Nikolai Fraiture

Wed 4th Mar, 2009 in Features

As an interviewer, you have to work around a minimal amount of time with a worn-out rock star, usually giving stock answers he’s given thousands of times before to questions you’ve researched endlessly for. Before you can ever get to ask anything decent from your notepad, the conference call assistant (usually someone whose level of English is intermediate, at best) is telling you that you have a minute left. Nevertheless, you approach every interview with the best intentions.

However, some musicians simply boggle the mind. In the case of Nikolai Fraiture, renowned bassist of The Strokes and accomplished solo artist with his project Nickel Eye, it’s his sheer inability to give a straight answer. Or one that made sense, rather. He voice slurred, croaky and continuously “umm’ing and ahh’ing” before his answers, you automatically feel like you’re talking to Fraiture at a bad time.

We start the interview well enough though, Nikolai in genuinely good spirits. Yet it doesn’t take long for him to start offering curious insight as to why he started the production of his folk-rock project. As he says, Nickel Eye was not set out as a creative outlet like John Frusciante or fellow band member Albert Hammond Jr. before him, but just to keep busy. “I was in London and, uhh, was hanging out with these musicians in a studio and I had these songs and, y’know, we just went to this studio and they helped me play on it. It was never a huge big thing. It just kinda came about very naturally from time off.

“The creative freedom, it wasn’t like it as given to me, I just had the time off. That was the freedom, in itself. To explore whatever I wanted and eventually somebody wanted to pick it up and wanted to release it.”

And while he expands on how Nickel Eye is more or less a pastime for him, he also begins to talk of doing something with his spare time that remains unclear. “It’s just a kind of a filler of time. Off-again, on-again. Any time off that I have, I just, y’know, play music. I play music every day so any time off I have I have to be doing something.”

It’s at this point that I begin to wonder what exactly Nikolai had before the interview. Adamant on getting some sort of decent response about his latest project, however, I ask about his songwriting influences. I’m in luck. “Initially, it was just travelling. I guess I could say travelling was the initial. Like, when I was young I went travelling in the US and I think that was the impetus to wanting to write about these kinds of things that I wrote about and wanting to write about what is on the album.”

Probably to Nikolai’s relief, I move to a topic that falls deep into his comfort zone: The Strokes. He talks at ease about his time with the five-piece, reflective of the impact it has had on him as a person. “Being in a band like that makes you want to strive to progress continually and just get better. Y’know, and explore different things musically and stuff and as a person. Y’know, I’ve seen a lot more than I think I would have had it not happened.”

That said, one particular quality Nikolai has developed is the complete nonchalance to what the music press says. Aside from being oblivious to the cultural change he created with the Strokes’ initial rise, he also shows little attention to the contemporary reviewer. “To me it’s kind of like, I don’t really care. I think that they don’t really think about what they’re listening to or writing about. I read other reviews of artist that I think are great and get a bad review. And vice-versa for artists that I think are terrible and then they get a great review. I feel, also, that recently with the advent of the internet and stuff like that, that critics are kind of obsolete, because people can just listen to the music and make up their own minds.”

In a conversation full of ambiguity and strange moments, there’s one clear point that Fraiture leaves us with: he’s grateful for the fame he has. Aside from promising that if the Australian public “want me to come, I will,” Nikolai doesn’t worry about the fans he’s gained and lost over time. “I don’t how they feel about it. For me it’s anybody willing to listen I’m grateful for.”

Nickel Eye’s album Time Of The Assassins is out now on Rykodisc through Stomp.