"It's like when you're sculpting something," says Moretti - a one-time sculpture major and a fan of sophisticated metaphor. "When you have a piece of marble and you fuck it up in any way, you'll lose a thumb, or at least the chance of refining the sculpture later on. You'll fuck shit up if you're not meticulous, but that's the way it is with all things in this life. People just don't recognise it." Two days after our meeting, The Strokes are onstage in Birmingham, having sold out the 2500-capacity Academy. Last Nite is locked on and The Strokes are brutally transcendent. In one year they've gone from the Camden Monarch to the Brits, and what was once an intense, promising, but avowedly mall-club live act is now a powerful, stage-filling rock band with no earthly impediments between them and a headline slot at, ooh say, Reading Festival. It's as simple as this: even if it's just in the way that they play these 14 songs, The Strokes are getting better all the time. "Do you want to know why they'll make it?" asks Steve Ralbovsky. "It may sound boring but in 20 years in the music business I've never met another band who rehearse on their day off..." And you never heard anybody say that about The Banana Splits.
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