Girls lie too much. Boys act too tough. Enough is enough

The Strokes - 'Take It Or Leave It' (Is This It - 2001)

I distinctly remember when I started to get excited about The Strokes’ debut album, Is This It. I was on holiday in Florida with my parents, and I recall sitting in the rental car on a hot day when the seat-belt tongue would be considered a weapon. This was August 2001, and I had recorded a mix of songs onto a MiniDisc to listen to on holiday, and one of the sources was NME Presents The Soundtrack To The Summer from June 2001. From this compilation, an obsession with ‘Hard To Explain’, by this time a top 20 single in the UK, began. I also managed to get hold of The Modern Age EP in time to burn that on the MiniDisc¹. I remember listening to all those tracks over and over and being very excited about the whole record.

I’d got into a decent amount of post-punk and other influences in 2000 as I explored more of the indie rock canon such as Television², The Velvet Underground and other New York CBGBs stalwarts. The idea of a fantastic bunch of sharp-dressing dudes from New York reflecting those influences back to me in real time was exciting as I was closer to the dork end of that continuum. The same was already happening with The White Stripes³, whose breakthrough White Blood Cells I’d managed to secure an import copy of.

The other thing that struck me about The Strokes in 2001 is how different they were from what was going on in music when they arrived. In the six or seven years that followed, you couldn’t move for bands with angular riffs, triangle cheekbones from New York, and seemingly every corner of The British Isles. As mentioned when we wrote about Kid A, bands coming through on the conveyor belt of the music press and dubbed by NME as the “New Acoustic Movement” in the previous three or so years included Travis, Coldplay, Muse and Doves. On top of that, you also had Elbow, Turin Breaks, Starsailor, Badly Drawn Boy, David Gray and Dido drawing water from the same well⁴.

Is This It is one of those albums, like Wet Leg’s debut, that we were already familiar with half of it before it was released. It also features a re-recording of ‘The Modern Age’, which I still complain about in the same way people older than I do about the damp production on the first album by The Smiths. The EP version, with the volcanic solo, is the definitive version in my house. Regarding the final track, ‘Take It Or Leave It,’ we don’t have an older version to compare or moan about twenty years later.

What precedes it is barely half an hour of galvanised indie rock for the new Millennium; the songs are tight and don’t out-stay their welcome⁵. The song is a, and I’m sorry for the second reference to them in as many paragraphs, much like ‘Girl Afraid’ by The Smiths, another song that deals with the frustration of gender relationships. That one is typical Morrissey; it is about an inability to communicate what you want to someone else. ‘Take It Or Leave It’ is almost a mirror reflection in that it is very clear about wants and desires, and the surprise isn’t that there is the potential for reciprocation but that there isn’t.

It commands a swagger that comes with the territory; the band called their album Is This It and finished it was a song called ‘Take It Or Leave It’ that peacocks around like Mick Jagger, pulses with kinetic energy, and leaves irritated and bitter. The chorus is meant to portray someone who doesn’t give a f**k what you think anyway, but there’s too much bite and venom in the snarled chorus actually to believe that.

Whether you liked them or not, whether you liked what came in their wake or not, it is hard not to see The Strokes as a vital reboot for the music industry in the UK. There’s a lineage that follows from them that includes The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, The Arctic Monkeys and pretty much everything else on the Future’s Burning compilation except Goldie Lookin’ Chain. Given I was a couple of months away from eighteen myself, it acts as a personal line between where I was catching up on 40 years of popular music and when I started listening to what was going to happen next as it happened.

Next week: Led Zeppelin and the first appearance by a certain quartet from Liverpool.

1. I can’t remember what else was on the MiniDisc now; I think I ended up recording over it before my first MP3 player arrived in 2004, a never bettered Creative Zen.

2. The band claims not to have heard of Television when releasing their first record. That gets a chinny reckon from me.

3. We haven’t got round to White Blood Cells yet, but we did drop in on Elephant fairly early on.

4. Tom Clayton’s book When Quiet Was the New Loud: Celebrating the Acoustic Airwaves 1998-2003 is a welcome history of a sound that might be due for a reappraisal.

5. I didn’t dislike their 2020 return, The New Abnormal, but why did they think including five songs that clocked over five minutes was what people wanted from them? I’ll never know.