Hey Yo!

Turn on the Bright Lights [Tenth Anniversary Edition] - 2012

Paul Banks: I was on Grand and Ludlow, where I lived.

Sam Fogarino: I was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I watched them fall from my roof.

Paul Banks: I had a job then - at that point I was doing data entry for Scholastic News. This is after I bailed on doing a real career. I was just doing shit work. I woke up to 1010 WINS every day, and some chick phoned in and said, "A plane crashed into the Twin Towers." I thought, "Ah, cool, I'll go see that." Because I'm thinking, "It has to be a Cessna, some moron in a Cessna just crashed into the Twin Towers." I walk down and see Armageddon happening.

You know how in movies like King Kong, women put their hands over their mouths and run the other way? I saw that for real. That's not just a film trope. That's an animal thing that humans do. A reflex.

I volunteered that whole day. My roommate Sebastian and I get on these MTA buses and we drive across the West Side Highway. We take off our T-shirts so they can be used as tourniquets for all these people we're going to rescue. They're teaching us CPR. You know, this was official. But we're just standing around. I wound up kind of saying to some fire marshal guy, I was like, "Are we gonna go in? Are we gonna do anything?" And he said, quote, "We're waiting for that building to come down." So I can vouch for the fact that they knew ahead of time that building seven was going to fall. Whether there was a conspiracy or not, I don't know. But I didn't do shit. I just stood around on the West Side Highway with my shirt off, with the volunteer group all fucking day, until sundown. But the one thing that I took away as being really, really memorable was seeing a bus full of firefighters going to the site. Fast-forward a couple of hours. It's dark, and the bus comes back with all the lights on inside, showing the firefighters completely covered in ash. I can see their faces and the look was deep dejection. That shit was heavy.

Sam Fogarino: For a couple months thereafter there was a great sense of paranoia and New York bonded together. It was like, "Oh, man. I'd rather be in shitty New York with people pissing on my leg."

I'd say for a minute we probably collectively thought that it was over, that we were not going to make a record. But then it became fuel for the fire. New York puffed up again and said, "You picked the wrong city. You picked the wrong one," and on a microscopic level this little band, Interpol, is going to put out a fucking record anyway.