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(Credits: Far Out \/ Roger Woolman)<\/p>\n
Mon 1 September 2025 0:00, UK <\/p>\n
\u201cI just wanted to be one of The Strokes<\/a>\u201d, Alex Turner sings at the outset of one of the best songs, \u2018Star Treatment\u2019, from their very best album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. <\/p>\n And let\u2019s be honest, who hasn\u2019t felt that way before? Who wouldn\u2019t have wanted to have been one of The Strokes? Who wouldn\u2019t want to be in the coolest band of the century and have a real name like Julian Casablancas, Fabrizio Moretti or Nick Valensi?\u00a0By the turn of the century, rock music was, for all intents and purposes, both creatively and spiritually dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n It had become a slog to listen to the latest releases in guitar music over the last few decades, from the ridiculousness of bands like Kiss and Van Halen or Guns N\u2019 Roses through to the heavy sludge and depressing droning of groups like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, the sleepy, boring pretension of bands like Radiohead and Muse or else in the stodgy drivel of Oasis<\/a>, Blur and the rest of the Britpop bunch (not you, though, Pulp!). <\/p>\n Barely anyone was making anything fresh or exciting, anything that had that much to say or that had much artistic value or anything that really was even worth listening to any more. Not the Red Hot Chili Peppers, not Limp Bizkit and certainly not the Foo Fighters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Long gone were the days of raw and pure invention from killer singers like Little Richard, Lloyd Price or Elvis Presley; long gone was the mercurial talent of anyone even close to Michael Bloomfield or the careless cool of a Keith Richards character. There were no new Link Wray\u2019s coming up, no new Johnny Thunder\u2019s or Sly Stone\u2019s shaking up the scene. No one was reaching the heights of Marquee Moon in the 1990s, that\u2019s for sure, but what\u2019s worse is that it doesn\u2019t even sound like many were reaching for those heights, either. This is not to write off the astonishing or groundbreaking music being written and released by someone like Fiona Apple or even Wilco and other groups like them, or the established greats like Dylan and Waits who put out monumental albums towards the end of the decade, but in terms of out and out rock and roll from new and exciting talent, the party was over. <\/p>\n Until it wasn\u2019t. The Strokes arrived on the scene and sent a jolt of electricity through the corpse of rock and roll, shocking it back to life and creating a thousand Frankensteins in the form of groups like the Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, Kings of Leon, The Killers, The Kooks and countless other indie artists in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n