The lead singer with the band that gave us NME's "album of the noughties" is one of the last bona fide rockstars. With louche nonchalance, Julian Casablancas mumbles to Jim Carrollabout quitting booze, going solo and rejoining The Strokes
HERE he comes now. Naturally, Julian Casablancas is late. On this occasion, the tallest lead singer you will meet in many a long day is a mere four hours behind schedule. Casablancas and his band blew into Dublin this morning for a sold-out show. After some nondescript slouching around, the singer decided to go for a nap. Four hours later, he’s ready to mumble.
The post-nap rock star is mighty peckish so a menu is found and shoved into his hands. Casablancas peers at it intently. In fact, in a hotel bar which is so chi-chi that lighting is deemed surplus to requirements on this dank, dark, dreary winter evening, he has his nose in the menu trying to read it.
A tea-light and the interviewer’s mobile phone are pressed into service so Casablancas can actually see what’s cooking.
Someone said the soup here was decent, I suggest. “Uhm, pea and mint? That one? That sounds damn weird.” Casablancas shrugs and the soup is ordered
They don’t make rock stars like Julian Casablancas any more. Sure, you can find off-the-peg variations on his casual insouciance, louche nonchalance and disorientated cool elsewhere, but why bother with cheap-ass imitations when you’ve got the real deal? Even Casablancas’s back-story chimes with the image. His father, John Casablancas, founded the Elite Model Agency, so many writers have focused on a childhood Casablancas junior spent surrounded by supermodels.
The truth, as Casablancas points out, is a little different. “It doesn’t irk me, but I wouldn’t be as casual to say it amuses me. It’s something people say when they don’t know exactly how I lived.
“My dad was really good at what he did and very successful, but that was not my world. I grew up with my mom and I would visit that world, so I saw it more as an outsider. But I don’t go out of my way to defend myself either. It was a good life. There’s so much shit in the world that I feel very grateful and blessed about what happened to me. It’s not so much about how you come into this life as how you go out of it.”
Casablancas's public life began when he and The Strokes came screaming out of New York City. They were just what the world was looking for in the early years of the last decade: a band of barmy, headline-making cool dudes on a quest to redefine and invigorate rock'n'roll. They did that with a couple of fine albums. Is This It?and Room On Firechanged the indie rock game with their stonking, swaggering sound and fantastic pouts. Is This It?was named "album of the decade in an NME poll late last year.
While the world waits for The Strokes to lurch back into action, their lead singer has finally made his solo bow. After all, the man had to do something when he stopped boozing.
With a title purloined from an Oscar Wilde article originally published in an Oxford student magazine, Phrazes for the Youngis a hoot. It's a grand parade of knock-out pop melodies, throwaway cosmic pop shiners, mad-as-a-brush synth squiggles, a bit of bar-room crooning and some downright gleeful moments when Casablancas sounds like he's having a a rare old time.
For someone who has bitched and grumbled like an old biddy about making records in the past, you sound like you’re having fun. “I had some moments when I felt good during the recording, moments when I went ‘wow, that’s really cool’,” Casablancas says.
"When I was finished recording, I really didn't know what the hell I had done. My ears were dead. Also I couldn't stop fiddling with the tracks because I was so unsure of what I was doing. That's what Out of the Blueis about: everything is dark and you don't know what the solution is and then, you find a solution.
“Sometimes you just feel very passionate about something and you don’t want to leave until you have sucked all the emotional juice out of the piano. But most times, you never know what you’re going to get when you start. I was probably happier when I was writing the songs which sound sadder.”
It took Casablancas a few years to get his head in the right shape to do a solo record. The last time he was in a studio to record an album was in 2005, when The Strokes blew a lot of gaskets trying to put the troublesome third album, First Impressions of Earth, to rights.
Recording and touring that one took its toll on Casablancas. “It took me a little while to recover from the whole band thing – six months or something before I felt normal,” he says. “To be honest, I still felt bad for two years afterwards. I’d given everything to the band already and the band was in a very weird place. I was disappointed and I was disappointed for the fans too.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, the life I had was good, but I was kind of stressed the whole time about the band thing. I was really just trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I knew that I didn’t want to do a solo record, I knew I didn’t want to get another band together.”
One of the first things he did do was stop drinking. “Did I know it was time to quit? Man, I should have quit a long time ago. I mean, I was comfortable with it. I liked it. I must have liked it because I went drinking every day. But there was a dark side to it, and that was painful and that’s why I had to stop.”
Casablancas quickly points out that any epic drinking never went hand in hand with songwriting. “Even when I drank, I wasn’t drinking when I wrote songs. OK, I was a little towards the end, which is another reason why I had to stop. It all became a little too celebratory – ‘oh, I’ve written this cool line, I have to celebrate, where’s the whiskey?’”
Another change came when he moved from New York to Los Angeles. “Los Angeles is a better place to be sober in than New York or Dublin. Legally, anyway. Everyone drives in LA,” he quips. “But Los Angeles is way cheaper than New York when it comes to recording, rehearsing, finding a band and living.
The soup arrives (“Man, I didn’t think it would be this green”) and talk turns to the band that Casablancas does not mention once by name during the interview.
The Strokes have already announced a number of festival dates for 2010 and there is talk of plans for recording album number four. So is Casablancas looking forward to becoming a full-time Stroke again? He pauses, grimaces, sighs and has another spoon of soup before continuing.
“To be honest, no, but I’ll do it. It’s hard because I have to be careful about what I say about this. I do an interview here in Ireland and speak my mind and end up upsetting other people in the band and they’ll be busting my balls about what I said to you.”
That doesn’t sound like fun. “It sucks. The tension and the stress of that whole time with the last album was such a downer that I’m, yeah, guarded about what might happen next. I mean, we have never really worked together, at least not in the way I understand the term.”
It must be even more difficult when you remember the early days, when you and the other young guns were having a ball just making music together. “The music part is not hard, it’s all the crap that comes with it that I find hard. Working on music is when I’m happiest.
Casablanacas sits back in his chair and shrugs. “What are you going to do? This is what I do, that ain’t going to change. These solo shows I’m doing now are the first time I’ve been onstage since I took a break. I didn’t miss it or I didn’t really get excited about it, but I have found, as the tour went on, that I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever have. I think I wasn’t really enjoying it before.”
Yet there’s nothing else he could imagine himself doing – for now. “I feel I have unfinished business musically. If I ever got to the point where I’d done two of three records, I might go off and do something else. But that time hasn’t come yet.”
Phrazes of the Youngis out now on Rough Trade
The Strokes: where are they now?
ALBERT HAMMOND JR
The sharp-dressed guitarist has been the most prolific Stroke in the solo album stakes, releasing two well received solo albums (2006's Yours to Keep and 2008's ¿Cómo Te Llama?). He also produced New York band The Postelles.
The most sartorially elegant Stroke teamed up with designer Ilaria Ubinati for a collection of men's suits for Los Angeles store, Confederacy.
"I'm trying to do something that's classic – you put it on, you feel like a man, you look good," said Hammond of the collection.
FABRIZIO MORETTI
The Strokes drummer hooked up with Los Hermanos singer/guitarist (and Devendra Banhart collaborator) Rodrigo Amarante and multi-instrumentalist Binki Shapiro for the Little Joy side-project. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2008 and was full to the brim with sweet, sultry, carefree pop tunes.
Moretti has also played drums with Har Mar Superstar and Neon Neon.
NIKOLAI FRAITURE
Once it was obvious that The Strokes were on a hiatus, the band's bassist decided to "repurpose" teenage poems and rants for a new band called Nickel Eye.
With the help of Regina Spektor, South (an act once signed to Mo Wax) and Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fraiture recorded The Time of the Assassins, an album of downbeat, minor-key, one-dimensional songs.
On the evidence of Nickel Eye's flat and underwhelming tunes, however, Julian Casablancas' role as lead singer in The Strokes is safe.
NICK VALENSI
The only Stroke not to release a solo album to date, the guitarist has spent the time since First Impressions of Earth doing collaborative odds and ends with Devendra Banhart, Regina Spektor and bandmate Moretti's Little Joy.
