LEE PAYNE

Category: Music

  • Listen To This: Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms

    Cover art for Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms

    I love music. I love all kinds of music. It doesn’t have to be a certain genre or style, it just has to make me feel something.

    One of my favourite bands is Blossoms, who I was delighted to discover when they were heavily promoted by Radio X (formerly XFM) in 2016. The five piece from Stockport have a knack for catchy riffs and singalong tunes, with every song written by frontman Tom Ogden. Their self-titled debut album reached number one, as did their third effort Foolish Loving Spaces in 2020. On 29th April 2022, the band released their latest: Ribbon Around The Bomb. Here’s my review.

    Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, drummer Joe Donovan, frontman Tom Ogden, bass player Charlie Salt and keyboard player Myles Kellock.

    It was soon after 6am on Friday and I was hauling myself into my car for the half an hour drive to work, contemplating the day ahead. It had been a hell of a week. The new Blossoms album had been released at midnight, though, and I was looking forward to having the time to give it a good listen on my journey.

    The best thing about music is its ability to take you out of yourself. No matter what you’ve got going on, a song can change your mood in an instant. The very best songs transport you to somewhere else entirely. One of my heroes, Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys, sums it up:

    “Some of my favourite records, to me, feel like places that you can sort of go to and move in to for a bit.”

    Within a few seconds of hearing the strings of short instrumental opener The Writer’s Theme, I had a smile on my face. When it beautifully segued into Ode To NYC – a love letter to the Big Apple and one of four singles released ahead of the full album – I had the feeling that the world isn’t such a bad place after all. The rest of my car journey was serene, totally enraptured by the tunes coming from the radio.

    Ribbon Around The Bomb, the title track and my favourite of the four singles, is followed by The Sulking Poet, a highlight of the album and a song inspired by a Blossoms fan account on Instagram that referred to frontman and principle songwriter Tom Ogden as such due to him often appearing to have a ‘face like a slapped arse’ in interviews.

    Next is Born Wild, which for me brings back memories of the band’s previous chart topping album Foolish Loving Spaces. Then it’s The Writer, which carries a more than passing resemblance to the Oasis track Half The World Away.

    Blossoms show how they have matured on their new album

    Everything About You keeps up the album’s theme of marrying intriguing, inward-looking lyrics with cheerful melodies. Care For is a disco-inspired joy, with Ogden waxing lyrical about his new wife. Cinerama Holy Days has perhaps the album’s most repeatable chorus, while Edith Machinist has those wonderful strings adding the cherry on top of the cake.

    At 7 minutes, Visions is one of the longest songs Blossoms have ever made and contains its most talked about lyric:

    Was I complete at 23?

    Visions by Blossoms

    Then, with another instrumental lasting less than minute, the appropriately titled The Last Chapter brings us home.

    This is an album that I think will prove as pivotal to the longevity of Blossoms as Humbug was to Arctic Monkeys. An evolution, rather than a revolution. The sound of a band maturing and learning with every new track. Work on a fifth record is apparently already underway and I for one can’t wait to hear more. Ribbon Around The Bomb is an album they should be very proud of.

    Listen to Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms on all usual musical streaming services, including Apple Music. You can buy the album from their official store here.

  • Listen To This: Suck It and See by Arctic Monkeys

    Arctic Monkeys in 2011

    There was a lot riding on the fourth studio album from Arctic Monkeys. 2009’s Humbug had seen the band adopt a daring new sound that divided fans, a big departure from the record breaking debut and the follow up that capitalised on its incredible success. The next effort was pivotal – would they blend everything they’d learned into a hit record, or alienate the people that had made them popular in the first place once and for all?

    In the gap between the Arctics’ third and fourth albums, frontman Alex Turner wrote and recorded six original songs for the soundtrack to Submarine, a film directed by Richard Ayoade – known as Moss from The I.T. Crowd – who had been behind the videos for Arctic Monkeys songs Fluorescent Adolescent and Cornerstone. I was made aware of it by Turner’s involvement but I loved the style, the story and the performances and it has become my favourite film.

    By 2010, Turner was living in New York with his then-girlfriend, the TV presenter and model Alexa Chung. It was there that he wrote most of the twelve songs that would make up the fourth Arctic Monkeys album. In Los Angeles, the band recorded live takes of each track – a different process to Humbug, where they used overdubbing.

    As for the title? It could have been The Rain-Shaped Shimmer Trap, inspired by the ‘colourful’ names often given to guitar fuzz pedals. According to drummer Matt Helders, ‘it were genuinely gonna be Thriller for, about… a week’. Eventually, they settled on the title of the album’s eleventh track to label the entire record: Suck It and See was born.

    The rather sparse cover of Suck It and See – some American retailers found the title offensive and covered it with a sticker

    Track listing

    She’s Thunderstorms
    Black Treacle
    Brick by Brick
    The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala
    Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair
    Library Pictures
    All My Own Stunts
    Reckless Serenade
    Piledriver Waltz
    Love Is a Laserquest
    Suck It and See
    That’s Where You’re Wrong

    Released on 6th June 2011, more than 82,000 copies of Suck It and See were sold in its first week, comfortably knocking Lady Gaga off the top of the albums chart and giving the Arctics another number one. The songs are much less dark than those on Humbug, the band returning to a more accessible pop sound – Q magazine described it as ‘the sound of a band drawing back the curtains and letting the sunshine in’. They remained unafraid of trying something new, however.

    The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala was the first Arctic Monkeys song I ever heard played over the PA system in a football ground, a sign of how mainstream this album was. Brick by Brick featured Matt Helders on vocals, with Turner only belting out the chorus. Some songs were inspired by such innocuous moments as someone telling Turner in the studio ‘don’t sit down, ’cause I’ve moved your chair’. Piledriver Waltz was written for the Submarine soundtrack and was re-recorded with the full band for the album.

    Turner’s insightful lyrics are still very much part of the package. On All My Own Stunts, he sings ‘Been watching cowboy films on gloomy afternoons/Tinting the solitude’, a possible reference to the long days in New York waiting for his girlfriend to come home. The excellent Love Is a Laserquest contains my favourite lyrics on the album:

    And do you still think love is a laserquest?
Or do you take it all more seriously?
I've tried to ask you this in some daydreams that I've had
But you're always busy being make-believe

And do you look into the mirror to remind yourself you're there?
Or have somebody's goodnight kisses got that covered?
When I'm not being honest, I pretend that you were just some lover

    Matt Helders has a lot to thank Suck It and See for – it was while recording the video for the title track that he met model Breana McDow. The couple had a daughter in 2015 and were married in 2016, though sadly divorced in 2019.

    Matt Helders and Breana McDow became a couple after shooting this video together

    Suck It and See was another important step for the Arctic Monkeys after Humbug, and paved the way for the huge success of AM that followed.

  • Listen To This: Humbug by Arctic Monkeys

    Listen To This: Humbug by Arctic Monkeys

    You’ve had two number one albums. The first was the fastest selling debut album in British music history. You’ve won the Mercury Prize. You’ve headlined Glastonbury. Where do you go from here?

    Many would have been tempted to stick to the formula that had brought such huge success, releasing a rinse-and-repeat third album to please the masses. Not Arctic Monkeys.

    After a whirlwind period in which the Sheffield band’s first two albums had been released within fifteen months of each other, there was more of a gap between 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare and its follow up. The front man, Alex Turner, recorded with his side project The Last Shadow Puppets – the resulting album, The Age of the Understatement, also went to number one.

    The four members of Arctic Monkeys had first met Josh Homme while playing the support act for his band, American rock outfit Queens of the Stone Age, in Houston. The idea of working together was mooted and in late 2008 they began making music with Homme in his recording studio near Los Angeles. They then continued to work in another studio in the Mojave Desert – about as far away from suburban Sheffield as it is possible to imagine.

    The result was Humbug.

    Album cover of Humbug by Arctic Monkeys

    Track listing (click to listen)

    My Propeller
    Crying Lightning
    Dangerous Animals
    Secret Door
    Potion Approaching
    Fire and the Thud
    Cornerstone
    Dance Little Liar
    Pretty Visitors
    The Jeweller’s Hands

    Ten tracks, all written by Turner as usual, but this time the lyrics were more abstract and instead of just guitars and drums those lyrics were accompanied by keyboards, xylophones, glockenspiels and shakers.

    I won’t go into detail about each song, but here a couple of things I want to say: Fire and the Thud was written about Turner’s then-girlfriend Alexa Chung, and Cornerstone contains my favourite lyrics in the entire Monkeys canon.

    Tell me, where’s your hiding place?

    I’m worried I’ll forget your face

    And I’ve asked everyone

    I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along

    Cornerstone by Arctic Monkeys

    Humbug was released in the UK on 24th August 2009, which was not just the day before my 17th birthday but also five days before Arctic Monkeys headlined Reading Festival with a set that included seven of the new album’s ten tracks. They were almost unrecognisable from the band that had performed on the same stage just three years earlier – the hair was longer, the guitars louder, the mood darker.

    Arctic Monkeys headlining Reading Festival in 2009

    As such a major departure from their earlier work, it took some fans time to get their heads around Humbug but it was another number one album for the band and is now seen as something of a gateway for them – a record that allowed them to break out of the image of cheeky indie lads and into bona fide rock stars. It paved the way for AM, the album that broke America, and the other-worldly Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

    Yes, I’m well aware that I’m biased (I’ve listened to Arctic Monkeys nearly every day for years), but I urge you to give this album a listen.

  • The funniest love song I’ve ever heard

    Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, when supermarkets shift a lot of flowers and chocolates love is in the air. Musicians have long been inspired by matters of the heart, so it takes a different approach to the subject to stand out. Here, I’d like to introduce you to the funniest love song I’ve ever heard.

    The Turtles might not be familiar to you, but you will probably have heard at least one of their songs. In 1967 they had a big hit with Happy Together, knocking The Beatles off the top of the US charts.

    Happy Together, the biggest hit The Turtles had

    They were talented musicians, so naturally they wanted to go down new routes and change their sound. Their record company, however, motivated by the cash Happy Together brought in urged them to write a very similar song.

    Fine, they thought – if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. The Turtles recorded a parody of their biggest hit, dripping in sarcasm – it was called Elenore.

    I feel as if I can go no further without showing you the song’s lyrics in full:

    You’ve got a thing about you
    I just can’t live without you
    I really want you, Elenore, near me
    Your looks intoxicate me
    Even though your folks hate me
    There’s no one like you, Elenore, really

    Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell
    And you really do me well
    You’re my pride and joy, et cetera
    Elenore, can I take the time
    To ask you to speak your mind?
    Tell me that you love me better

    I really think you’re groovy
    Let’s go out to a movie
    Whadda you say now, Elenore, can we?
    They’ll turn the lights way down low
    Maybe we won’t watch the show
    I think I love you, Elenore, love me

    Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell
    And you really do me well
    You’re my pride and joy, et cetera
    Elenore, can I take the time
    To ask you to speak your mind?
    Tell me that you love me better

    (One more time)
    Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell, ha-ha
    Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell, ha-ha, ha-ah-ah

    I long to use the line ‘I really think you’re groovy, let’s go out to a movie’ on a woman.

    The trouble is, The Turtles did such a beautiful job of their act of self-sabotage that it backfired. The lyrics were a joke, but they were delivered so well and backed by such terrific production that the song became another top ten hit in the US and went to number seven in the UK – five places higher than Happy Together had managed.

    It never fails to make me smile.

    The funniest love song I’ve ever heard

    Another love song I like

    This one’s not a parody, it’s just a really great song. It’s The Dave Clark Five with their 1963 song Glad All Over.

    An absolute banger, it was a number one hit in the UK and broke the top ten in the US – highly unusual for a British group that wasn’t The Beatles back then.

    You may have heard it at a football match, it’s an anthem for Crystal Palace. It’s well worth a listen.

    Glad All Over by The Dave Clark Five

  • Watch This: Blossoms – Back To Stockport

    As much as I love football, I am getting a bit tired of the daily dose of games beamed live from empty grounds. I’m really starting to miss crowds now. A living, breathing crowd adds so much to sport. Bordered by empty seats, even the biggest games feel like no big deal – Liverpool v Manchester United might as well have been Tranmere v Oldham.

    Last night Arsenal played Newcastle, and, while I would usually have the game on in the background while doing other things, this time I decided to watch something more interesting. I watched Blossoms – Back To Stockport.

    It’s a documentary film about the band Blossoms, exploring their origins and showing their preparations for a big homecoming gig in front of 15,000 people at Edgeley Park, home of Stockport County Football Club, which took place on 22nd June 2019.

    Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, bass player Charlie Salt, lead singer Tom Ogden, drummer Joe Donovan and keyboard player Myles Kellock

    In case you haven’t heard of them, Blossoms are a five-piece band from the aforementioned town of Stockport, near Manchester. The sort of music they make is probably best defined as psychadelic-indie-rock-pop. They came fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2016 list, the broadcaster’s annual pick of musicians to listen out for in the year ahead. I first heard about them as I am a listener of Radio X, who included Blossoms on their similar Great X-Pectations list, and gave a lot of radio play to their single Charlemagne.

    Charlemagne, the breakthrough single for Blossoms

    I was immediately drawn to the band I think, in part, because there was a certain groove, a funk, to their songs – a sound that manages to simultaneously feel both modern and retro. I respect the fact that the frontman Tom Ogden writes all the songs and they all seem genuinely great guys who are living the dream. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a total devotee to Arctic Monkeys, so you can imagine how delighted I was to hear in the film that Blossoms started off doing Arctic Monkeys covers and described Alex Turner as an ‘idol’.

    The film is made to a very high standard. It goes in-depth on the back stories of the five members of the band (discovering that all but one of them is younger than me made me feel old), who go against the grain of many rock bands of the past by showing themselves to be best mates in a way that they simply couldn’t put on for the cameras. Footage of the Edgeley Park gig runs as a thread throughout, and there are even little animated inserts to go along with whatever story one of them is telling at that moment.

    In Ogden, the band have a figurehead who demonstrates great showmanship on stage – the long hair and the 70s suits – but away from it he’s a quiet guy who just likes walking his dog. The drummer, Joe Donovan, has been Ogden’s friend since they were at school together and is a ball of energy brilliantly described by the others as ‘like having a fan of the band who is in the band’. Bassist Charlie Salt is a sort of older brother figure (he was born in 1991 for Christ’s sake!) who has the air of someone who would be able to charm his way into anything. Myles Kellock plays the keyboards, but seemingly only half as much as he plays video games – there’s one shot in the film where he’s playing what looks like Mario Kart at the back of a recording studio while the others are working on a song. His keyboards certainly contribute greatly to that modern/retro sound I described earlier, though.

    That leaves my favourite member of the band, lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst. He has a quality that I admire a lot, and that is being funny with a straight face. He doesn’t go out of his way to make people laugh, he just has a dry wit that makes him naturally funny. I’m someone who relies a lot on sarcasm so I can relate. In one scene, the band are being fitted out with the suits they will wear on stage at the big gig and Dewhurst tells a hilarious story about how he’s had to have pockets made on his trousers because, according to the tailor, ‘you don’t have an arse’. He tells it in such a way that makes Ogden in the background crack up, as did I. Dewhurst is also an incredibly talented musician. On the most recent Blossoms album, Foolish Loving Spaces, on the track Your Girlfriend the cowbell-type sound at the beginning was produced by Dewhurst hitting the wheel of a car.

    Your Girlfriend, from the 2020 Blossoms album Foolish Loving Spaces

    The shots of 15,000 people packed tightly onto the Edgeley Park pitch feel like a window into a different world, one in which no one knew what social distancing was. As hard as it is to believe at the moment, those days will return but for now this film is a wonderful tonic for these locked down times.

    I urge you to both give Blossoms a listen and watch the film. Their music appeals to all ages – I gave my mum one of their albums as a present last year and she’s had it on almost constantly in her car ever since – and the film is inspiring, in that a group of lads who a few years ago were playing to fifty people in pubs are now headlining stadium gigs. Watch the trailer below and the film is on Amazon Prime.

    The trailer for Blossoms – Back To Stockport
  • Listen To This: AM by Arctic Monkeys

    Listen To This: AM by Arctic Monkeys

    AM album cover

    Yes, I’m writing about Arctic Monkeys again. To go with my pieces on their first, second and sixth albums, I am going to take you track-by-track through the record that cracked America for the four-piece from Sheffield.

    One of the things I admire so much about Alex Turner, Jamie Cook, Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders is how they have evolved over time. They have never been afraid to go in a completely different direction and, to them, making the same music over and over again is a crime. Listen to their first hit single, 2005’s I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, and One Point Perspective, my favourite track from the 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and you can scarcely believe that the two songs were written and recorded by the same band.

    By the time AM was released on 9th September 2013, Arctic Monkeys had transformed from the scruffy indie kids in baggy jeans they were when they started out to rockers with slicked-back hair and leather jackets. The music had gone through a similar process.

    In an interview with BBC Radio 1 at the time of release, frontman Alex Turner said:

    “…it feels like this record is exactly where we should be right now. So it felt right to just initial it.”

    AM was born – with more than a nod to VU, released in 1985 by the Velvet Underground.

    Track list (click on one to listen)

    Do I Wanna Know?
    R U Mine?
    One For The Road
    Arabella
    I Want It All
    No. 1 Party Anthem
    Mad Sounds
    Fireside
    Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?
    Snap Out Of It
    Knee Socks
    I Wanna Be Yours

    The album’s opening track Do I Wanna Know? features what I consider to be one of the great guitar riffs. If you happen to be walking somewhere listening to it through headphones, I promise that you will feel approximately 94% cooler than you really are. The song is about unrequited love, how difficult it is to move on when you’ve been obsessed with someone and ponders whether the narrator really wants to know ‘if this feeling flows both ways’ or not.

    Another reason why this band means so much to me is that I really identify with the lyrics. There’s a line in the song – ‘maybe I’m too busy being yours to fall for somebody new’ – that completely nails how I’ve felt in the past, in a way that I hadn’t been able to figure out for myself up to that point. Do I Wanna Know? was the first Arctic Monkeys song to make the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US and was the opener to every gig the band played when touring the album. If you’re a fan of Peaky Blinders you might recognise it too.

    The band wanted to make a record that sounded good in a car and after that strong start they follow it up with R U Mine?, which sounds a bit like an up-tempo version of Do I Wanna Know?. The rapidly delivered lyrics are about missing the object of your desires and having a sincere feeling that every moment spent without them is wasted. The video for the song won the NME award for Best Video:

    The award winning video for R U Mine?

    One For The Road is the first example on the album of the continuing influence of Josh Homme on Arctic Monkeys. The frontman of Queens of the Stone Age first worked with the Monkeys on their third album Humbug and has been close to them ever since. In this song, you get the sense that Homme – who features on vocals – is moving their sound away from their native Sheffield and towards a kind of Americana. This was not a popular move among some of the fans but, for me, it’s really good if done well – which it is here.

    “And when she needs to shelter from reality she takes a dip in my daydreams”

    — Lyric from Arabella

    Alex Turner would introduce a performance of the fourth track from the album by informing the crowd ‘I want to tell you about a girl called Arabella!’. The lyrics are poetic, full of metaphors and a sign of how Turner’s songwriting has matured from, as he put it, ‘pointing at things and talking about them’ to speaking more from within. The song is essentially all about how awesome the aforementioned Arabella is.

    I Want It All and Mad Sounds are as close as this album gets to filler – very listenable songs, both achieve the aim of sounding great in the car – but just not particularly ground breaking. Between those tracks sits No. 1 Party Anthem, the obligatory ‘slow’ number on the album. I’m not sure why, but it feels to me like a bit of a tribute to the band’s debut single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. It contains some cracking lyrics too, my favourite being ‘It’s not like I’m falling in love, I just want you to do me no good/And you look like you could’. The performance of it at Reading festival in 2014 was a highlight of their set.

    No. 1 Party Anthem live at Reading Festival in 2014

    Take in Fireside for its tale of how love can be unpredictable, the much-covered Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? for its story of frustration and try to get over that special someone with Snap Out Of It.

    Knee Socks is another song featuring the voice of Josh Homme, which might explain why I’ve always found it very similar to One For The Road.

    Most people would agree that Arctic Monkeys is a terrible name for a band. The story goes that it was guitarist Jamie Cook who came up with it but they were always looking to change it, until the performance poet John Cooper Clarke was apparently the first person to say he actually liked it. Clarke had always been a hero of Alex Turner’s, which isn’t surprising what with his proficiency with language, and performed at the Sheffield bar Turner was working in one night. Turner plucked up the courage to tell Clarke about the band he was part of and Clarke said ‘that’s a name I can imagine in the hit parade!’. The name has stuck ever since, and one of Clarke’s poems was slightly tweaked to turn it into the closing song on AM.

    I Wanna Be Yours, with its quirky lyrics including ‘let me be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust’, seems the perfect way to finish off the record – it’s a love song, but one that’s down to earth and not too mushy. And for a brooding, confident album there seems no better ending.

  • Listen To This: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not by Arctic Monkeys

    The release of the debut album by Arctic Monkeys was a major cultural event. The kind that wouldn’t happen nowadays. The full story of the origins of the band is one to be told another day, but by 23rd January 2006 it’s fair to say there was rather a lot of hype surrounding the Sheffield four-piece. They already had two number one singles to their name, had played the Carling Stage at the Reading Festival and crowds at their gigs already knew the lyrics to their songs.

    Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not album cover

    More than 360,000 copies of the album were sold in the first week after its release, comfortably securing the top spot in the charts and as I write this fourteen years later it is still the fastest selling debut album by a band. It won the prestigious Mercury Prize and well and truly set the band up for the enormous success that it continues to enjoy to this day.

    The album’s title is a quote from the 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning starring Albert Finney.

    This clip from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the origin of the album’s title

    It could be argued that it is a concept album, with the majority of its songs about the nightlife of Sheffield. The band have never claimed that this was their intention, and it’s most likely a coincidence. Alex Turner was probably writing about his own experiences, which as a teenager almost inevitably involved going out on the town.

    Here, I go through this classic album track by track. Click on the title of each song to listen to it.

    The View from the Afternoon

    It’s a fast start to the album as the drums of Matt Helders crash into the guitars, leading into Alex Turner’s lyrics about the anticipation of a night out. The lines ‘And she won’t be surprised and she won’t be shocked/When she’s pressed the star after she’s pressed unlock/And there’s verse and chapter sat in her inbox/And all that is said is that you’ve drank a lot’ rather date this song and evokes memories of the tiny Nokia phones everyone seemed to have back then.

    I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor

    The first Arctic Monkeys song to be number one in the UK (in October 2005) and probably still their best known track. Played at the fast pace that characterised their early work, it kicks off with the great line ‘Stop making the eyes at me/I’ll stop making the eyes at you’ and paints a vivid picture of two people flirting across a nightclub. Nearly fifteen years after it was released, the band are a bit fed up of playing it now but it remains a firm fan favourite and the Monkeys even performed it at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

    Fake Tales of San Francisco

    This song moves away from the nightlife theme somewhat and discusses how new bands often ignore their roots in the pursuit of being trendy and encourages them to ‘get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook’ and be true to themselves.

    On a personal note, my landlord is adamant that he inspired part of the lyrics to this track. He has told me a story about drinking in The Boardwalk in Sheffield with a friend, who during a conversation told him ‘you’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham’. A pre-fame Alex Turner was working behind the bar, seemingly overhead this and put those words into this song.

    Dancing Shoes

    Turner points out in Dancing Shoes that everyone on a night out is trying to pull but pretends that they’re not. It’s ‘the only reason that you came’, after all.

    Left to right: Jamie Cook (guitar), Andy Nicholson (bass), Alex Turner (vocals, guitar), Matt Helders (drums)

    You Probably Couldn’t See for the Lights but You Were Staring Straight at Me

    This song develops the idea of being on the pull on a night out further, focusing on the narrator’s attempts to chat up a girl. It’s the most lyrically complex song on the album, delivered almost at the pace of a rapper, and I feel this verse sums it up perfectly:

    ‘And oh, I’m so tense and never tenser
    Could all go a bit Frank Spencer
    And I’m talking gibberish
    Tip of the tongue but I can’t deliver it
    Properly
    Oh, it’s all getting on top of me
    And if it weren’t this dark
    You’d see how red my face has gone, yeah’

    Now I don’t go to nightclubs but I feel like that’s exactly what it’s like whenever I try to speak to a woman.

    Still Take You Home

    We’re still on the subject of trying to pull in a nightclub here, but in this one Turner talks about how people he’d never usually fancy at any other time suddenly look stunning in this particular setting. You get to hear a bit more of the rest of the band’s abilities in this one.

    Arctic Monkeys won the Mercury Prize in 2006 for this album

    Riot Van

    The slow number that most albums tend to include somewhere, and a tale about a group of cheeky lads fuelled by alcohol winding up the police.

    Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured

    Underrated, and possibly my favourite song on the album. Turner has always been very good at observing everyday things and making songs out of them. Here, it’s the sign you often see on the inside of a taxi. It’s time to go home after a night out now and High Green, the suburb of Sheffield the band grew up in, is mentioned. The driver won’t let them have six in, though, ‘especially not with the food’.

    Mardy Bum

    A love song, but not the typically gushing type. The narrator is having a bit of a row with his ‘mardy bum’ (Northern slang for irritable) of a girlfriend, and reminisces about ‘cuddles in the kitchen’. I’m sure we could all relate. Turner would make a habit of going at love songs from unusual angles in the second Monkeys album and the track D Is For Dangerous.

    They don’t play Mardy Bum live very often but when they do they tend to slow it right down – they did it accompanied by a string arrangement at Glastonbury in 2013 and the result was beautiful.

    Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But…

    A rather brave thing to do on your first album, but here Arctic Monkeys launch something of an attack on the sort of promoters and record producers who only see music as a way to make money. You just have to listen to the lyrics yourself, they’re quite extraordinary.

    When the Sun Goes Down

    The second Monkeys single to top the charts, and it’s all about the prostitutes the band used to see around their rehearsal space in Neepsend in Sheffield. Rather than passing judgement on the women, it centres on the men coming to pick them up (a working title was Scummy Man).

    From the Ritz to the Rubble

    This one starts off about an attempt to get past the bouncers and into a nightclub and ends up reflecting on how you can say things on a night out that you just can’t say the next day.

    A Certain Romance

    The closer of a classic album and the closer to most of the band’s gigs in their early years. The maturity of A Certain Romance’s lyrics belie the tender age Turner was when he wrote it.

    If you enjoyed reading this, I have also written about the other Arctic Monkeys albums Favourite Worst Nightmare and Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.

  • #GoodStuff – a few things I’ve been enjoying despite all of this

    There’s a lot going on at the moment that can really get you down. If the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t enough, keeping us away from our family and friends, ruining our plans and making us worry, then the events in the US over the last week or so have only added to the load.

    I am a big Twitter user. I find it useful to keep up with what’s going on, connect with a wide range of people and to try to get my writing seen. However, I find it really difficult to avoid getting into arguments on there. With the topic of race right back at the top of the world agenda, I’ve been coming to blows with some who I feel have truly abhorrent views.

    To drag myself out of that particular tunnel I have started something called #GoodStuff, where I share things that have made me laugh, smile or simply made this whole situation easier to deal with over the last couple of months. Here are my first selections.

    Mark Church’s Garden Cricket

    When sport is your thing, a global virus pandemic bringing the whole thing to a sudden halt for a while is tough. Football and cricket are my two biggest loves and there hasn’t been any live action to watch in this country since March – except in Mark Church’s garden.

    Mark Church is the cricket commentator for BBC London. Usually at this time of year he’d be busy reporting on all of Surrey’s matches, but the coronavirus has left him with a bit more time on his hands.

    He’s been playing in his garden, against his garden furniture. A full schedule of five Test matches, five One Day Internationals and some upcoming Twenty20 games. Some might describe the whole thing as one man’s slow descent into insanity but, trust me, it will put a smile on your face.

    From the kid’s scooter taking a quick single to the rain delay musings of presenter ‘Roy Broadcaster’ to the day/night matches, it’s been a joy. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.

    Blossoms making music in isolation

    This week I should have seen Blossoms supporting The Killers at Carrow Road, but that’s been rescheduled for next year for obvious reasons. I’ve been a fan of the Stockport band for a while and loved Foolish Loving Spaces, their third album, released in January.

    They haven’t let the fact that they’ve been locked down in different places stop them making music, though. They have recorded some of their own songs and a few covers in isolation, and the results have been incredible.

    My favourite is their cover of Tame Impala’s The Less I Know The Better, with Miles Kane from The Last Shadow Puppets. It sounds great, you’d never know they were recording their individual parts – and at one point drummer Joe Donovan plays a potato peeler. Have a listen.


    Elis and John’s Isolation Tapes

    I’ve been a big fan of Elis James and John Robins for about three years now. At the time, they presented the 1pm-4pm slot on a Saturday on Radio X and the start of their show would coincide with me driving home from work.

    I really liked how the show was basically two mates having a chat. They talked about all kinds of stuff, and it never felt forced or fake. They’re both comedians by trade, Robins an Edinburgh festival fringe comedy award winner and James a proud Welshman who now does a lot of gigs in the Welsh language.

    I started listening to the podcasts of their radio show and have done ever since. I went to see them at the UEA in 2018 when they released a book and did a tour of the country to promote it. At the end, I even got my copy signed!

    My signed book

    Last year they moved to BBC Radio 5 Live and during the pandemic they’ve been recording extra episodes called The Isolation Tapes. I’ve found them a wonderful slice of normality amidst the chaos.

    #514 – Chinese Geese, Caribbean Soaks and Emre Can Headspace – Elis James and John Robins

    It’s limbs in the studio as a box of brownies and a couple of books have lifted Elis out of a funk. What great news for bookworms with low blood sugar. But the internal glucose alarm isn’t the only one going off as a fire alert causes chaos. We also get psychological as the boys unpick the idea of the inner monologue, and with that the terrifying engine steering John under the bonnet. Would Freud enjoy this? Potentially. Would it frighten him? Almost certainly. And from brains to bodies, the show gets panned as the least erotic thing possible, whilst we have a couple of fantastically zoological Mad Dads.It’s elisandjohn@bbc.co.uk or 07974 293022 on WhatsApp if you’ve got any comments on the above. But please nothing too close to the erotic bone. Keep it PG.
    1. #514 – Chinese Geese, Caribbean Soaks and Emre Can Headspace
    2. #513 – John Laughter, Alan Giggles and Pierre Novellie
    3. #512 – Stasi Mealtime, Clown Stance and There’s A Lot Going On With You
    4. #511 – Chorister Humour, The Veg Guesser and What a Husband!
    5. #510 – It’s Not A Drawer, Creosote i Bumry and The Spirit of Shelford

    I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at some of the things that have been keeping me going during this difficult time. Stay safe everyone.

  • Listen To This: Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys

    It was only the year 2007 and yet it had already been quite the ride for Arctic Monkeys. Entering their fifth year since forming, they already had two number one singles and the fastest selling debut album by a band to their name. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, even claimed to be a fan – though when pushed he couldn’t name any of their songs. The time had come to tackle the difficult second album.

    On 23rd April 2007, Favourite Worst Nightmare was released. Not as raw as the previous year’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the twelve songs feel more polished. Alex Turner’s superb observational lyrics go a little deeper and branch out further than musings on Sheffield’s nightlife.

    The album opens with Brianstorm, a loud and confident start which apparently describes a man the band met backstage after a gig in Tokyo. ‘Brian’ left such a big impression on the Monkeys – ”Cause we can’t take our eyes / Off the t-shirt and ties combination?’ – that he became the subject of a song. Brianstorm has become an absolute staple of their live sets, a real crowd pleaser, and they are still performing it now. Here it is from Lollapalooza in Argentina in 2019:

    Next comes Teddy Picker. If you’ve ever been to one of the arcades at the seaside, you’ll know what a teddy picker is – those machines that have a claw you try to grab prizes with. Turner uses those teddy pickers as a metaphor for the pursuit of fame and the downside of it. ‘And it’s the thousandth time that it’s even bolder / Don’t be surprised when you get bent over / They told you, but you were gagging for it’. It’s basically a warning to be careful what you wish for.

    Track three is D Is For Dangerous, the chorus of which gives the album its title:

    ‘D is for delightful
    And try and keep your trousers on
    I think you should know you’re his favourite worst nightmare’

    Love is certainly not an unexplored topic in music, but I have always admired the slightly different way Alex Turner approaches the subject. Like in the first album’s Mardy Bum, which describes a row between a couple, D Is For Dangerous is about being in love with someone you know it won’t be easy to deal with.

    Matt Helders, Alex Turner, Nick O’Malley and Jamie Cook in 2007

    The album moves on to a song about casual sex. Balaclava, with its catchy bass throughout, is all about not becoming emotionally attached to the girl you’ve just pulled. ‘The confidence is the balaclava’.

    Next is my favourite song on the album, Fluorescent Adolescent. It’s probably the best known one on it, and the one you’re most likely to have heard somewhere else (it was, for example, on the soundtrack to The Inbetweeners). It starts with two guitars crashing into each other, leading into Turner’s lyrics about getting older. I can do no better than to relay the whole of the first verse:

    ‘You used to get it in your fishnets
    Now you only get it in your night dress
    Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
    Landed in a very common crisis
    Everything’s in order in a black hole
    Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
    That Bloody Mary’s lacking in Tabasco
    Remember when you used to be a rascal?’

    Turner was just 20 years old when he wrote that with the help of his then-girlfriend Johanna Bennett.

    The band slowed the song down and added a snippet of Dion’s Only You Know to it to make for a highlight of their headline set at Reading in 2009:

    Like most albums, Favourite Worst Nightmare has a slower tune in the form of Only Ones Who Know. I would almost describe the guitars on this song as haunting. It’s great to listen to with headphones on. It feels like a sad song, and sets this album apart from their debut, which had a cheekier tone throughout.

    In Do Me a Favour Turner once again turns the classic break up song on its head by writing it from the perspective of the person in the wrong. It starts with Matt Helders thundering on his drums and describes, in Turner’s words, ‘a goodbye’.

    ‘It’s the beginning of the end
    The car went up the hill and disappeared around the bend
    Ask anyone, they’ll tell you that it’s these times that it tends
    To start to break in half, to start to fall apart, hold on to your heart’

    We are into the second half of the album and This House is a Circus signals a change in tone for the album. A wild night out is described in what Turner calls his favourite song from the record.

    Next, it’s If You Were There, Beware and we are back onto the topic of fame. In this one, Turner talks about how annoyed he is at the way the media treats his loved ones. In terms of the instrumentation it’s the clearest hint we get of what was to come on the third Monkeys album, Humbug, which represented a major shift in sound for the band. Lyrically, it seems Turner’s girlfriend is being hounded by the paparazzi:

    ‘If you were there, beware the serpent soul pitchers
    Can’t you sense she was never meant to fill column inches
    Ain’t you had enough? What you’re trying to dig up
    Isn’t there to be dug; the thieves help the thugs
    As they’re trying to beat the good grace of a sweetheart
    Out to the point she’ll comply’

    The bad thing in Do The Bad Thing is having an affair, and Old Yellow Bricks is all about finally getting out of your hometown and realising that the rest of the world isn’t up to much after all. An interesting one, given that nowadays two of the band live in Los Angeles while the other two have settled back down in their native Sheffield.

    The album closes with 505, a song recently named the best of all Arctic Monkeys songs in a radio station poll and a track the band have used to bring the curtain down on countless live performances over the years. It starts off with the sound of an organ, the same chords you can hear in the Western film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and suddenly ups the tempo in the final third of what Turner described as ‘the first proper love song we’ve done’. Additional guitar for this track was provided by Miles Kane, who would form the supergroup The Last Shadow Puppets with Turner later in 2007.

    So there we have it – the twelve songs that made the difficult second album something of a breeze for Arctic Monkeys. Favourite Worst Nightmare went straight to the top of the album chart and secured the band their first headliner slot at Glastonbury. I will leave you with the band’s brilliant performance of 505 from Glastonbury 2013.

  • Listen To This: Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) by The Darkness

    Well the weather is cruel
    And the season of Yule lifts the heart but it still hurts
    You’ve got your career spent the best part of last year apart and it still hurts
    So that’s why I pray each and every Christmas day that it won’t end

    Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) by The Darkness

    I’m no Scrooge, but Christmas isn’t my favourite time of year. I always struggle to decide what presents to buy, I’m not keen on turkey and that weird week between Christmas Day and New Year messes with my head.

    This is also the tenth Christmas period I will spend working in a supermarket. As soon as we are into December the dreaded Christmas music starts getting pumped through the PA system. The same few festive pop hits, the ones we hear every year, joined by dreary choral gibberish. Over the course of two shifts, I must have heard at least ten different versions of Santa Baby.

    If only they would add what I consider to be the best Christmas song of them all to the playlist – Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) by The Darkness.

    There’s a chance you might have forgotten about The Darkness by now. They were briefly massive in the early 2000s when their debut album Permission to Land went to number one, led by the single I Believe in a Thing Called Love. In 2004 they won three BRIT awards, including Best British Group. For us here in the east of England, the band had added significance by hailing from humble Lowestoft.

    The Darkness

    In the build up to Christmas 2003, The Darkness released Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) – and it was a breath of fresh air. Kicking off with a heavy guitar riff, the lyrics are delivered in falsetto style by frontman Justin Hawkins. They almost sound upbeat, but if you listen closely they are tinged with sadness – he only sees his lover at Christmas, and he doesn’t want it to end and her to go away again.

    Those lyrics might just be a reason we don’t hear the song alongside Slade, Wizzard and Chris Rea every year. As Hawkins put it:

    We managed to get bellend into a Christmas song without it getting banned!

    Justin Hawkins, The Darkness

    Yep, they knew exactly what they were doing.

    The song was in the race for Christmas number one in 2003 but came in at number two behind the utterly miserable Mad World cover by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules. It was accompanied by a hilarious video in which every single Christmassy thing anyone can think of was packed into 3 minutes and 41 seconds, then topped off by Hawkins shouting ‘BELLS END!’ in front of a choir of children.

    As for The Darkness, Hawkins left the band in 2006 after finishing rehab for cocaine and alcohol abuse. He and his former bandmates were involved with new, separate projects before The Darkness reformed in 2011. They released a new album in October this year – but it’s safe to say the glory days are in the past.

    But I urge you to make this song a part of every Christmas from now on – it’s the perfect antidote to the musical crimes that have been committed at this ‘most wonderful time of the year’.