The Lads Are Alright

Monday night in Bristol, England. Inside the Carling Academy nightclub, the mood is borderline hysteria as the Arctic Monkeys saunter onstage and Alex Turner, their skinny, scruffy, casually charismatic frontman, sings the words with which he opens every show: “Anticipation has the habit to set you up for disappointment.”

In the context of the song, “The View From the Afternoon,” the sentiment applies to a big night out. Delivered to crowds dizzy with lager and excitement, however, it sounds like a wry disclaimer, a cute nod to the maelstrom that currently engulfs these four young men from the north of England.

In recent months, Britain has gone unashamedly gaga over the Arctic Monkeys. Less than a year since they released their first limited-edition EP, they have notched up two No. 1 singles and the fastest-selling debut album in British history; at one point, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not was shifting almost 5,000 copies an hour. When influential rock weekly NME booked its annual package tour of new bands last fall, the Arctic Monkeys weren’t yet successful enough to headline. A few months later, the biggest, most talked-about new band on the planet is playing second on the bill in venues it could sell out many times over.

Tonight’s audience, from the teenagers in Strokes T-shirts to the thirtysomethings in Smiths ones, look as if they can’t believe their luck. Every person seems to know every word to every song. At several points, Turner simply stops singing and watches this 1,600-strong choir of unofficial backing vocalists do his work for him.

How must it feel to be at the center of British music’s biggest phenomenon in a decade? Earlier that day, in the back of a tour bus outside the Academy, Turner absentmindedly strums an acoustic guitar as he tries to explain. “It’s all about how you look at it. I think the core of it, the important bit, the center of whatever it is, is the music … man,” he adds self­consciously, wise enough to recognize that “it’s all about the music” is a geezer cliché but young enough to use it anyway. “You have to try and remember that when all these sales figures come flying at you.” He sounds wistful, as if recalling a long-lost era. “To start with, that’s what it was about.”



America has every reason to be suspicious of British music’s hype cycle; it is an excitable culture, hungry for novelty, and today’s heroes are often tomorrow’s laughing stocks (cheers, Craig David!). But the Arctic Monkeys’ popularity is no parochial affair. Their American enthusiasts include such esteemed parties as Jack White and the New York Times, which raved, “You probably won’t hear a better CD all year long,” even though it was only January.

“Hype” is the wrong word here. Rather than driving the buzz, the media have been scrambling to catch up with the kids. Thanks to fertile, fan-led online music communities such as MySpace.com, the band’s MP3s had been downloaded thousands of times before they even received their first review.

Another thing: The album is every bit as good as its cheerleaders claim. Better, even. On one level, Arctic Monkeys’ white-knuckle pop-punk cherry-picks from the decade’s alt-rock heroes: the precision of the Strokes, the muscular rhythms of Franz Ferdinand and the eccentric wit of the Libertines. But it is also consistently surprising. The agile grooves nod towards funk while the melodies sometimes seem to predate rock & roll altogether, with hints of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, 1940s English music hall and the communal celebration of soccer terrace chants. Such maturity belies their age; Turner and guitarist Jamie Cook are 20, bassist Andy Nicholson and drummer Matt Helders just 19.

Most important, the lyrics encapsulate in spine-tingling detail how it feels to be young and English. The album loosely chronicles a night out in their northern, industrial hometown of Sheffield, Yorkshire. It sweeps the listener past indie hotties (“I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”), obstructive cab drivers (“Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured”), sullen girlfriends (“Mardy Bum”) and surly bouncers (“From the Ritz to the Rubble”). Based on real events and specific locations, it’s as true as a documentary but as sharp as a sitcom. If you’re a 17-year-old in Britain right now, it’s the soundtrack to your life.

“They’re very honest,” approves English hip-hop star Mike Skinner, a.k.a. The Streets. “That sounds simple, but it’s a difficult, courageous thing to do in music.”

“I genuinely believe this is one of the most important British bands of all time,” says NME editor Conor McNicholas. “In the future, people will talk about the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Oasis and the Arctic Monkeys. In terms of their cultural impact and what they’re capable of achieving, you could put them just below the Beatles.”

Put all this to the band’s bluntly down-to-earth Jamie Cook, however, and he’ll sound both flattered and bemused. “People do blow stuff up a bit,” he sighs. “For a bunch of 19-year-olds to start being called Britain’s saviors of music when the first record’s not even out yet, you do think, ‘Fucking hell! Calm down! Let us make a few first.’”



When the Strokes made their entrance five years ago, they looked as though they had been bred to be rock stars. But you could walk into any pub or shopping center in England and find people who resemble the Arctic Monkeys: jeans, T-shirts, unremarkable haircuts, problem skin.

“We don’t look like superstars,” says Andy Nicholson. “I think people look at us and think, ‘They’re just normal people making good music. I’m sure I could do it.’” He grins. “Anyone can do it. We’re living proof of that.”

Nicholson is the band wit, reliably swift with a self-deprecating quip. Cook is the bullishly confident blue-collar lad and Helders the quietly amiable diplomat. Turner is harder to get a handle on. Fidgety and intense, he’s the least talkative member of the group, chewing over his answers for so long that he ends up doubting his own words. When the Arctic Monkeys are trading banter, he’s the least likely to join in.

“He observes things,” says Alan Smyth, who produced the band’s early demos. “Whenever anyone popped in the studio he would sit and listen to them before he would say anything. He watches before he speaks. He doesn’t like to talk crap.”

Conor McNicholas witnessed the band dynamic backstage on the NME tour. “You get a real sense that you don’t want to piss off Alex. It was almost like he was somebody who had to be protected. It’s not like he runs the band, but he sets the temperature for the whole thing.”

The man in question gazes at his sneakers as he explains the band’s genesis. “It was just a hobby. Something to do because your mates were doing it.”

Three-quarters of the band grew up in High Green, a nondescript village outside Sheffield that’s so small you can walk the length of it in less than 15 minutes. Nicholson lived down the road in Hillsborough. Turner is the son of a music teacher. The media may have labeled the band working-class heroes but its members never have.

In December 2001, Turner and Cook received guitars for Christmas and set about learning to play, rehearsing in Turner’s garage. Before long, they had adapted the name of Helders’s dad’s band during the 1970s: Arctik Monkeez. When their first vocalist, Glyn Jones, left after a few months, Turner cautiously stepped up to the microphone. Meanwhile, he and Helders also played in a local funk band called Judan Suki.

In August 2003, Judan Suki were recording a demo at a Sheffield studio and Turner asked Alan Smyth if he would produce his other band. They’d written only four songs; the rest of their live set consisted of songs by the likes of the Vines and the White Stripes.

“They were giddy,” remembers Smyth. “They weren’t the tightest of bands by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought they definitely had something special going on. I told Alex off for singing in an American voice at that first session.”

Turner admits that he was initially too self-conscious to sing in unaffected Sheffield argot and write lyrics that were about his own life. Yorkshiremen have a reputation for down-to-earth stoicism; they don’t take to show-offs. “You don’t really have any sort of identity, and yet you have to have songs that sound like ‘you,’ whatever that is,” Turner says. “That took a lot of time.”

With different bandmates, he thinks, “it could have been shit. I’m quite easily influenced. I could have ended up anywhere with a little push from whoever. So it was important that it was us four.”

Smyth introduced the Arctic Monkeys to Geoff Barradale, a seasoned musician with whom he’d played in a band called Seafruit. Barradale became their manager and paid for them to record four more three-song demos over the next 15 months, while they were still in college. “It was like walking into a youth club,” he says. “I thought it was fantastic. It was naive, it was raw, it had character. Everything you could want from a band was there.”

With each session their confidence and songwriting took another leap forward. Barradale would drive them around venues in the north of England to establish their reputation, handing out copies of the demo CDs after each show. Says Barradale: “There was a lot of, ‘What are we doing this gig for? When are we going to get a record deal?’ And I was going, ‘Look, you don’t need a record label, you need a fanbase.’”

Early enthusiasts began posting the songs on their own websites, inspiring the band to do the same. By the end of 2004, thousands of fans knew their songs inside out. “That was the most bizarre thing,” marvels Smyth. “A band with no records out and an audience that knew every single word.”

The tipping point came on March 7, 2005, at a free venue called the Harley. “There were people outside watching through the windows because they couldn’t get in,” recalls Helders. “People were crowdsurfing and falling onstage.” Shortly afterwards, they self-released their first EP, Five Minutes With Arctic Monkeys, before signing to Domino records, the independent label that discovered Franz Ferdinand. One of the 1,500 copies of that debut EP would now cost you $200.



N.W.A introduced the strife-torn city of Compton into hip-hop folklore. The Smiths made the Salford Lads’ Club in Manchester an unlikely tourist destination after featuring it on the sleeve of The Queen Is Dead. To this list of unspectacular locations lent a mythic glow by a hit record can now be added the Frog & Parrot, a pub in the center of Sheffield. This is the place pictured in the CD booklet of Whatever You Say I Am …; a friend of the band is seen stumbling blearily home.

“When we’re locking up, there’s always a load of kids outside taking snaps, recreating the pose,” says pub manager Nick Simmonite.

Above the bar hang four clocks, the kind you might find in an upscale hotel lobby showing the time in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. These four, however, are all in the same time zone and represent four Yorkshire towns mentioned in Arctic Monkeys’ lyrics: High Green, Hillsborough, Hunters Bar and Rotherham. That last town is mentioned in “Fake Tales of San Francisco,” their agenda-setting attack on skinny-tied posers. “I’d love to tell you all my problems,” sings Turner in his thickest Sheffield accent. “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham.”

Sheffield’s musical identity, like its economy, was founded on the steel industry. The clang of heavy machinery inspired the harsh, metallic synth-pop of Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League, and later the spiky techno of the Warp label, home to Autechre and Aphex Twin. It’s a heritage the Arctic Monkeys playfully reference on “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” in which a girl is “dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984.”

But there’s an equally strong tradition of left-wing politics and working-class pride. Today the student housing around the corner from the Frog & Parrot bears a poem etched in metal plates at the foot of each window. The last line runs, “These streets are full of heroes.”

Embodying this philosophy, many Sheffield bands celebrate ordinary lives. The Human League’s biggest hit, “Don’t You Want Me,” began with a waitress in a cocktail bar. A decade later, Pulp became stars with pin-sharp vignettes of teenage flings and adult disappointments. When Turner started writing lyrics, his biggest influences were Manchester’s so-called “punk poet,” John Cooper Clarke, and hip-hop; the band currently come onstage to Warren G’s 1994 gangsta hit “Regulate.” Turner’s lyrics can be seen as a distinctly British response to rap. There’s the same delight in regional accents and slang, a similar eye for local detail. He says he types ideas for lyrics into his cellphone but doesn’t carry a notebook because “I would just look like a fucking idiot, wouldn’t I?” He winces at the thought. “People would say, ‘What are you doing, you cunt?’”

Turner thinks that some people misunderstand what he’s trying to say. Unlike Morrissey, he isn’t desperate to escape or condemn his provincial upbringing. Even as he takes a step back, he remains one of the people he’s singing about. “I don’t think it’s sneering as much as people think on first listen: ‘Oh, they’re saying this fucking small-town life is really terrible.’ We’re part of it. People aren’t as different as they think. Everyone’s as bad as each other, really.”

Cook vigorously agrees. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an indie kid or a football hooligan or whatfuckingever. You’ll still go out at the weekend, you’ll still get bollocksed and you’ll still try and cause a fight.”



Frankfurt, Germany. Two weeks after the Bristol show. Backstage at the Mousonturm, Alex Turner has just received a puzzling text message from Lisa Moorish, a British singer best known as the mother of illegitimate children by the country’s two most notorious rock stars, Liam Gallagher and Pete Doherty. It concerns the Sun, Britain’s leading tabloid.

“There’s a vile and disgusting story in today’s Sun about you and me,” it reads. “I’ve got my lawyer on to it and I would appreciate it if you were approached about it if you could set the record straight.”

The tour manager calls Geoff Barradale, who’s still in England. While he rushes out to buy a copy and report back, the band’s imaginations run riot. “‘Vile and disgusting,’” Cook repeats with a smirk. “I can’t wait to see that. That’s going in my scrapbook.”

Turner looks unamused. “I’m thinking how I’m going to tell my mum.”

The truth, fortunately for Mrs. Turner, is not as dramatic as Moorish makes out — the Sun simply claims that the 34-year-old Moorish made a move on Turner at an awards ceremony and he brushed her off — but this is a glimpse into the surreal world the Arctic Monkeys currently inhabit.

In recent weeks, newspapers have scrambled for new angles on the band’s success, from the Scottish doctor who criticized them for promoting smoking on the album cover to Lauren Bradwell, the Sheffield girl who dated Turner for four months at school. Her shocking revelation? “He was a lovely lad.”

The challenge that the Monkeys face is how to preserve their bloke-next-door perspective now that, like it or not, their lives have changed beyond recognition. Already when they go to their old haunts, fans thrust camera phones in their faces. Will that make the next album completely different?

“Oh, completely,” says Turner, who has already written several new songs, some of which will be included on a forthcoming EP. “You’re not that kid anymore.”

What they want, more than anything, is to cling to the reasons they made the album in the first place, and to record another one as quickly as possible. If you ask them about their ambitions in America (where their album debuted, encouragingly, at No. 24), they’ll lower their heads and say, “Wait and see.”

“We’re just little shits,” says Helders.

“We don’t want to take over the world,” Nicholson brusquely declares. “We don’t make music to have tea with Tony Blair. I’m proud of what we’ve done so far. We’re only 19. By 21 we could be working in the supermarket.”

Turner tries one last time to summarize what it’s like being an Arctic Monkey right now. “When we went to No. 1, my mate said to me there’s no one in the country who could say they know how you feel, because it’s never happened like this before. At first that’s quite daunting, because you think, ‘Shit!’” He laughs and shakes his head. “But you get on with it. You carry on.”