Being cool in your early twenties is a wonderful thing. Just ask the Strokes. Five good-looking New Yorkers from wealthy backgrounds with an apparent ability to look impossibly stylish in whatever clothes were lying on the floor next to their beds, the band arrived in 2001 with a debut album, Is This It, that was so fresh, so vital, that it made clever but primitive, simple yet sophisticated Lou Reed-style rock’n’roll relevant all over again. They were the gang everybody wanted to join, sleep with or at least buy a round of drinks for.
Being cool in your thirties isn’t quite so impressive, however, particularly if it isn’t backed up by anything meaningful, and for the past decade it has seemed as though the