LEE PAYNE

Tag: arctic

  • 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: 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: 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.

  • One year on: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino by Arctic Monkeys

    Arctic Monkeys
    Left to right: Jamie Cook (guitar), Nick O’Malley (bass), Alex Turner (lead singer), Matt Helders (drums)

    Arctic Monkeys are my all time favourite band. No one else has ever made music that has spoken to me in quite the way they have. I own all six of the albums they have released to date, I know every one of their songs and the brilliant lyrics of their frontman Alex Turner have accompanied me through my highest of highs and lowest of lows.

    On 11th May 2018, the Sheffield band released Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, their first new material for nearly five years. It was a completely different sound, led by the piano, which left some fans used to them thrashing on guitars upset. I loved it, however, and love it even more now as it reaches its first anniversary. I’ll tell you why.

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a collection of eleven songs loosely based around the idea that the human race has colonised the moon and opened a hotel and casino complex on it. Yet, the aesthetic feels like the 1970s. You need only to look at the video for the title track to see what I mean.

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is meant to feel like a place you can go and spend a while. Tranquility Base was the name given to the area of the moon that Apollo 11 landed on in July 1969.


    I liked the idea of naming [the album] after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while.

    Alex Turner, Arctic Monkeys

    For me, it absolutely achieves that aim. I have listened to the album hundreds of times, often when I’ve got into my car after a tedious day of pushing trolleys around a supermarket car park. Heading to Tranquility Base for 41 minutes is a great way to escape the mundanities of real life.

    In these days of cherry-picking individual songs on streaming services, it was a bold move to release a proper album – a collection of songs designed to be listened to as a whole, in a particular order. The end of One Point Perspective actually blends in to the beginning of American Sports to emphasise this.

    The album is full of quotable lines. You get the feeling Turner was enjoying himself writing it, relishing the freedom its other-worldly setting was affording him. The genre of science fiction is often used as a method of commenting on our own world, as if taking a step back and looking at it from a different perspective offers the opportunity to say things you might not feel comfortable with otherwise.

    Turner does this in the song Golden Trunks. He had always steered clear of politics in his lyrics, but with this album he felt able to have a little stab at it.


    The leader of the free world
    Reminds you of a wrestler wearing tight golden trunks

    Golden Trunks

    I don’t know about you, but I get a rather unpleasant image of Donald Trump in my head after hearing that.

    Music is saturated with love songs. Turner wanted to give them a swerve after several of them appeared on Everything You’ve Come To Expect, the 2016 album he made with his side project The Last Shadow Puppets. A couple made their way onto this album, though, with the closing track The Ultracheese being the most gushing. It is this song that contains my favourite line of the whole album.


    Oh, the dawn won’t stop weighing a tonne
    I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done
    But I haven’t stopped loving you once

    The last lines of the album’s closing track The Ultracheese

    Whenever I hear that, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s such a great observation about love – we mess up sometimes, but we never stop loving.

    In September last year, I saw Arctic Monkeys on their UK tour at the Sheffield Arena. It was a dream come true, seeing my heroes in the flesh in their hometown. The aesthetic they had created with the album carried on perfectly – the stage design, the clothes the band wore and even their hairstyles complemented Tranquility Base wonderfully.

    Wide shot of the stage at Sheffield Arena as Arctic Monkeys performed
    Seeing Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in September 2018

    Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a brilliant, mature, visceral album that I will be listening to for years to come. I hope you give it a try.

    Track list (click on song to listen)

    1. Star Treatment
    2. One Point Perspective
    3. American Sports
    4. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
    5. Golden Trunks
    6. Four Out Of Five
    7. The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip
    8. Science Fiction
    9. She Looks Like Fun
    10. Batphone
    11. The Ultracheese

    Now watch Arctic Monkeys perform the opening track, Star Treatment, live at TRNSMT festival in Glasgow from July 2018.