LEE PAYNE

Tag: submarine

  • 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.

  • My favourite film – Submarine

    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.

    Oh, and the fact that Alex Turner, the frontman of Arctic Monkeys, wrote and performed six songs for Submarine’s soundtrack is just a coincidence…

    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.