Step Up Winnipeg
New York band says Toronto and Montreal set the standard for its Canadian tour
John Kendle

Albert Hammond Jr. sounds more happy than a man should when he’s calling from Ottawa.

Three days and two shows into The Strokes’ first cross-country tour, the rhythm guitarist is riding a high.

“Toronto was great, and Montreal was really fucking great, so the rest of the country has a lot to live up to,” the 27-year-old says. “Our favourite thing to do is going to new places to play. We just did a tour of U.S. cities we’ve never been to. We’re going to Russia. We’re going to play in Asia.

“We were in South America when it was summer there, and the crowds were amazing. We had 20,000 people humming guitar parts.”

Such is life in The Strokes in 2006.

The ‘it’ band of 2001-2002 has released two albums since Is This It took the music world by storm — 2003’s Room on Fire and this year’s First Impressions of Earth. Enough time has elapsed that the band has been through the cycle of hype, overhype and resultant backlash. Now Hammond and his bandmates — singer Julian Casablancas, 27; bassist Nikolai Fraiture, 27; drummer Fab Moretti, 25; and guitarist Nick Valensi, 25 — can settle down to the business of making rock ’n’ roll, instead of being stuck with the burden of having to save it.

“The hype is something that the media controls, not the band,” Hammond says. “We are constantly trying to beat ourselves — not in that sense — by working hard to try to create something new and different every time.

“When you’re in a band and you’re friends, there is a certain unity, but there are also some very vital differences between you, and it’s these things that make you what you are.

“We all have strong egos and strong personalities, and we also help each other out with what each other likes.”

While Casablancas is the principal songwriter in the quintet, Hammond describes the group’s song-shaping process as communal.

“We all add and arrange parts and do what we do,” he says. “We can change a song’s form four or five times over.”

He also says that working with David Kahne helped give the new recording its creative momentum. Kahne came in and finished off First Impressions… after the group realized that working with Gordon Raphael, who had helmed the first two records, wasn’t going to cut it.

“The album really got going after about the third song, when (Kahne) came in and took over. Then we went upstate to Allaire Studios and recorded overdubs and some vocals, and it really came together then,” Hammond says.

With three albums now under their belts, The Strokes find themselves in the happy situation of having more songs than time in which to play them. After five months on the road, Hammond says the playlist has evolved to 22 to 24 songs.

“Basically we have 18, and then there are some songs that rotate in and out of the other four slots depending on how we’re feeling,” he says.

“Some songs go well. Some go better than others, and then, when you start touring, you find that one or two sort of creep up on you.

“So the show’s about an hour-20, hour-and-a-half, depending on whether we do four songs in the encore or three, or how much Julian talks. It’s about the running time of a short romantic comedy.

“But maybe with more substance.”