![]() ![]() “The Brooklyn scene was slightly different to the Manhattan scene and what was going on with DFA and James was a different thing altogether.” “It was called the New York scene but it had different pockets,” Southern argues. Today, several music films later – including the 2012 LCD Soundsystem film Shut Up And Play The Hits and the 2010 Blur rockumentary No Distance Left To Run – the pair have convened in an interview room behind a trick bookcase in a King’s Cross hotel to celebrate the culmination of years of work on the film, gathering archive video and interviews to brilliantly piece together – as the book does – a surprisingly disparate scene. ![]() “It definitely wasn’t called Indie Sleaze back then,” Southern says. Aesthetically it had ties to scenes that had emerged in New York previously, but then it also had a modernity to it as well.” Not that they could put a name to it. It was just like ‘something’s actually happening’… It was familiar and different. It was exciting for us in Liverpool at the time suddenly seeing people who looked like The Strokes. “It was all that Fred Durst, pop-punk, that was the landscape, something needed to happen. “The soundtrack to our corporate video hell was probably these bands,” Southern admits. Just out of university and making corporate films and music videos for local bands in Liverpool, they sensed the buzz beamed over from the Big Apple. In the early 2000s, when The Strokes and their NYC pals were busy rendering the nu-metal and acoustic rock behemoths of 1999 obsolete and inspiring a new generation of wired, hyperactive millennial alt-rock to rise up across the UK, Southern and Lovelace were half a world away, but listening closely. And so straight away it was like, that’s what the film should be.” “When we read the book, the first half was the page-turner,” says his directorial partner Will Lovelace, considering a film which covers the gradual build-up to the lightning bolt emergence of a fully formed NYC scene including The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture, The Moldy Peaches, The Walkmen, LCD Soundsystem and Interpol between 20. ![]() When you’re having the best time of your life, you probably don’t realise it at the time We were fascinated about the transformations all of the characters underwent and how ephemeral, how difficult to hold on to it is, and it’s tied to something more universal. The draw of this mythical city and the characters arriving there. Each of our stories is a kind of coming-of-age story. “The origin story, if you like, of the bands. “To us, the bit that was interesting was that initial explosion,” says Dylan Southern, co-director of the new documentary adaptation of Meet Me In The Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s acclaimed oral history of the early 2000s NYC scene. All NYC – and, for that matter, 21st century rock music – needed was the spark, the green light, the starting gun. On the Lower East Side, two studio dudes start throwing wild and diverse club nights, playing Daft Punk to the rock kids and soon to start their own post-punk dance label. “It felt like something was actually happening” – director Dylan Southern A Seoul-via-New Jersey art school kid is watching DIY acts dressed as rabbits and Robin Hoods at the anti-folk nights at SideWalk Café in the East Village, soaking in the community vibe and wondering about transforming her acoustic duo Unitard into a trashy art-punk spectacular. Tiny foreshocks seem to shake the clubs and cafés almost nightly – something’s coming, something big.Ī gang of Brat Pack punk lotharios in skinny jeans and ties, out to look like a classic band on the subway, emerge from producer Gordon Raphael’s underground Transporterraum studio with a rough-hewn demo EP they presciently title ‘The Modern Age’. It’s late 2000 and New York bristles, rattles its cage, a city on the brink. ![]()
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