Julian Casablancas: ruling The Strokes with an 'iron-fist' led to 'issues'

Julian Casablancas has said that guiding The Strokes with an "iron-fist" led to problems within the band.

Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, The Voidz frontman discussed his relationship with The Strokes candidly. He said that for Comedown Machine he had to relinquish his control in order to let the tensions within the band play out.

"I maybe wasn't kind of as iron-fisty as I had been in the past, but on purpose, because that created all these issues," he said. "I think it's important for someone to – whether or not I think it's better – for someone to have their say. I'm still writing a lot of parts and songs and we're playing together, so it's not like we're mailing each other songs and that we never see each other."

"The funny thing about 'Angles' is there was all that weird talk about recording it separately. We just had dinner in LA and we were all talking about it. And they forget that we sat in a room in a studio and were writing songs forever."

"That's where we did the whole record. All the parts, the songs, in a room, together. We recorded them with two mics, and that was the foundation, and then we were going to go track the official recording."

"That's when they went and recorded stuff, and when the 'Julian wasn't there' BS or whatever [started]. That was just because logistically, we'd never done a record like that."