'I think that was fucking Britney Spears!' he exclaims. 'Shall we go follow her?' He does a U-turn. 'Holy shitballs!' he says, 'it makes sense thought, doesn't it? A nice Mercedes....' We pull alongside at some traffic lights. 'That's her, isn't it?' he says, then realises that for all her youth and blondeness, the drive is not Britney. 'It did look like her though, didn't it?' he sighs, turning back round. 'I would've liked it to have been her...'
What drug would you never take?
Julian: I really try to stay away from heroin. Yeah, it's fun, but do you want to have the band break up, play bad music, think you're good when you suck, die...? There's no positive aspect to it. You try shit when you're a kid. That's like and an orgasm - it feels good but it lasts a short time. But for me music is more important. Some people do music to figure out what's going on, then they do drugs and they figure nothings going on. But they only way I can figure how things are going on is through music. So if anything can take that way , it's my enemy. like to work really hard and I like to get fucked up sometimes, so I do shit. But I want to write music where people's jaws drop and they go fuck. All that rock bullshit. All that clich�. It's just so uninteresting. It's fun as an individual who liked to get fucked up, and I'll always do that, but it has nothing to do with what I wanted to do. I don't give a fuck if people think I'm a dork. I write better fucking songs than them. And writing a song is so hard. It's one of the hardest things in the world.
Albert: I don't want to take any more hallucinogens. Not that I took a lot but I don't think I could handle tripping right now. I would go bonkers man. Once we were having a great time and my friend went into convulsions and I thought he was joking and he woke up and he was all pale and he threw up straight in the air and it landed on his face, and for 20 minutes I had the worst time of my life. He ate too many mushrooms.
Nikolai: In our environment,heroin. Just because of all the clichedness of it. In a rock 'n' roll environment of everything-is-so-easy,you-can-get-anything-you-want, it would definitely become a problem. For where we are, a moderately successful band, the record companies want to please you, people want to make you happy,countless people come up to you...it's all definitely there. You just have to know what to stay away from and what not to do too much.
Nick: I don't want to answer that. I don't want to talk about drugs.
Fab: Heroin. Never ever. The whole idea that you could be a slave to something...
It is way past midnight when, a little drunk again, Julian agrees to sit at a table near the pool in LA and talk some more. The Strokes have spent the evening rehearsing, tightening up Hard to Explain, for a TV show appearance tomorrow, and have been working on his newest song,which is right now called 'I can't win'. 'It could be good', he says,' but right now its not.' He explains that 'a new song can only be a new song it it's better than the other songs - that's the criteria.'
We talk about some of he weird flotsam and jetsam which recently floated The Strokes' way. The Different Strokes EP for instance, where some anonymous English musicians covered the strokes songs on toy organs. He says that he heard it for the first time when someone blasted it at the end of a Christmas party at Fab's place. 'It was definitely funny,' he says. 'At first I though it was an insult, that they were going to make fun of it, but they were actually just playing the songs on a keyboard. I guess people think in different ways.'
Then there is the popular 'Stroke of Genius' bootleg, melding the introduction of Hard to Explain with the vocal from Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle. Julian says, 'I was hoping for better. There's one part where she goes 'wo-wo-woah', actual three different chords, but everything else is just one chord so I was a little disappointed.' Did you like the sound of it? He looks at me like I may be slightly disturbed. 'No', he says, 'I would never listen to it for fun, no.' It is, I point out to him, quite a big deal in England now. 'Well you know', he says dryly,' a lot of things are big in England right now. A lot of things that are big in America. I don't give a shit.'
I ask him about something I've seen him do since the first day I spent with him. Sometimes he hangs his lead low, lets his hair fall over his face. and simply sits there, motionless, hidden in plain sight. He snorts when I mention this. I ask what he's thinking under there. 'I don't know. Different things. Sometimes I'm thinking about music. Sometimes I'm thinking about other stuff.' When you do it you give the impression, I say, that you'd rather not be where you are that moment. 'Well', he says, 'I'm sad I make it so obvious.'
What are the strangest rumours you've heard about the Strokes?
Fab: That we were on magazine before we had any songs. That we were put together by Julian's father. [laughs] That I'm going out with Drew Barrymore.
Albert: That we get our parents' money and we buy our songs. I mean, how come no one else does that? And the gay one's a funny one, always.
Nikolai: That either Julian or Albert was the kid in that movie Big. Things like that.
Julian: Just stuff like that I was going out with Ryan our manager; that I as the bitch and he was the butch. Some are funnier than the others. I don't really care about that stuff.
Nick: I don't give a shit. I don't care about anything aside from those four guys, my mother and my two sisters and our music.
The Tonight Show is an American institution, a TV show which has been running for far longer than any of the strokes have been alive. Tonight they are to make their first appearance on it, playing their current single Hard to Explain. On the soundstage, mid-morning, they run through the song. Julian's voice quickly cracks. 'Shit', he says and begins half singing in a lower register.
As they finish rehearsing, Jay Leno, the host, strides over to greet them, clapping his hands. 'thanks kids', he says. 'Are you happy with everything?' Albert tells him that he just fucked up. 'Yeah, fuck up - it's only TV,' says Leno breezily and wanders back to his interviewing desk.
Back in the dressing room, Nick and Julian play a driving game on the Playstation. 'I try to think of myself as Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder,' says Julian. 'How would he drive the car? What would he do?' 'I'm nervous man,' says Fab. 'You're nervous?' says Julian. 'How about me? I just fucking suck.' He sits there. 'Dude, I'm so nervous,' he says. Then he shouts,very loudly, 'IS ANYBODY NERVOUS?' he half-laughs. 'That's my pseudo-vocal warm up.'
It takes me awhile to realise that, beneath all this play-acting about being nervous, he really is. He keeps talking about it. 'Is anyone else freaking nervous, y'all?...Dude I'm so freaking scared...Dude it's totally nuts what we're doing here.'
The show begins on the monitor in the corner of the room. and Jay Leno announces that the Strokes will be playing later. 'Did he just say our name?' asks Julian. 'That's so great.' He stands up, walks over to me, grabs my head and kisses me on the cheek. he and Fab dance violently around the room, to "get the heart going." 'I can't go on this', says Nikolai. 'I just can't.'
They go downstairs. When the curtain rises and Leno introduces them, Julian looks kind of pissed off, standing there, which is how he looks best, of course. It's a fine performance, the first time today Julian sings it the way he can, and is punctuated by the screams of the unexpectedly large number of strokes fans in the audience. Leno stands at the edge, hands in his pockets, vaguely shaking a leg by way of approval.
'I was so worried I'd mess up,' Julian says afterwards. 'I was fucking it up so bad this afternoon.'
They watch a playback. 'This is awesome,' Julian commentates, then, as he watches himself swing a little bit wildly into the beginning of the second verse, says 'Not so good.' But they're pleased. Julian and Fab dance together and chant, 'Party! Pizza Party! Party! Pizza Party!..'
In the bus back to the hotel, various strokes call their parents and suggest they watch later. 'Last Nite' comes on the radio, and they turn it up. When they turn down the nu-metal noise which follows it, Julian sings to himself,'baby you and me/wouldn't you agree/we've got a pretty groovy kind of love.' He looks behind him to where I'm writing in my notebook, and he shakes his head one more time. 'Scribblings of a madman', he says. Its hard enough, all this, without having to worry about whether anyone will understand it.