Fabrizio Moretti: A Fine Modern Gentleman, With No Regard For The Smoking Ban
“We can’t smoke in there?”, asks Fabrizio Moretti, drummer of some band called the Strokes, understanding but a little flabbergasted as we make our way outside. In person, the 28-year-old is over-whelmingly polite. All holding doors and helping with jackets, apologetic as he proffers me a cigarette. “I hear they’re bad for you”, he drawls, careful to blow any potential cancer away from us both as he explains the purpose behind his new venture, Little Joy.“The sound is as close to the sound of something done as honestly as possible, as I could possibly get to. There was no project. No objective. Just a bunch of friends getting together and doing it for the sake of doing it.”
Named after an LA wateringhole, Little Joy are purveyors of simple, perky pop songs with minimal arrangements, and trouble-free vocal melodies. There is no hint of his signature drumbeat, Moretti instead providing guitar and backing vocals, playing second fiddle, as it were, to lead vocalist Rodrigo Amarante, formerly of Brazilian band Los Hermanos, and multi-instrumentalist Binki Shapiro. With influences like Sam Cooke, Nina Simone and the Fleetwoods, Little Joy’s sunny retro feel is no accident. Critical of his current hometown in its modern form, Moretti notes, “The glory of Los Angeles is in its heyday, which has long passed- when you’re driving around pretending to be from another time, like in a novel, with the palm trees going by, and you have to put on the Beach Boys to fill in that imagination.” When asked to opine on critics comparison of Shapiro to the Nico of the group, Moretti disagrees. “She’s more like Moe Tucker. Nico was an outsider in the band, whereas Binki is an inherent part.” Indeed, Shapiro, Moretti’s current ladyfriend, has a style more akin to that of Tucker. “Maureen had this sweet, genuine voice that told a story, and wasn’t too concerned with melody and perfection.”
Their self-titled debut, released through Rough Trade last year, garnered almost unanimously favourable reviews. Produced by Noah Georgeson, the man behind Joanna Newsome’s Milk-Eyed Mender and whom Amarante met during his own recording sessions with Devendra Banhart, the band felt comfortable recording under this watchful eye. “He’s close enough as a friend that he doesn’t mind telling us what he thinks. He hears a song and thinks about what it reminds him of, perhaps very obscurely, and then listens to that song or reads that passage, and figures out how to translate it”, Moretti explains.
Seeming increasingly more like a band in the true sense than a side-project, with all of Moretti’s heart in it, the drummer is grateful of the break from the more rigid assigned-instrument policy he is used to. “The biggest example of that is in the instrumentation of this record", he says."In the Strokes, we have to stick to drums, bass, two guitars and vocals. We really deviated from that kind of recipe here.” Indeed, the Italian-Brazilian is careful not to be typecast as a one-dimensional musician. “If you think you’re only listening to the drums or focusing on only one instrument in a song, you’re not going to get it. You’re cutting yourself short”, he says. “If you’re just going to fill around, attack cymbals and do whatever the fuck you want, you’re not promoting the song. You’re not understanding the relationship between the beat, and whatever the instruments are doing.”
However, Moretti is certainly not reveling in his new-found semi-frontman status. “We used to divvy up all the interviews in the Strokes, particularly because Julian didn’t like doing interviews”, he notes. “So, as much as it gets pretty redundant talking about yourself, day in, day out- and I find myself very uninteresting- I just do it because I have to.”
As far as the Strokes go, Moretti is reserved, barely discussing his infamous bandmates, or the black hole of Calcutta they seem to have descended into since 2006’s First Impressions of Earth. Although confirming they are to reconvene in February, Moretti makes no assertion on the possibility of a new album. The success of this musical venture, and that of longterm-friend Albert Hammond Jr, has heartened him greatly. “I think that it shows that the Strokes weren’t just a fluke. It wasn’t just some romantic moment in time; a flash in the pan. We’re all as dedicated as each other to what we know how to do best.”
As for Little Joy- and Megapuss, Moretti’s project with Devendra Banhart- how will one man have time for all this, if the Strokes juggernaut is once more in motion? “I don’t know yet”, Moretti concedes, but admits that he doesn’t want to stop this current foray. “We’ve built something, whether it's good or bad. Maybe they can continue without me for a little while.”
Whichever path Moretti pursues for the moment, it seems to his fans at least, he can do very little wrong. Indeed, when the Stroke lights up one last cigarette during the encore of tonight’s gig and casually hands it to an audience member, his nonchalantly hip reputation is cemented. I doubt anybody would argue with that- other than the authorities, perhaps.