In the summer of 2000, a young record producer named Gordon Raphael was handing out business cards at a small, free-admission venue on Ludlow Street called the Luna Lounge. One of the cards reached a guitarist named Albert Hammond Jr., who walked over to Gordon's studio on E. 2nd Street a week later. What followed was the recording of The Modern Age EP and, shortly after, Is This It – the debut album that announced The Strokes to the world. What Ever Happened? – The Strokes / New York / 2001 is Gordon Raphael's map of the world in which that happened. A few square miles of lower Manhattan, in the years around the turn of the millennium. Before smartphones and social media, culture travelled through record shops and music magazines, late nights in basement venues and afternoons in independent bookshops. Cheap pizza, dive bars, converted basement studios. A neighbourhood of musicians, artists and European exiles who had arrived in New York to find or make something. Gordon was at the centre of it. He recorded The Strokes at Transporterraum, watched them play their earliest shows at Luna Lounge and Arlene's Grocery, and was present on the last night of recording Is This It when a delegation from Rough Trade and NME flew in from London to hear the album for the first time. His map takes in the studio, the bar across the street, the apartment where the songs were written, the management office with its world map covered in coloured thumbtacks. But the guide is not only about The Strokes. It is about the neighbourhood that produced them – the record shops and vintage stores of St Marks Place, the venues that gave unknown bands their first audiences, the restaurants where the scene's participants ate, argued and occasionally stormed out leaving uneaten cheeseburgers on the table. Twenty-five years on, this is a first-hand account of a moment when a city, a scene and a band aligned.