VIDEO: Arctic Monkeys, "Brianstorm" (From Favourite Worst Nightmare)
It’s two o’clock on a warm, spring, Mother’s Day Sunday, and three of the four Arctic Monkeys are just now being roused from their beds aboard a deluxe tour bus parked on Lansdowne Street. It’s a rock star’s prerogative to get up every morning in the afternoon. But today that’s posing a minor problem because two Monkeys — singer/guitarist Alex Turner and guitarist Jamie Cook — are meant to be performing, well, right now, for an intimate crowd of radio-contest winners at a WFNX-sponsored event on the other side of the river, at New Alliance Studio in Cambridge. The goal: to promote the band’s new sophomore album, Favourite Worst Nightmare (Domino). The other two Monkeys — bassist Andy Nicholson and drummer Matt Helders — are staying behind to spend a little time with me. From the look a disheveled Helders gives me as I try to make conversation, he’s not all that excited by the presence of a stranger amid the frenzied activity of Arctic Monkeys’ command center (a pair of tables packed crammed with computers, printers, fax machines, and all manner of paperwork upstairs at Axis).
Later that evening, Arctic Monkeys will perform for a capacity crowd at the club next door, Avalon. That will be the highlight of their day. After which, I presume, they’ll beat a hasty retreat into their home on wheels, the command center will be disassembled and packed away, and they’ll be off to the next city on their agenda, where they’ll do it all again. Glamor? There’s not much of that here. Glitz? Hardly. What I’m witnessing is the workaday business of a band on the rise — or, more specifically, the mild frustration of a drummer in search of not coffee but orange juice.
Then again, to call Arctic Monkeys a band on the rise is to understate massively the situation these four boys from Sheffield have found themselves in since their first big single, the frenetic, hook-spiked “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” hit the airwaves in the UK in October 2005. That set the stage for their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (Domino), to make UK history in January 2006: the disc, in its first week, moved 350,000-plus units, a stunning feat in an age of fragmented demographics. But breaking sales records has little to do with what’s made the Monkeys such a big deal over the past year and a half. No, the real kicker is the way they live up to and even surpass the hype that surrounds so many young British bands. Not since Nirvana has an outfit come storming onto the scene with the promise of making rock relevant again. Yet though you can go all the way back to Gavin Rossdale and Bush in the ’90s and find plenty of English bands who sound like Nirvana, Arctic Monkeys aren’t one of them.
Critics have tried to make all kinds of comparisons stick, from old-school Britpunks like Gang of Four and the Jam (that touch of a young Paul Weller in the tone of Turner’s voice and the slash-and-jab guitars and almost funky rhythm section that support him) to new bands like the White Stripes and the Vines (the Monkeys being thought to have some of the same raw, garage-band qualities). But if the first album didn’t go far enough to prove that the Monkeys had stumbled onto something they could call their own simply by following the twists and turns of Turner’s songwriting, then the new one, with its slightly higher production values and expanded sonic range, should.
“Yeah, people will compare us to Gang of Four or other bands like that and we’ve really never heard any of that,” says Helders, the “talkative” one. “When we were growing up, when I was about 12 or something, I think I was into listening to Oasis. I mean, I liked to sing them and stuff. I didn’t really know anything about them. But while I was at school, I’d listen to a lot of Dr. Dre and hip-hop.”
Nicholson, who was the last to join the band (he’s known the rest of the guys only since he was . . . 10), continues: “When we were 14, everyone at school was listening to Eminem and Dr. Dre. We’d try to impress each other by knowing all the words.”
That immersion in hip-hop during his formative years may account for Turner’s facility with lyrics. Torrents of words flow with typical ease in “Fluorescent Adolescent,” a stuttering tune he showers with the likes of “You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress/Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis/Everything’s in order in a black hole/Nothing seems as pretty as the past, though/That Bloody Mary’s lacking a Tabasco/Remember when he used to be a rascal?” And what’s the last time a band’s first big hit had a Shakespeare reference (“There ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets/Just banging tunes and DJ sets and/Dirty dance floors and dreams of naughtiness”)?