LEE PAYNE

Tag: pop

  • Listen To This: Suck It and See by Arctic Monkeys

    Arctic Monkeys in 2011

    There was a lot riding on the fourth studio album from Arctic Monkeys. 2009’s Humbug had seen the band adopt a daring new sound that divided fans, a big departure from the record breaking debut and the follow up that capitalised on its incredible success. The next effort was pivotal – would they blend everything they’d learned into a hit record, or alienate the people that had made them popular in the first place once and for all?

    In the gap between the Arctics’ third and fourth albums, frontman Alex Turner wrote and recorded six original songs for the soundtrack to Submarine, a film directed by Richard Ayoade – known as Moss from The I.T. Crowd – who had been behind the videos for Arctic Monkeys songs Fluorescent Adolescent and Cornerstone. I was made aware of it by Turner’s involvement but I loved the style, the story and the performances and it has become my favourite film.

    By 2010, Turner was living in New York with his then-girlfriend, the TV presenter and model Alexa Chung. It was there that he wrote most of the twelve songs that would make up the fourth Arctic Monkeys album. In Los Angeles, the band recorded live takes of each track – a different process to Humbug, where they used overdubbing.

    As for the title? It could have been The Rain-Shaped Shimmer Trap, inspired by the ‘colourful’ names often given to guitar fuzz pedals. According to drummer Matt Helders, ‘it were genuinely gonna be Thriller for, about… a week’. Eventually, they settled on the title of the album’s eleventh track to label the entire record: Suck It and See was born.

    The rather sparse cover of Suck It and See – some American retailers found the title offensive and covered it with a sticker

    Track listing

    She’s Thunderstorms
    Black Treacle
    Brick by Brick
    The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala
    Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair
    Library Pictures
    All My Own Stunts
    Reckless Serenade
    Piledriver Waltz
    Love Is a Laserquest
    Suck It and See
    That’s Where You’re Wrong

    Released on 6th June 2011, more than 82,000 copies of Suck It and See were sold in its first week, comfortably knocking Lady Gaga off the top of the albums chart and giving the Arctics another number one. The songs are much less dark than those on Humbug, the band returning to a more accessible pop sound – Q magazine described it as ‘the sound of a band drawing back the curtains and letting the sunshine in’. They remained unafraid of trying something new, however.

    The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala was the first Arctic Monkeys song I ever heard played over the PA system in a football ground, a sign of how mainstream this album was. Brick by Brick featured Matt Helders on vocals, with Turner only belting out the chorus. Some songs were inspired by such innocuous moments as someone telling Turner in the studio ‘don’t sit down, ’cause I’ve moved your chair’. Piledriver Waltz was written for the Submarine soundtrack and was re-recorded with the full band for the album.

    Turner’s insightful lyrics are still very much part of the package. On All My Own Stunts, he sings ‘Been watching cowboy films on gloomy afternoons/Tinting the solitude’, a possible reference to the long days in New York waiting for his girlfriend to come home. The excellent Love Is a Laserquest contains my favourite lyrics on the album:

    And do you still think love is a laserquest?
Or do you take it all more seriously?
I've tried to ask you this in some daydreams that I've had
But you're always busy being make-believe

And do you look into the mirror to remind yourself you're there?
Or have somebody's goodnight kisses got that covered?
When I'm not being honest, I pretend that you were just some lover

    Matt Helders has a lot to thank Suck It and See for – it was while recording the video for the title track that he met model Breana McDow. The couple had a daughter in 2015 and were married in 2016, though sadly divorced in 2019.

    Matt Helders and Breana McDow became a couple after shooting this video together

    Suck It and See was another important step for the Arctic Monkeys after Humbug, and paved the way for the huge success of AM that followed.

  • Watch This: Blossoms – Back To Stockport

    As much as I love football, I am getting a bit tired of the daily dose of games beamed live from empty grounds. I’m really starting to miss crowds now. A living, breathing crowd adds so much to sport. Bordered by empty seats, even the biggest games feel like no big deal – Liverpool v Manchester United might as well have been Tranmere v Oldham.

    Last night Arsenal played Newcastle, and, while I would usually have the game on in the background while doing other things, this time I decided to watch something more interesting. I watched Blossoms – Back To Stockport.

    It’s a documentary film about the band Blossoms, exploring their origins and showing their preparations for a big homecoming gig in front of 15,000 people at Edgeley Park, home of Stockport County Football Club, which took place on 22nd June 2019.

    Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, bass player Charlie Salt, lead singer Tom Ogden, drummer Joe Donovan and keyboard player Myles Kellock

    In case you haven’t heard of them, Blossoms are a five-piece band from the aforementioned town of Stockport, near Manchester. The sort of music they make is probably best defined as psychadelic-indie-rock-pop. They came fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2016 list, the broadcaster’s annual pick of musicians to listen out for in the year ahead. I first heard about them as I am a listener of Radio X, who included Blossoms on their similar Great X-Pectations list, and gave a lot of radio play to their single Charlemagne.

    Charlemagne, the breakthrough single for Blossoms

    I was immediately drawn to the band I think, in part, because there was a certain groove, a funk, to their songs – a sound that manages to simultaneously feel both modern and retro. I respect the fact that the frontman Tom Ogden writes all the songs and they all seem genuinely great guys who are living the dream. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a total devotee to Arctic Monkeys, so you can imagine how delighted I was to hear in the film that Blossoms started off doing Arctic Monkeys covers and described Alex Turner as an ‘idol’.

    The film is made to a very high standard. It goes in-depth on the back stories of the five members of the band (discovering that all but one of them is younger than me made me feel old), who go against the grain of many rock bands of the past by showing themselves to be best mates in a way that they simply couldn’t put on for the cameras. Footage of the Edgeley Park gig runs as a thread throughout, and there are even little animated inserts to go along with whatever story one of them is telling at that moment.

    In Ogden, the band have a figurehead who demonstrates great showmanship on stage – the long hair and the 70s suits – but away from it he’s a quiet guy who just likes walking his dog. The drummer, Joe Donovan, has been Ogden’s friend since they were at school together and is a ball of energy brilliantly described by the others as ‘like having a fan of the band who is in the band’. Bassist Charlie Salt is a sort of older brother figure (he was born in 1991 for Christ’s sake!) who has the air of someone who would be able to charm his way into anything. Myles Kellock plays the keyboards, but seemingly only half as much as he plays video games – there’s one shot in the film where he’s playing what looks like Mario Kart at the back of a recording studio while the others are working on a song. His keyboards certainly contribute greatly to that modern/retro sound I described earlier, though.

    That leaves my favourite member of the band, lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst. He has a quality that I admire a lot, and that is being funny with a straight face. He doesn’t go out of his way to make people laugh, he just has a dry wit that makes him naturally funny. I’m someone who relies a lot on sarcasm so I can relate. In one scene, the band are being fitted out with the suits they will wear on stage at the big gig and Dewhurst tells a hilarious story about how he’s had to have pockets made on his trousers because, according to the tailor, ‘you don’t have an arse’. He tells it in such a way that makes Ogden in the background crack up, as did I. Dewhurst is also an incredibly talented musician. On the most recent Blossoms album, Foolish Loving Spaces, on the track Your Girlfriend the cowbell-type sound at the beginning was produced by Dewhurst hitting the wheel of a car.

    Your Girlfriend, from the 2020 Blossoms album Foolish Loving Spaces

    The shots of 15,000 people packed tightly onto the Edgeley Park pitch feel like a window into a different world, one in which no one knew what social distancing was. As hard as it is to believe at the moment, those days will return but for now this film is a wonderful tonic for these locked down times.

    I urge you to both give Blossoms a listen and watch the film. Their music appeals to all ages – I gave my mum one of their albums as a present last year and she’s had it on almost constantly in her car ever since – and the film is inspiring, in that a group of lads who a few years ago were playing to fifty people in pubs are now headlining stadium gigs. Watch the trailer below and the film is on Amazon Prime.

    The trailer for Blossoms – Back To Stockport