"Six months prior the naysayers were saying. This won't play next to Linkin Park and Puddle Of Mudd," recalls Ralbovsky, a veteran of previous New York hipster scenes, having formerly managed Tom Verlaine. "They perceived Last Nite to be this lo-fi thing and UK hype wasn't helping at all. But we got the key programmers out to the shows and they realised The Strokes were selling out 3800-seater shows in their territories without a stitch of radio play."
Late autumn, playlisting at stations including KROQ in LA and WBCN in Boston followed, as did enthusiastic listener feedback. Suddenly The Strokes were fixtures in the rock airplay Top 10.
"Modern rock radio is the holy grail because it has an active buying audience," Ralbovsky explains. "If you do well there, MTV's gonna be your friend, retail will be your friend. Suddenly we're seeing The White Stripes coming in on the back of what The Strokes are doing and The Hives maybe on the back of The White Stripes. It's the beginning of a whole new sound being embraced by a previously very rigid radio format."
A double-edged sword for The Strokes: more fans, but more touring. And although two non-Is This It tunes have emerged from rehearsal days and soundchecks (Meet Me In The Bathroom is switchblade pop based on a mad jazz chord chart in Mickey Baker's guitar instruction book; "The Newie" is artfully diverse with a ripping Casablancas chorus), they'd like to be writing more. Touring Japan in February saw the peak of their frazzlement. Fainting fans were dragged from their shows. The earthy, freewheeling Hammond went AWOL with an Australian stripper ("We hung out, she got me fucked up and we went to a Buddhist temple at 5:30am to watch the monks pray").
"There was definitely a time when I thought that this was the road to typical shit," sighs Julian Casablancas, "that we were just going to break up. We were so stressed about stupid shit all the time. Frustrated. And it was just so silly, cos we'd been given such a chance to do something good."
The squabbling Strokes put their own train back on the rails in the way they say they always do, with a series of no-holds-barred band meetings ("With me lately it's become almost like therapy," says Nick Valensi. "It's like I've started to think like a fuckin' psychologist. That made you happy? Why did that make you happy? You're upset? What about me made you upset? It's like marriage guidance".
The Strokes have had a lot to wrangle over of late. The day after the Brit Awards, where they nabbed a Best International Newcomer gong and performed a sluggish-by-their-standards Last Nite to 10 million TV viewers, sales of Is This It leapt by 158 per cent. It was an Oasis moment: subculture band goes overground in spectacular style. It seems the only five people in Britain right now who are unconvinced that this is a 24-carat Good Thing are The Strokes themselves.
"It was great for the record," says Julian Casablancas, reclining on Moretti's bed and - not for the first or last time today - dripping with sarcasm. "I feel I should have taped what everyone else said in their acceptance speeches and played it backed. 'This is a-may-zing!' Do they go to school to learn how to say that shit?"
Asked to play Last Nite when they'd have rather played "something more representative", The Strokes entertained the idea of making an outrageous, unannounced lunge into Meet Me In The Bathroom ("That would have been a declaration of our independence," reckons Moretti). Finally they capitulated. Even so, after all that worry, didn't they find The Brits terribly glamorous?
"I wouldn't say glamorous is the right word at all," says Valensi. "I felt very out of my person all evening, like I was high on a drug I'd never taken before and that I didn't really like."
But last year you said your goal was to be the first musician to play in front of a trillion people. "
That," says Valensi, summoning a silly journalist look, "was a joke."
There's something simultaneously miraculous and precarious about The Strokes. The beginning of it all is well enough documented. Albert Hammond Jr and Julian Casablancas briefly met at posh Swiss school, Institut La Rosey, in their teens. Returning to New York, "numb" and "unhappy" thanks to a bizarre scholastic regime that involved 6am runs around the school grounds in the snow, and enrolling in the slightly less posh Dwight High School on New York's Upper West Side, Casablancas encountered Moretti and Valensi, who were already playing music.
"I remember I was jamming with Nick in Vinnie's Studio, 1994," recalls Moretti. "We were, like, 13, and Julian came to visit. He just stayed and listened, didn't even play, but it was a rare old time. He was eating Tacos I believe."
Casablancas, yet to pick up an instrument, was entranced. A stint at music college at Five Towns in Long Island followed as did much wrestling with guitars and singing along to Pearl Jam records. Bassist Fraiture, a bass player who'd known Casablancas since they were six, was added to the mix. Meanwhile, Casablancas received a Velvet Underground CD for Christmas ("Their music is perfect"_ and an early template was established.
Then Hammond - following a period spent in Los Angeles with his '70s songwriter father - swept back into their lives encumbered with records by Tom Petty, The Cars and The Modern Lovers. According to Moretti it was Hammond who "taught us how to dress. He already had this whole style thing going down. He had that aura, that he's ready to be looked at and listened to."
"When I first came to New York," marvels Hammond, resplendent in red and black winklepickers, "the way things happened to me, it was like there was someone... doing it. I moved into my apartment, it was directly across the street from where Julian worked. Like, what are the odds? I could literally see him from my window."
Are The Strokes blessed?
"We're blessed in that the five of us look like we fit each other. We look like a band of five guys who are in a band. We're a band! A band means... it doesn't mean Johnny Whatever & The Thumpets. You know when you get those pictures and there's a guy all blurry in the background, you're not sure what he does, maybe he plays the guitar or something? The Strokes ain't like that. That's how we're blessed, we're blessed that we met each other."
Casablancas's songs were coming, but before their celebrated three-track demo (The Modern Age, Barely Legal, Last Nite: the first UK EP) could make it's way to Rough Trade, sparking all the subsequent madness, The Strokes had another obstacle to overcome: New York. The music scene, notoriously bitchy and inward-looking, hadn't produced a breakout band since the late '70s, and the club scene, battered by Rudy Guiliani as a by-product of his crusade against drugs and underage drinking, has struggled rather than soared. The last "next big thing" from New York, glam-rockers D Generation, fizzled after two mid-'90s albums and The Spiral on Houston - scene of The Strokes' first show on 14 September 1999 - is already defunct. Elsewhere in New York, hip hop rules.