Before this I thought: ‘I’m going to get lost, do drugs, die’
The Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr talks to Will Hodgkinson about his OCD, kicking heroin and a new, healthier life – married with a solo career.
As you may expect from the most stylish member of The Strokes, Albert Hammond Jr arrives at our interview in the bar of a Manchester hotel looking very sharp indeed. His rosered suit is accessorised by a tie pin on a white shirt. This turns out to be mere daywear: that evening he will change into a rock’n’roll-friendly outfit of white jeans and black leather jacket to perform songs from his New Wave-tinged solo album, Francis Trouble, which explores, among other things, the guitarist’s recent discovery that he had a stillborn twin. You might assume that he just wants to look good. As it turns out, there are more complex reasons for his dapper leanings.
“I’m a very neat person,” says Hammond, who does resemble the kind of man who would be thrown into crisis by a malfunctioning trouser press. “I started dressing differently as a way of attracting the people I wanted to meet, but at the same time my neatness is a form of OCD. I’m learning to deal with it. I’m like this because my mind talks too much and I don’t know how to stop it. The first time I took heroin, I could focus. I was self-medicating my inner voice.”
On the face of it, Albert Hammond Jr appears to have led a gilded existence. The son of the Gibraltar songwriter of the same name whose soft rock standards The Air That I Breathe and When I Need
You have soundtracked a million slow dances at weddings, Hammond Jr went to private schools in Switzerland and Los Angeles before hitting Manhattan at 18 armed with his dad’s credit card. There he met a former school friend, Julian Casablancas, and formed The Strokes. Within two years this gang of raffish, privileged dudes had made one of the most perfectly realised debut albums to date. Released in the wake of 9/11, Is This It marked The Strokes out as the last great New York band before the cultural baton was handed to hip-hop, pop and R&B.
Out of all The Strokes, Hammond seemed like the one you would most like to hang out with in a Lower East Side dive bar. Casablancas, the singer, was elusive, and the guitarist Nick Valensi a little too pleased with his model looks, but you could imagine having fun with Hammond. You certainly wouldn’t have expected him to be the one that fell into a vortex of drug misery.
“That’s because I always wanted to be in The Beatles,” says Hammond of his happy-go-lucky demeanour. “I grew up watching films of The Beatles clowning around. Then The Strokes would go and do an interview and the other guys would be acting all moody and serious, and I would be thinking, ‘If you’re not going to have fun now, when will you?’ It doesn’t matter what moment you’re in if you can’t enjoy the moment.”
In the early days at least, being a Stroke was fun. As documented in Lizzy Goodman’s hilariously gossipy oral history of the Noughties music scene,
Meet Me in the Bathroom, The Strokes exuded an air of impermeable cool, prowling the city’s bars and clubs, picking up women, playing increasingly buzzy shows and somehow finding the time to write a handful of garage rock classics. Then Is This It came out and turned them into a phenomenon.
“It was too much to adapt to,” Hammond says. “We were kids, building a spaceship in our backyard. All of a sudden there are jets on that spaceship and it is taking us to the Moon and we’re going, ‘No! Wait! We haven’t finished building it yet!’ We were lost in space.”
Initially Hammond was getting drunk and smoking joints after gigs, as young men in happening rock bands have always done, but after a tour of Japan in 2007 he crossed the line into heroin. Casablancas has blamed the songwriter and fellow former narcotics enthusiast Ryan Adams for leading his friend down a dark road, which Adams denies, but Hammond takes full responsibility for his mistakes.
“People love drugs because real life is, like, ‘This sucks, that’s not working.’ And going to the grocery store is boring,” he says. “Drugs bring a sense of wonderment to everything. Then you get addicted, and by the time you are injecting, you have to ask why you are physically mutilating yourself. There must be something about yourself that you hate. Honestly, before this record my attitude was, ‘I’m going to get lost, do drugs and die.’“
Hammond’s addiction reached a height during the recording of the Strokes’ 2009 album Angles, when his mother and the other band members forced him into rehab.
Now clean, and living with his Polish wife, Justyna Sroka, in upstate New York, he says that making
Francis Trouble has forced him to address a few uncomfortable truths. Alongside taking stock of what being the surviving twin means, the album looks at politicians’ shaky notions of truth (Far Away Truth) and the damage that Hammond’s flirtatious tendencies have caused to past relationships (Rocky’s Late Night).
With shades of the literate, economical style of Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman, the songwriting is crafted throughout. It makes you wonder: did he catch some tips from his dad?
“He’s one of those people who is good at what they do, but don’t know how to teach it,” Hammond says of his paternal namesake. “When I was young he was just my dad and I didn’t think about what he did for a job, especially as I wanted to be a scientist. When I was older I kept what he did separate, perhaps out of competition. I remember once when I was 16 going to this garage studio to record my song, and he and his friend took over and completely ruined my music. After that I was, like, ‘F... this.’ Mum was the supportive one. My dad just said, ‘Make sure you have a back-up plan.’“
Hammond never did find that back-up plan. As he runs through key musical moments in his life, from discovering the Ohio indie band Guided by Voices at 16 and realising that he could do something similar to getting stoned and lying on the floor of his New York apartment with two speakers by his ears while losing himself in the self-titled 1995 album by Elliott Smith, he developed a love affair with music first and tried to work out his place in it afterwards. Francis Trouble is Hammond’s fourth solo album – his brightest and most accessible work yet – but it is also a fresh start.
“That Elliott Smith record contained everything I wanted to be in,” he says. “Music opened me, and connected me, and completely changed the way I looked at the world. Songs I loved made me walk different, talk different, think different. I wanted to be a part of it, but then success gave me a role [as guitarist of The Strokes] that I couldn’t escape. To really do something good as a solo artist you have to make mistakes, and not like who you are, and take risks. It took me until almost 38 to realise that.”
As he gets up to leave, Hammond cracks a smile. “What can I say? I’m a late bloomer.”