My favourite band, Arctic Monkeys, released their first new material in more than four years this week.
There’d Better Be A Mirrorball is the first single to be released from their new album, The Car, which is out on 21st October.
The Sheffield band spent some time recording last summer at the 14th century Butley Priory in Suffolk. People there said: “Being serenaded while watering and weeding the garden, listening to the double bass, drums and piano wafting out of the open double doors, was pretty nice.”
I’ve been playing the new song on repeat since it was released, and when I haven’t it has been running through my mind like a particularly voracious earworm. The word I would use to describe it is sumptuous – there are so many layers to enjoy. Alex Turner’s voice sounds better than ever, deep and brooding, with the strings giving it Bond theme vibes. Lyrically, it’s a break up song; I’ve heard it described as “Mardy Bum for grown ups”. Here are my favourite lines:
Arctic Monkeys played their first gig since 2019 in Istanbul, Turkey at the beginning of August and made their way across Europe performing mainly at festivals before headlining Reading + Leeds Festival last weekend. You can see highlights of their set here.
The photos above are just a snapshot of my bedroom, which since being redecorated recently has become something of an Arctic Monkeys shrine. Now you’ve seen those, you’ll hopefully understand that for me the release of new music from them is like Christmas. I already know what will be the soundtrack to my autumn.
I’ll be 30 on 25th August – despite my protestations about not being done with my 20s yet. Anyway, the other night I made a playlist of songs that hold memories for me in my life so far. These are not necessarily favourites (I haven’t listened to Cher for a while, I have to say), but ones that take me back to a particular time and place. I hope you find a song you really like here, and look out for the links that look like this – clicking on them will give some extra information about what I’m banging on about.
SNAP! – Rhythm Is A Dancer
The number one single in the UK on the day I was born, 25th August 1992.
Scatman John – Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)
My mum won a hifi system in a radio competition, the kind that would have been way out of our price range, and somehow it ended up in my bedroom. I remember listening to this song on it and being fascinated by it.
Cher – Believe
Brings back memories of being driven around Norwich by my mum with this blasting out very loudly.
Cartoons – Witch Doctor
Hearing it now, this song is completely ridiculous – but I can definitely remember hearing it at home, where we had it on CD. Some people had Abbey Road… I think it sounds a bit like Scatman John in terms of playing around with mouth sounds, so there could be a link there.
Dario G – Carnaval de Paris
Originally released for the 1998 World Cup, though I have no memory of that tournament (2002 was the first one I can recall). This was actually used by Sky Sports as the theme tune to their Premier League coverage in the early 2000s, and that’s where I remember it from.
Heather Small – Proud
We all sang in this in the school hall on our last day at Norman First in July 2000. Corny? Yes. Memorable? Definitely.
U2 – Beautiful Day
You’ll notice a trend of songs I remember from being theme tunes to TV shows. This was what ITV used for their highlights programme The Premiership, when they briefly held the rights away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in the early 2000s.
MIKA – Grace Kelly
A massive hit in 2007, this seemed to be on the radio every morning on the way to school. I was surprised to see MIKA turn up as one of the hosts of this year’s Eurovision – I’d not heard a peep from him for years.
The Killers – Read My Mind
I remember listening to this a lot when I was at sixth form – 2008 to 2010. Seeing The Killers perform it live at Carrow Road in June this year was a special moment.
Arctic Monkeys – Brianstorm
There will be a lot of Arctic Monkeys on this list – after all, they’re my favourite band. The first album of theirs I actually owned on CD was their second, Favourite Worst Nightmare. This song was track one.
Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor
Their first single and the Arctic Monkeys song I reckon most people will have heard of.
Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz
My Arctic Monkeys obsession led to me discovering Submarine, which is my favourite film. Arctics frontman Alex Turner did the soundtrack and this is my favourite song from it.
Arctic Monkeys – Black Treacle
Reminds me of driving backwards and forwards between Norfolk and Essex when I was at university. This is from their 2011 album Suck It and See.
Pulp – Do You Remember The First Time?
I can’t remember the first time I heard this song but it always stops me in my tracks when I hear it. Makes me feel nostalgic and sentimental. It’s between this and Babies for my favourite Pulp song.
Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone
Probably my favourite of all Arctic Monkeys songs and one that reminds me of an unrequited love.
Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough
Was played a lot at Carrow Road during the years Paul Lambert was manager (2009 to 2012). Some of the happiest and most successful times Norwich City have had in my lifetime.
Grandaddy – A.M. 180
The theme tune to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, a programme I have seen many, many times over and still go back to now and again.
Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta
The theme tune to Peep Show. I first saw the sitcom starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb in a Media Studies lesson at school, oddly enough, but I loved it and have seen every episode more times than is healthy.
Morning Runner – Gone Up In Flames
Another TV theme tune – this one is from The Inbetweeners. The sitcom about four lads and their time at sixth form was broadcast exactly when I was at sixth form myself and, I can tell you, it was very realistic.
The Wombats – Anti-D
I spent a fair bit of time as a uni student being miserable – this song was released around that time and I can remember listening to it in my more self-indulgent moments in the room I rented in a lady’s house a short walk from the college.
Cage The Elephant – Shake Me Down
Another song I can remember hearing a lot during my time at uni.
Underworld – Caliban’s Dream
I watched every minute of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and can remember being spellbound by this song. They were a great Olympics and they happened just a month or so after my mum and I moved to a little terraced house in Dereham. Happy times.
Arctic Monkeys – Do I Wanna Know?
From the fifth Arctic Monkeys albumAM, released in 2013. An absolute banger – I saw them live in their native Sheffield in 2018 and this sounded amazing.
Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks
For a little while, I taught my friend to drive in the empty Sainsbury’s car park after work on a Sunday. Our musical tastes were very different. This is one of the only songs we both liked so we played it a lot while she was driving around.
Arctic Monkeys – One Point Perspective
Arctic Monkeys finally released a new album in 2018, their first for five years. This masterpiece is my favourite track from it.
Joe Cocker – With A Little Help From My Friends
As I mentioned before, I saw Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in 2018. This song was played over the speakers just after the gig had finished and the audience were filing out. It reminds me of the complete euphoria of seeing my favourite band in the flesh for the first time.
Talking Heads – Take Me to the River
A more recent memory, I can recall driving around listening to this song, just driving for the hell of it and lost in thought.
Blossoms – Your Girlfriend
I first heard Blossoms in 2016, when their single Charlemagne was played a lot on Radio X. I really got into them when I heard this song for the first time, sitting in my car at work during my lunch break a few years ago. They are now one of my favourite bands and I’ve got tickets to see them live in Norwich this November.
The Rolling Stones – She’s A Rainbow
During the first Covid lockdown, the Wednesday night trip to the pub was replaced by drinks and music in the living room. This song was one of the highlights.
If you’ve got this far, thanks very much! This was just a bit of fun for myself really. If you want to carry these songs around with you, I put them in a Spotify playlist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LEE PAYNE 