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The Walkmen play King Tut’s, Glasgow, on Friday, then tour to Birmingham, Brighton, Nottingham, Manchester, London and Glastonbury ( ). None of us says, ‘We’re going to be terrible tonight,’ and means it.”They’re signed to Warners now, and “The Rat” is doing well for them. “It kind of dragged on…”They cut their losses and were joined in 2000 by Leithauser and bassist Peter Bauer. Having arguably laid the ground for The Strokes, The Walkmen became caught in The Strokes’ slipstream. “It’s something we can deal with,” Martin says, “but it makes it hard to be your own entity.”Barrick’s early-U2-ish drumming aside, they don’t quite fit the oft-suggested comparisons with Eighties rockers such as U2, The Pixies and The Cure “We’re more Sixties rock,” says Leithauser. “We listen to it constantly and it’s what we’re always talking about. At every band practice we’re trying to rip off Bob Dylan or Velvet Underground or something like that.”So how did so young a band (all in their mid-twenties) became so downbeat and downright spiky? “It’s a safety thing,” says Bauer, “so we don’t get our hopes up And kind of a humour thing I mean, we’re always optimistic before we go on stage.

And they looked the part, with their winkle-pickers, sharp shirts, and serious cheek bones But things went awry. Having caused a buzz with their 1997 mini-album, Tremble Under Boom Lights, they were snapped up by DreamWorks. By the time of their debut album proper, though, Wolf Songs for Lambs, things had started to sour. The album proved a tough sell, and more ambiguous “personal problems” started to rear their heads.

As one commentator put it, JF*E’s lifespan was nasty, brutish and short “That’s about right, but it wasn’t that short,” says Martin. Are The Walkmen really as antagonistic as it suggests? “Oh, definitely,” says Maroon, grinning: “You got a problem with that?”
Three fifths of the band – Maroon, Barrick and the organist Walter Martin – were, from 1995 to 1998, in the most talked-about band in New York before The Strokes: in fact, Jonathan Fire*Eater were The Strokes that blew it.The five-piece came from Washington DC, but there was a definite New York flavour to their well-tailored rock’n'roll clatter. It’s a tasty number, with Paul Maroon’s panicky guitar and Matt Barrick’s disgruntled drumming propelling Hamilton Leithauser’s bellowing vocals to stormy effect. MTV viewers will surely be familiar with “The Rat”, the tempestuous single from The Walkmen’s Bows + Arrows album. Interest is rising with more than 60,000 expected to be sold in the UK this year compared with 50,000 only two years ago.Barrie Cadogan, of the Vintage and Rare Guitars shop in London which has just sold a good condition 1956 model for £18,500, said the point of the Strat was that it had proved itself over many years.Although in the 60s it lost some ground to the Jazzmaster and the Jaguar, the arrival of Jimi Hendrix, and later Eric Clapton, got sales soaring again.”Guitars do come and go out of fashion, but it’s been popular throughout the decades,” Mr Cadogan said.”It’s very well-designed and it has a very versatile range of sounds Yet Leo Fender couldn’t actually play He relied on feedback from musicians That’s what made his guitars so different.”. It’s such a warm sound, something you don’t get with a cold instrument like the piano or keyboards.”Like Manzanera, she admitted drooling when she visits guitar shops although she has no particular guitar heroes – “apart from people like Jimi Hendrix that everybody looks up to whether you’re a guitarist or not”.The Fender Stratocaster developed out of work that Leo Fender began in his radio shop in California in the 1940s, making custom guitars and amplifiers.