falls down the familiar path of drug abuse. The Strokes, for instance, are perhaps the most quintessential, sexy rock n’ roll band of the bunch, with frontman Julian Casablancas racked by nerves and perfectionism as rhythm and lead guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. In many ways, the documentary presents us with archetypal band stories. Created entirely from audio interviews and raw, contemporaneous archive footage, the film tells the story of these bands, crucially in a nuanced way, and feels comprehensive, which, added together, gives an impression of the wider environment of the time – even if some may find this latter part frustratingly so.

Whilst a similar pattern links these bands and their assortment of characters together (chiefly, arriving in the Big Apple and wanting nothing more than to bang heads together over fuzzy guitars to assail boredom), they each added their own flavour to the musical output of the time – as well as a means of doing things.īased on Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history of the same, what directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (as well as editors Andrew Cross and Sam Rice-Edwards) have achieved with this documentary is three-fold. And, of course, the aforementioned LCD Soundsystem, and indeed The Rapture. It just so happened that at the turn of the millennium, under the watchful gaze of The Empire State Building, they followed each other hard and fast. In this way, too, it represents something else to be gleaned from Meet Me In The Bathroom whilst we’re all-too-willing to impose the idea of a ‘scene’ onto a particular time and place of music (like Britpop over here, for instance), in actual fact, this was more a melting point with one band simply carving a path for others to quickly follow. In fact, it went on to become the best-selling single of Brooklyn’s DFA Records, which James Murphy, the mastermind behind electronic-rock outfit LCD Soundsystem, co-founded.

Raucous, frenetic and periodically wild, the dance-punk tune was the lead single from the band’s second studio album, Echoes, and epitomised the unexpected success that could be wrought from this era’s heady experimentation. Telling the story of the 2000s New York music scene entirely from audio interviews and contemporaneous archive footage, it’s rough and raw like any good gig.įew tracks capture the spirit of the early noughties New York music scene – and the new documentary covering the period, Meet Me In The Bathroom – like The Raptures’ ‘House of Jealous Lovers’. Meet Me In The Bathroom, the documentary from Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace based on Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book, gets its UK cinema release this Friday.

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