Arctic Monkeys combine rock energy, wit of England’s north

RAW rock energy and a passion for the wit and poetry of England’s north have taken Arctic Monkeys on a long journey from Sheffield.

A 2006 photograph of the band, from left, Matt Helders, Alex Turner, Jamie Cook and origi

ALEX Turner is doing his best to ­stifle a few early morning yawns after one of the biggest nights of his professional life. The 28-year-old Arctic Monkeys frontman and songwriter can be forgiven a little weariness, given he and his colleagues have been touring through North and Central America and Eur­ope for the best part of nine months.

The gig the previous evening, at Boston’s Agganis Arena, is the latest on the Sheffield band’s American tour to promote its fifth album, last year’s AM. The show is a resounding success in front of nearly 7000 fans. Turner’s recollection of it and of similar triumphs across the US in ­recent weeks are enough to snap him out of his initial fatigue.

“It has taken us a while,” he says in his distinctive South Yorkshire drawl, “but things are beginning to happen here.”

If the US has taken Arctic Monkeys to its bosom, so too Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook, bassist Nick O’Malley and drummer Matt Helders have adopted Uncle Sam. California has been their home for the past couple of years, at least when the band hasn’t been on the road. They’re part of the Los Angeles rock elite. They ride expensive motorcycles and are pictured in celebrity magazines, not least Turner, often with his girlfriend, American actress-model Arielle Vandenberg.

With his tattoos and sharp quiff, Turner exudes a rock-star confidence, not something that was immediately apparent when the Arctic Monkeys arrived on the world stage on the back of the delicious punk-pop anthem I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor in 2005. Back then the four musicians (including bassist Andy Nicholson, who left after the first album) had their heads wrapped in the teenage angst and adventure around them in the working-class Sheffield suburb of High Green, where the fledgling band grew up and cut its teeth making demos and giving them away at shows.

They were boys looking for escape but seemed unsure about what to do once they found it. Even on their first visit to Australia in 2007 the Monkeys (now with O’Malley on bass) appeared uncomfortable with the career they had carved for themselves; an awkward, motley bunch that only connected — and then some — from the stage. Now they’ve grown up, musically and as people, a development the wordy Turner describes in beautifully colloquial terms as “getting better at getting the legs straight on the table”.

“I think anybody between the ages of 16 and 28 probably changes quite a lot anyway,” Turner says. “In this strange occupation there are probably some different changes, but it’s hard to say what they are.”

Turner has reason to be cheerful. The Monkeys’ previous two albums, Humbug (2009) and Suck It and See (2011), received mixed reviews and enjoyed moderate sales compared with the band’s debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006) and its successor Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), two albums bristling with an energy, venom and Turner’s snappy ­lyrics that took the rock world by surprise.

AM, however, has recaptured the zeitgeist, not least in Australia, where it went to No 1. On the eve of their latest tour here, which begins in Sydney on May 6, Turner is aware that, as people and as a unit, he and his bandmates never had it so good. While they have always delivered as a live attraction, there was a lot riding on the fortunes of AM. It was produced by James Ford, who has been at the controls for the last four albums and he, along with co-producer Ross Orton, another Sheffield muso, have helped refresh the Monkeys sound without tampering too much with the original formula. Five singles — R U Mine?, Do I Wanna Know?, Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?, One for the Road and Arabella have been taken from it and have become staples of their live set.

“This record has been so well received and the biggest songs in our show now are songs from this record rather than the first record,” says Turner.

WORDS have always been important to Turner, even before he became the vocalist and lyricist for the Arctic Monkeys. He was a fastidious English student at school in Sheffield (with an original sense of humour, according to his teacher). Had he not found fame and fortune with the band he says he would have gone on to study English at Manchester University.

What stopped him from doing that was the momentum that built after he left school and the band began rehearsing and doing small shows around Sheffield in 2003. They recorded songs to give away at gigs and online. It was fans uploading these songs on the internet that spread the word about the band. The Arctic Monkeys were one of the first examples of a band attracting commercial interest through this relatively new medium and soon, after signing to Domino in 2005, they were the poster boys for the internet music generation.

Turner says the Monkeys “weren’t that aware” of being radically different when they first started. “I remember thinking there were six or seven bands in different counties doing the exact same thing then. Maybe there were.”

As much as the frenetic energy of Dancefloor and just about everything on that first album was a hurricane of fresh air, so too Turner’s savage tongue and insightful poetry offered a new take on the pop lyric. That combination of wit and what was once called gritty British realism has been central to Turner’s oeuvre.

There’s an urgency, poignancy and black humour in his lyrics, particularly the early ones, that owe a lot to British writers such as Alan Sillitoe and 1960s films including This Sporting Life, Billy Liar and A Kind of Loving, among others, which examine the minutiae of working-class struggle in the north of England.

In the beginning many of the songs, including Dancefloor, took as their starting point the social mayhem of Sheffield nightclubs — the brawls, the laughs, the prostitutes — that were a common part of the landscape. In essence they were the group’s conversations set to music.

“The songs on that first record were written for a small circle of friends, some of whom were in the band,” says Turner. “They were like in-jokes or something. In a lot of that stuff it would be the music first and then the words would be chasing behind that wagon … to subscribe to whatever the bass and the drums would dictate. Especially in the beginning it was that. Then the landscape changes pretty dramatically, even if you don’t want it to. Now it’s more practised.”

The new album, recorded in California and featuring, among others, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Imposters drummer Pete Thomas, has a worldlier bent and is subject to a few fresh influences including hip-hop and heavy metal.

Songs such as R U Mine? and Do I Wanna Know? have a more romantic touch, although still with northern humour attached (“Do you ever get that fear that you can’t shift/ The type that sticks around like summat in your teeth?” Turner sings on Do You Wanna Know?).

There’s also the breezy Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?, a song covered a few months ago by Miley Cyrus on MTV Unplugged. Turner rates her twerk-free version. “She gave it some welly at the end,” he says, drawing on the vernacular once more. “She has a very impressive range.”

His own voice is in fine shape too, he says, and he’s happy the band he helped start has evolved and continues on an upward trajectory 12 years after its inception.

There is one particular connection to the past on AM that illustrates Turner’s passion for northern wit and poetry. The last song, I Wanna Be Yours, is a take on Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke’s work of the same name, a spiky love poem that features the lines:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

It’s hardly a surprise Cooper Clarke was one of Turner’s earliest influences.

“It was seeing him perform that made me start writing lyrics the way I did for that first record,” he says. “I had written a couple of songs before that, but when I saw him … you know, I realised I can write about this stuff now. I suppose it was a pivotal moment. The humour you get in his poetry is something I thought you could have in songs. At that stage you’re really worried about being taken seriously, in the beginning. The moment you stop putting humour in there is when you’re worried you’ll cross the line and it won’t be taken seriously. John kind of walks that line.”

Lyrics are only part of the Arctic Monkeys’ story of course. Most of the music is credited to the band as a unit and each individual has had a significant input on the band’s sound. Helders’s drumming, for one thing, is a distinctive element, not least on Dancefloor. It’s the music and words combined that give the song a universal appeal.

Turner says the words for Dancefloor, about being given the eye by a girl in a nightclub, “are based on a universal concept, although they are delivered in a colloquial way. I think what overrides that is that from the amazing drum intro it is just so energetic. It’s all of the elements that are responsible. In spite of the words being difficult to understand for foreigners, that’s almost like that is the last thing you get to when you hear the song. There’s all that melody and the rhythm — that gets you first.”

Five albums in seven years is a prolific output for a 21st-century rock band. It must be gratifying for Arctic Monkeys and Turner to find their most recent one has taken them to a new level of success, that by tweaking their formula — as great artists are wont to do — they have been able to keep one step ahead of the game.

“On the one hand I do think it’s a craft and you get better at it,” he says, “but on the other it’s not entirely like that. There is something that comes with practice in songwriting, but I still think you need that other side of it, which is kind of a law unto itself … the only way to continue is to change, but not completely. There is a connection to the early days. There was never a complete reinvention and going back to the drawing board.”

And despite the musical evolution, the dynamic within the band, as musicians and as friends, has remained the same throughout. “We’ve moved up a few gears and we’re really playing well as a band,” he says, “but the dynamic between us has always been the same.”

And, he adds, Arctic Monkeys have a long way to go.

“In some ways it seems like it has been a long road,” he says. “I guess you only feel it has gone quickly when you’re at the end of it … and I don’t think we’re at the end of it yet.”

The Arctic Monkeys’ AM Tour begins in Sydney on May 6 and travels to Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.