeting in large, wild capital letters. 'I'LL MISS YOUR CREEPY IN THE SHADOWS, MAD SCRIBBLING.' he wrote 'EXPOSE US FOR THE FRAUDULENT POSEURS WE ARE.'
Who is the best kisser in The Strokes?
Fab: I don't know. We might have all kissed in a drunken stupor, but I don't remember. I may not have kissed Nikolai. It's not a regular thing. But we're that comfortable with each other, we're that close to each other; the boundaries that society have set saying 'this is what a friend does and this is what a lover does' is a little skewed when it comes to The Strokes. We're not homosexual; we understand what the love between the band is worth and we like to express that to each other. It's also being able to not feel uncomfortable as individuals touching each other, because we're brothers. Imagine you were looking at a five year-old and a six year-old playing in a pool where they had no inhibitions and they're just having a fun time, no real boundaries.
Albert: Julian kisses like me - the problem is, I don't like his breath sometimes. We have really big lips. Fab and Nick kind of kiss the same; Fab has the stubble, it itches. I can't believe I'm telling you this. It's ridiculous. It's hilarious. I've never kissed Nikolai so I don't know - he's the only one that doesn't allow that. The best kisses is my girlfriend. But it's always been a running joke in the band. To go and promote ourselves we'd get pretty wasted because we were tired of going to all these places and seeing the same assholes who'd say 'fuck you' when we gave them a flyer. And we loved fucking with people. Everyone thought we were gay or something. It always fucks with people's heads.
Julian: Everyone's a pretty good kisser. Albert's pretty nice. It's not like we're getting turned on. It's sort of a joke. Nikolai likes it the least. It's when we fuck around and get fucked up but it's not an important tradition with us or anything. It's just something that people catch us doing every now and then and make a big deal out of. You know, we just act like idiots sometimes. We're friends and we don't care. We're five very headstrong, different people with one extreme blessing, which is that we all want the same thing. We all want to do something that's cool and interesting , so all the small pretexts get wiped under the rug, and let's just act like it is together because that's pretty much all we are.
Nick: [long pause, exhale] That's a ridiculous question. I've kissed most of them, it's true. I've never thought about gauging how good my friends kiss. They're all not bad. When they kiss me it's a bit different to when they kiss their girlfriend. We don't go around kissing each other all the time - people see a snippet of something and they assume that we're hanging out after a show in a hotel room having make-out sessions. We're all pretty secure with each other and we find it funny. Watching Julian dry-hump Fab is funny. Whether we're in public or in our rehearsal studio by ourselves, I just think it's funny. And I don't care why.
Nikolai: It's not that I'm less keen, I'm just not as full-on about it as the others. I've probably kissed all of them, back in the day, when it was more innocent affection and much less thought about, showing true affection. We're good friends; we don't care. With guys open affection is almost frowned upon, we're five guys that are close and it goes beyond sexual; it makes people weird. In the environment we're in there's so much outer pressure that it's good to know there's five people who don't have to hide anything; it's just comforting inside.
'I got to piss badly', says Julian,' Whiskey on the rocks', he requests.
It is later on the night of our long, New York bar conversation.
When Julian comes back, he brings with him some regrets about having discussed his life. 'I feel bad I talked about it,' he says, 'I just feel like it sounds so cheesy'. He doesn't like stuff when it's pinned down. 'You read Crime and Punishment? How did you feel after you read that book? Probably totally differently than I felt. So what are you going to say?' He says we don't need to know what Dostoevsky was thinking about. 'Because of what was in his mind and it was being interviewed by a rock journalist - that would make any kind of a difference?' he says.
Isn't it a pity that Dostoevsky never did an NME interview?
'Well dude, thank God. That's why he's so good. If he did then people would be "oh OK I've figured him out, he's about this and that". Well it's not about this and that, it's about everything.
He says how much he hates it when the strokes are dismissed as rich kids, not because his family never had any money (though most of it was his father's, and not within his orbit) but because it somehow casts doubt on his sincerity, and on how hard he worked. 'I think that if I knew me, and then saw the music we played, I would think it was cool,' he says. 'If I read stuff that they wrote about me then I would think I'm full of shit'.