LEE PAYNE

Tag: age

  • 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.

  • My favourite film – Submarine

    I have mentioned before that films aren’t really my thing. I’m not quite sure why that is. I struggle to suspend my disbelief for 90+ minutes and therefore find it difficult to feel involved in a film (but then I can do that no problem with a TV series), and while the big explosions and huge fight scenes might entertain a lot of people they tend to bore me. Michael Owen gets a lot of stick for feeling this way, but I’m totally with him.

    As a result of this, I have seen a very short list of films so far. I was taken to the cinema as a child, mostly to see Disney animations as I recall, but you could name a huge number of ‘classics’ that I’ve never seen a single second of. I saw Blade Runner for the first time last year – purely because it was set in November 2019 and it was appropriately geeky in my eyes to watch it in November 2019. To be honest, I didn’t really see what the fuss was all about.

    My favourite film is one that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of. It was released in 2011, following a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. It’s called Submarine.

    Submarine trailer

    Submarine is not about submarines. The film is based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, who wrote most of it while at the University of East Anglia doing a creative writing degree. I read the book after seeing the film and thoroughly enjoyed it – the big screen adaptation stayed remarkably true to the source material, and Dunthorne’s writing style was very readable.

    The focus of Submarine is a 15-year-old boy, Oliver Tate, who is something of an outsider. No wonder I can relate to the character. You see, when I was at school there was usually one girl a year that I was completely besotted with. But I never told any of them – I never even tried to speak to them at all. I preferred to admire from afar. Oliver seems to take a similar approach, but plans his attempt to get together with the object of his desires, Jordana Bevan, with military precision.

    Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) and Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine

    I don’t want to spoil it, I want you to go and watch it, so I won’t go too far into the story but it centres around Oliver and Jordana’s relationship, Oliver’s fears that his mother is having an affair, and Oliver’s reaction to a crisis in Jordana’s family. There are poignant moments but also some very funny ones (‘My mother is worried I have mental problems. I found a book about teenage paranoid delusions during a routine search of my parents’ bedroom.’)

    The title is derived from a line in the book, a love letter Oliver sends Jordana, in which he states ‘you are the only person that I would allow to be shrunken down to a microscopic size and swim inside me in a tiny submersible machine’.

    Richard Ayoade, who you may know as Moss from The IT Crowd, directed the film and did a fantastic job at rooting it in the book’s 1980s setting. I think it’s the feeling Ayoade creates that seals the deal for me in making this my favourite film.

    Richard Ayoade directed the film

    So, will you have heard of any of the cast? Well, Oliver is played by Craig Roberts, who first appeared in the kids’ TV show The Story of Tracey Beaker and also turned up in one of the later episodes of Skins. Noah Taylor, who plays Oliver’s father, has been in Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders, his mother (Sally Hawkins) starred in The Shape of Water, and Jordana’s mother is played by Melanie Walters, best known for playing Stacey’s mum Gwen in Gavin & Stacey.

    Oh, and the fact that Alex Turner, the frontman of Arctic Monkeys, wrote and performed six songs for Submarine’s soundtrack is just a coincidence…

    Submarine often pops up on streaming platforms, though at the time of writing is only available for rental or purchase. Click here for places to get it.