It is 5 June 2001 and obscure New York band The Strokes are on their second visit to London plugging their second UK single , Hard To Explain. Dandyish but dishevelled, they prance and wobble like toddlers denied Ritalin. They hug, they harmonise on R Kelly's I Believe I Can Fly and show off their pubic hair to strangers. If you were to compare them to another band it would not be Talking Heads or The Velvet Underground, despite their influence on The Strokes' wiry, breakneck sound - it would be The Banana Splits.
Most hyper are guitarist Nick Valensi and drummer Fabrizio Moretti. Co-guitarist Albert Hammond Jr is friendly but hungover and bassist Nikolai Fraiture is practically silent. Singer Julian Casablancas - equal parts wary suspicion and big-eyed, flirtatious candour - is describing his bandmates in a handful of adjectives.
"For Albert the words would be risky... flamboyant, happy generous. Nikolai... is rugged... tough, sincere subtle, humble... er, beautiful?"
There is a debate as to whether the lantern-jawed bassist is "beautiful". He says not. The band decide - on a majority - that he is.
What about Moretti? "Direct, energetic..."
"Coked-up."
"I am not coked-up!"
"He's just naturally coked-up!"
"I'm not coked-up at all. Put that in your piece."
And Nick Valensi?
"Handsome, cocky..."
"...blatant."
"...and ruthless."
Valensi is unhappy ("You guys've made me out to be the evil guy!") so a pow-wow is called. Valensi is lightened up for public consumption. It's decided that he's "honest, handsome, cocky and courageous". Now it's Casablancas' turn. As one the band emit a low whoop and start rubbing their hands.
Valensi: "I'm giving Julian talented, moody, indecisive. Sometimes cocky and sometimes insecure, but it balances itself out perfectly."
Moretti: "What's the word that means you're self-taught, but it seems like you've been taught by the masters?"
Q: "Autodidactic?"
Moretti: "That's it!" "That, or fucked up in the head."
If they're lucky, declare The Strokes, they could eventually be as big as Guided By Voices.
Less than eight months later, and almost everything has changed. The Strokes have vomited before stepping onstage at the Reading Festival. On 19 January they played Saturday Night Live, building up reserves of stress that, Hammond claims, affected them for weeks. Hammond has been strip-searched by Canadian customs. ("They looked under my ball-bad - did they think they'd find reefers?"). Along the way, 1.6 million copies of their album Is This It have been sold - just under 4000,000 of those in Britain. If their astonishing tale began with hype, it has entered a second, infinitely more substantial chapter.
Today the band are billeted at London's Trafalgar Hotel - a step up from the Jury's Inns and Holiday Inn Express of their first UK tour and conveniently situated for lightning visits to "Micky D's" (ie McDonald's) and the National Gallery. Whereas last year it wasn't unusual to find a Stroke flaked out in a hotel room with a member of Mo Solid Gold, these days Nick Valensi shares his berth with ex Mrs Duran, Amanda De Cadenet.
"If I'd had a proper day off today," Valensi languidly relates, "I would have laid in bed and had sex with my girlfriend all day [belches]. I'm getting into the mode of going on the road and not being naughty. If you've got a girlfriend, you've got a girlfriend, y'know?"
If any Stroke has visibly changed since June 2001, it is Valensi. Formerly stylish but rumpled, today he looks like an ID magazine fashion plate, the hair artfully teased à la salon punk. Revealed by the high cuff of his paint-on trousers, he daringly sports Miss Kitty socks from Top Shop, Oxford Circus. He claims, believably, to have never made his own bed. Are The Strokes prepared to be rock stars?
"At first I didn't think we were going to be rock stars," says Fab Moretti, all teeth and curls. "We were just hungry for anyone to recognise us. Now I've started to realise that certain things are happening that are very rock star-ish: the way people are reacting to us and the offers that are made by girls... But I'm not really ready to be a rock star yet."
Moretti tours with a regulation two pairs of underpants, a practice pad for perfecting those paradiddles, (he and drum tech - and sometimes stand-in - Matt Romano have purchased identical Penguin Classics editions of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo) and a sketch book. Unlike Charlie Watts, he's a compulsive doodler. Unlike Chris Watts, he's very good. A pencil self-portrait with the artist's eyes eerily replaced with a silver cut from a Polaroid suggest that Moretti may be 1) quite talented and 2) somewhat freaked out.
Moretti nods in agreement. "There was a point recently when we looked at each other and went. What the fuck is happening to us?"
Suddenly, people around The Strokes are using the word "burnout". They utter it under their breath, like people say the word "cancer".
"We don't want to burn them out," says Steve Ralbovsky, their A&R man at US label RCA (like Oasis, The Strokes are an "indie" band with major muscle almost from the start). "We don't want to spend two years on the road with no new songs. That way you get an age between albums because of exhaustion, and then you're starting from scratch."