For one type of guitar-based music fan, the sort that perhaps swerved V Festival and went to Ozzfest instead, the beginning of the 21st century was very enjoyable indeed. Limp Bizkit, Korn, Papa Roach, Slipknot and other like-minded menaces had become huge. Nu-metal was a global phenomenon. Lucky you guys!
On the other side of the fence, things were pretty dire. Indie/rock’n’roll, call it what you will, was on its arse. Quite literally, in some cases, with new bands such as Turin Brakes taking to singing their whilst sitting on a stool. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a sit down. As a 44-year-old man, I love a sit down. But no musical movement has ever come about from sitting down.
That’s not to say that, if you were averse to nu-metal and its associated acts, there were no decent records released in the year 2000, there were, but for the most part they were very nod-in-appreciation records rather than ‘there’s something really exciting here I want to go and see this band immediately’ records, albums like Doves’ Lost Souls, Badly Drawn Boys’ Hour Of The Bewilderbeast, Six. By Seven’s The Closer You Get, Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows, Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, Coldplay’s Parachutes… all relatively new artists but making music fit for taking your Ford Mondeo on a long Sunday morning drive to keep the car battery healthy. Come on lads, live a little!
Everything changed in one transatlantic phone call towards the end of 2000. Rough Trade Records had employed Matt Hickey, a booker at New York’s Mercury Lounge venue, as an A&R scout tasked with informing of any promising new bands he’d come across. As it happens, not long into working for Rough Trade, a demo had landed on his desk that was a little more than promising. A three-song EP by a local band called The Strokes, it was the best thing he’d heard in ages. Alongside his boss Ryan Gentles, who would go on to become their manager, he listened to it over and over and then got on the blower.
“Matt phoned up at about seven’o’clock in the morning in the morning and played about ten seconds of the EP over the phone, and that was it,” Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis recalled in Lizzy Goodman’s excellent Meet Me In The Bathroom, a book about New York’s vibrant, chaotic music scene in the ‘00s. “That was the moment.”
Those ten seconds would’ve been the hustling opening bars to The Modern Age, a propulsive garage-rock tune that harked back to 70s street-level rock’n’roll, in the lineage of The Velvet Underground and Television, but also sounded like nothing else in 2000. As Travis was to discover, the rest of the demo more than lived up to this thrilling opening song, sliding into the wired, choppy Last Nite, to become an indie-disco classic, and then the driving intricacy of a song titled Barely Legal.