‘Are you guys aware of the craziness you’ve created here?” a British journalist asked a dazed-looking Julian Casablancas in 2001. The exchange is included in the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom. The only words the Strokes frontman could muster were: “It’s crazy and bizarre.” When Yeah Yeah Yeahs landed on UK soil a year later, it was more of the same. “I was not prepared for it at all,” says Karen O, the lead singer, in the film. “We were drunk on the ravenous fanaticism.”
Meet Me in the Bathroom is based on Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book of the same name, which is subtitled Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, but ends up being as much about the UK. New York birthed these bands, but British media, fans and record labels lapped them up with such relish that they became stars here first. Summing up the book, Rolling Stone US concluded: “The UK might have done more for New York bands than New York did.”
