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:
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.
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.
LEE PAYNE 