New York, a city responsible for bands such as The Velvet Underground, Blondie and Ramones, was a cultural wasteland by the late 90s and the wider music scene was pumping out shlock like Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank.

As Adam Green says in the opening scenes of Meet Me In The Bathroom, a documentary based on Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of nYc’s musical rebirth, “Maybe New York wasn’t the kind of city anymore that produces iconic bands”.

Then came The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem and many more over the next ten years, turning the Lower East Side and Brooklyn into hipster havens.

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I remember the excitement when The Strokes, a gang of good-looking skinny boys with filthy hair and a filthier attitude, broke, in part thanks to the British music press, as I hustled for a copy of their Rough Trade debut EP Modern Age in early 2001.

The documentary, which is directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, highlights this explosion with a mix of incredible footage, including both rare live archive and general silliness, and interviews with many of the protagonists.

There’s the early performances by The Strokes at the Mercury Lounge, whose booker Ryan Gentles became their manager and Yeah Yeah Yeahs in Brooklyn with fellow scenesters Liars and Oneida as well as incredible early footage of frontwoman Karen O performing solo at the Sidewalk Cafe.

It also features LCD Soundsystem founder James Murphy’s origin story and Interpol’s early challenges including playing a nu-metal festival in the UK.

It makes you want to go back to dive bars like the Mars Bar and creep across Avenue A in battered Converse.

The film premiered last night at the Fonda Theater in LA and was followed by a rare live performance by the Moldy Peaches as well as a Q&A with the people behind it.

Goodman, who published her 650 page book in 2017, said that when she was writing the book – Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011, having a visual representation of this world was not “tenable”.

“There were 200 interviews in the book,” she said. “When [Dylan and Will] entered the picture and were psyched to make a documentary, the most fun part for me by far was seeing all of the footage come in and have no idea it existed and getting to have that experience of seeing it for the first time and be a fan again.”

Lovelace admitted that when they started making the film a few years ago, they had no idea what footage existed and one of their biggest challenges was tracking it down.

Southern added that Covid hit just as they were starting, which turned out to be a boon.

“We did a lot of detective work, we could be employed by Bellingcat, we went on old forums of the early days of the internet and found people. The good thing about Covid was everyone was bored so they wanted a project. We found people who were willing to go into the attic. We found people that weren’t people fans of the scene and shot every gig,” he added.

Although the filmmakers did some new interviews with people who were there, all of it exists behind footage from the time, so it doesn’t take you out of the moment.  

“Our whole ethos was let’s construct this film from things that happened at the time,” said Southern.

But turning a 650 page book into a feature documentary had its own challenges. The origin stories of the bar owners, promoters and scene kids that helped birth these bands would have been near impossible to tell in a fascinating form and many of the bands on the edges had to be left out.

Some of the darker elements of the scene, from Albert Hammond Jr’s heroin use, helped, it seemed, in part by his friendship with Ryan Adams, the cost of fame as highlighted by a weird MTV takeover featuring Courtney Love, and some incredibly raw footage of 9/11, which had a huge impact on the city and the scene (as well as The Strokes’ album tracklist).

“The biggest challenge was Lizzy’s book covered ten years or more, and the audiobook takes 22 hours to listen to. We had one and a half hours so we had to make some choices,” said Southern.

Lovelace added that they wanted to concentrate on the early years of the scene, eschewing some of the more popular bands that broke out of the world such as Vampire Weekend, with only a handful of scenes with the likes of TV on the Radio and ignoring the likes of Jonathan Fire*Eater, who were arguably the biggest influence on The Strokes, and their spin-off band The Walkmen, who created The Rat, possibly one of the catchiest songs to emerge from the island.

“We decided that we wanted to concentrate on these first few years, that felt like the period we should concentrate on. There was probably more footage from later on in the book, be we wanted to concentrate on the first three or four years,” he said.

Meet Me In The Bathroom is produced by XTR, Vice Studio and Pulse Films. It is being distributed by Utopia, which has a number of theatrical screenings, before it will air on Showtime in the U.S. It was produced by Vivenne Perry, Sam Bridger, Marisa Clifford, Thomas Benski, Danny Gabai, Suroosh Alvi, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace and exec produced by Haley Pappas, Matt Ippolito, Andrew Freston, Natalie Farrey, Bryn Mooser, Tim O’Shea, Isabel Davis, Brian Levy, Jaime Neely and Lizzy Goodman.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UgHN-YE7IPI%3Ffeature%3Doembed

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