Alex Turner on winning over a new generation
On the eve of Sheffield band Arctic Monkeys’ sold-out Australian tour, lead singer Alex Turner discusses his life onstage.
For Alex Turner, time is moving slowly, and the Arctic Monkeys frontman is using his to quote the cult book Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon to Vogue Australia. Some 20 years after Arctic Monkeys first formed – then, four scruffy teenagers kicking their heels in a back garden in Sheffield – Turner is sitting in an East London hotel looking towards the future and Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album, released on the cusp of another new era for the group who have continuously retooled what that means.
“It reminds me of when Doc is in this new place, surrounded by people acting like regulars, and he feels out of place,” Turner says, referencing the novel’s protagonist.
“He thinks about going back to his apartment, but he’s worried about not recognising it. Or worse, that it doesn’t recognise him. The key doesn’t fit. There was a bit of that with this record. Maybe you can’t get back there.”
‘There’ could mean something different to everyone. It might be the moment you first heard I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor in 2006, scratchy on the radio or way too loud and sweaty in a basement somewhere, or the split second Brianstorm became lodged in your brain irrevocably. Maybe it was with the band’s directional change of 2013’s rumbling AM, Turner’s thundering charisma winning over a new generation. Wherever ‘there’ is, it’s in the rear-view mirror now. And Turner, the band’s frontman and lyricist is relaxed, confident and pretty thankful for that.
This aligns with the mood of Arctic Monkeys’ seventh studio album, The Car. It’s a record about a record, a waltzing, emotional piece of art about making art and embracing a reflectiveness Turner has been working towards for the past two decades. The Car picks up where the band’s previous album Tranquillity Base Hotel + Casino left off in 2018, waving goodbye to the bruising riffs of AM in favour of something more elegant and crooning.
Turner knows the record is a risk. He knows the world is different, that their world is different, with Arctic Monkeys no longer sounding quite like the pioneers of indie rock, the genre that effectively shot them into the stratosphere.
“The new record certainly sounds very different to the sound we would make in the summer of 2002, but I think it feels somehow like it’s coming from the same place,” Turner says today of the first Arctic Monkeys album not made in a recording studio and the first in a very long time made in England. Yet even that homecoming is surprising when you consider the band’s chosen production location: the picturesque Butley Priory in Suffolk, a 14th-century monastery more popular with weddings than rock bands. Still, it’s a moment of rewilding, Turner agrees: “It’s as much based on my instincts as it was back then. There’s no more calculation.”
It was the summer of 2002 when Turner began making music in his parents’ garage with his then neighbour and friend Matt Helders, now the drummer for the band. It was a year until Arctic Monkeys played their first show though, then joined by classmate Andy Nicholson on bass and guitarist Jamie Cook, before Nicholson was eventually replaced by Nick O’Malley in 2006.
Their summer on the road in 2023 will truly mark the milestone anniversary for Arctic Monkeys. The singer is loath to think too much about the past today – not because it hurts, but because it feels so good to enjoy this moment. “
“That initial sharp success was already beyond our ambitions, and then everything changed. It was all beyond expectations”
There was a lyric that didn’t end up on the record, something about ‘an embargo on the memory of a mezzanine,’” Turner says of the limits of nostalgia. “We used to rehearse in this warehouse after the garage – a warehouse full of hats – and we were in the mezzanine in the corner, where Matthew’s dad works. It was a way of saying that you don’t forget about that stuff. But it’s not something you have to keep at the forefront of your mind.”
Arctic Monkeys will soon make the trip to Australia for the first time in four years, armed with both The Car and their entire back catalogue, for a tour that sold out almost immediately.
“One of the only shows I ever played on my birthday was down there,” Turner adds, of the fact they’ll be playing over the Australian summer – the second Arctic Monkeys show in Melbourne falls the day before the frontman turns 37. “We’ve always had a wonderful time there.”
When Vogue meets Turner, Arctic Monkeys are three weeks from starting their world tour. Everybody has their own firm idea of the songs that should be played in these career-spanning shows. It doesn’t bother Turner though – in fact, he doesn’t even know what ‘fan service’ means. “Is that an expression?” he asks laughing, when we suggest 20 years on, the band might be tired of the same singalongs.
“I’ve gone through phases of wanting to get away from those songs, but I’m just grateful I can still hit the notes,” he says, vowing that their eternally crowd-pleasing hit I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, isn’t going anywhere. “It is strange to still play songs every night that you wrote when you were 17. But they just have to evolve.”
Turner is comfortable with change, and with making fun of the idea he could be stubborn enough to consider hiding from it. He jokes about keeping Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run in the setlist, but then could not be more serious about the one song galvanising him right now. “It has to be Break My Soul, right?” he says, with the conviction of a man who knows how confident you have to be when bringing up Beyoncé. “She’s a superstar.”
As much as Turner says he doesn’t often think about the past, the most poignant moments of The Car do exactly that. ‘I know I promised this is what I wouldn’t do / But somehow giving it the old romantic fool seems to better suit the mood,’ Turner sings on lead single There’d Better be a Mirrorball, accepting that sometimes you do just have to surrender to a version of yourself that everybody thought you’d maybe left behind.
The moment Arctic Monkeys realised they could and should brave something different was when their third album, 2009’s stormy and experimental Humbug, wasn’t as successful as the first two.
“It was so important,” Turner says. “I remember feeling quite stuck before that; we’d gotten to this door and there was a worry of not going through it. It opened everything up – it’s the reason we’re sitting here now.”
Of what he might have hoped for, sometime around this day exactly 20 years ago, he says: “I don’t remember ever thinking, ‘We’re going to be the biggest band in the world.’ I’m not saying we’re that now, by any stretch of the imagination.” He pauses, anticipating our defence. “That initial sharp success was already beyond our ambitions, and then everything changed. It was all beyond expectations.”
But of course, it didn’t stop there, and still won’t. For Alex Turner, the wheels on the car just keep turning.
The Car is out now. Arctic Monkeys will tour Australia in January 2023.
This article appears in the November issue of Vogue Australia.