LEE PAYNE

Tag: am

  • 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.

  • Listen To This: Leave Before The Lights Come On by Arctic Monkeys

    Arctic Monkeys in 2006

    Every now and again I am going to present a track I think you should listen to under the title ‘Listen To This’.

    I have written before about my favourite band Arctic Monkeys and their sixth studio album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. My first track for this feature is a Monkeys song, but this one was released as a standalone single in 2006 between their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and their second release Favourite Worst Nightmare.

    It’s called Leave Before The Lights Come On.

    I think the band’s frontman Alex Turner is a lyrical genius and the words to this song would fit in very well with their phenomenally sucessful debut album.

    That was essentially a concept album about nightlife in a big English city. Turner drew on his experiences of nights out in his native Sheffield to craft a compelling collection of songs that almost everyone between the ages of 16 and 21 in the country could relate to.

    Leave Before The Lights Come On basically describes a one night stand. It would have slotted nicely onto the album but it says something about it when a song as strong as this doesn’t make the cut. When the band performed it at Reading festival in 2006, Turner described it as ‘the black sheep of the family… but we love it all the same.’

    And how can you wake up with someone you don’t love

    And not feel slightly fazed by it?

    Arctic Monkeys – Leave Before The Lights Come On

    Turner’s lyrics are well supported by the rest of the band. Each of the four members has to work hard on it, and that was one of the things that makes me love it so much. Matt Helders gets it going with his pounding drums, Andy Nicholson (and latterly Nick O’Malley) come in with the bass and Jamie Cook combines brilliantly with Turner on guitar. The song feels very well structured – it tells a story from start to finish in 3 minutes and 47 seconds. If I was in a band, I’d definitely cover it as everyone in the band would have a big part to play.

    The music video for the song features the actor Paddy Considine, who was in 24 Hour Party People, Submarine and Hot Fuzz amongst other things.

    Finally, here is the band performing the song during their headline set at Glastonbury in 2007.