LEE PAYNE

Tag: out

  • 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.

  • In search of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

    Remember my Durham holiday photo challenge? That stemmed from me trying to avoid getting bored during a week off work. Well – I’ve had another week off.

    I always try to have a week off just before the Christmas rush starts, but I’m not very good at resting or doing nothing. So last week I decided to use one of my free days to go in search of something that had fascinated me for ages. I went looking for the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.

    I had not been to London for a proper day out since last December. I’d been there for the play-off final at Wembley, but this was my first visit to the city itself in almost a year. As such, after getting off the train at Liverpool Street I wandered around for a while, taking in my surroundings and the big buildings before making my way anywhere.

    Eventually I went to Canada Water station and took the London Overground to Crystal Palace. When you come from Norwich you are used to everything being pretty close by – it took about half an hour to get from Canary Wharf to Crystal Palace! When the train finally arrived, I walked out of the station and was immediately filled with hope.

    1
    When you’ve come all this way looking for Dinosaurs, this was a pleasing sign to find.

    I was definitely on the right track.

    In case you don’t know, the Crystal Palace was a huge glass building that was built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. When the exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to Penge Common in South London. It had such an impact that the area it stood in itself became known as Crystal Palace.

    The land surrounding the Crystal Palace was landscaped and became Crystal Palace Park. The Palace burned down in 1936, but you can still see where it would have been. And one of the elements of the original park that still remain are the dinosaurs.

    I followed the path and got my first glimpse of the sculptures.

    3
    You don’t get those in Eaton Park.

    These models have been in place since 1854. 161 years! They were the first attempt to make large scale models of dinosaurs in the world, and were designed using the Victorians’ best ideas of what they looked like -they were made a full six years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Scientifically speaking, we now consider the sculptures to be rather inaccurate. But for me that just makes them all the more interesting.

    The Iguanodon models, the Park's most famous residents.
    The Iguanodon models, the Park’s most famous residents.
    A close up of Iguanodon.
    A close up of Iguanodon.

    There are not just dinosaur sculptures there. The idea was to make models of extinct animals from different eras. The dinosaurs were one part of that.

    6
    This is a Megaloceros. You can probably guess it is related to the deer.

    It was well worth the trip out to see them. It takes a bit of extra time to get there, and it’s a little bit off the tourist track, but there is plenty to see out there. I might even come back when it’s a bit warmer.

    After ticking the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs off my ‘to do’ list, I headed back to central London and did the usual things tourists do when they are in central London.

    The London Eye is ready for Christmas.
    The London Eye is ready for Christmas.
    Parliament, taken from the other side of Westminster Bridge.
    Parliament, taken from the other side of Westminster Bridge.

    It was then time to head home. And I managed to make it back, despite Greater Anglia’s best efforts. My train back to Norwich was cancelled so I had to make a detour to Cambridge in order to get home! I didn’t mind that much though, it had still been a decent day.

    I have another week off work in January – I wonder what I’ll get up to then?