Coolest Man on the Planet
We did the triple, but in all honesty, I suppose we’re suppose to display some gratitude in that of course, ‘voted for by the people’ and all that, we’re very happy about that, but who else were gonna be best British band among ye?
—Alex Turner at NME awards in 2006 after winning 3 awards.
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In 2007 nothing was the same for Alex Turner. With a successful world tour in his rear view mirror Turner is focused on the future.
“I don’t think I’ve changed drastically. I don’t feel that different when I’m in town or at home or whatever,” Turner shrugs. “When I get home and watch telly, I don’t feel like a pop star. I know I’m making pop music but I don’t feel like a celebrity. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to act like a fucking pop star,” Turner told NME. However Turner’s reputation by this point had turned a bit cockish. Accusations of rock star arrogance were flying in the British media. “I dunno. Maybe I got pure adrenaline from it all kicking off and when I started having to do interviews or awards, I probably got more defensive, my guard went up,” Turner offered the explanation. A misunderstood-shy or “frightened kid” he would often counteract.
“Maybe a bit, and a bit frightened as well. I was 17. It didn’t seem frightening at the time but looking back, it were a bit unnerving. Back then, you just thought ‘fuckin hell, come on!’ and walked up to collect an award like you were Liam Gallagher or something,” Turner admitted to NME.
It’s the winter of 2007, in the UK, and Alex Turner is wearing a grey military style peacoat, black scarf, and washed out blue jeans. He’s sporting a bruce lee style haircut while using all of his limbs to explain the influences behind Arctic Monkeys’ new album, Favourite Worst Nightmare. He credits ESG, Prodigy, Breakwater, Queens of the stone age, and The Coral for the influence. (The rhythm section of ESG’s first album in particular sounds like it had a heavy influence on Favourite Worst Nightmare.)
“It’s said that a young girl, ’Elsie’, haunts the chamber, and unexplained faint whispers have appeared on recordings in the past,” Turner described the studio vibe to Rolling Stone in a somewhat serious tone.
Arctic Monkeys recorded their highly anticipated second album in East London with James Ford and Mike Crossey in charge of the production duties. Miloco Studios, a conglomerate of the music studios and combination of Milo Music, The Garden and Orinoco Studios, was chosen as the main location. The three studios merged as one and are responsible for producing some of the UK’s great albums by the artist such as Oasis, The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Prodigy, Roots Manuva, Coldplay, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds etc, Jarvis Cocker, and many others.
Favourite Worst Nightmare was written from song ideas the band would get in between sound checks and backstage “jams”. The repetitive nature of touring made the band fidgety on and off the stage, always messing around, playing covers of various new and old material.
“Some were written on the road – but I always try to write songs,” Turner shrugged. “Like right now, I’ve written about six tunes since the record. Some are just me with an acoustic, but others come from when we’re in practice – there’ll just be like a riff or a drumbeat we’ve recorded on a phone or something, and we’ll build it up from that. There’s loads of bits and then we put them altogether. You can only go so far strumming with an acoustic – it can become a bit one-dimensional,” Turner told Uncut.
The first single off the new album was “Brianstorm”, an up tempo song about a smooth talking and fashionably dressed character they allegedly met at a show in Studio Coast “Ageha” in Tokyo, Japan. The man described as a laid back Los Angeles character wearing a T-shirt and tie combination that left a mark on the band, enough to write their leading single about him.
The video was directed by Huse Monfaradi at Pinewood Studios, who directed the music video for “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”. The entire film crew and the band would stop working to watch Arctic Monkeys’ mailed-in Brit Award speech live on TV in the studio as it was happening on the same night. Monfaradi was largely inspired by 90s RnB videos and hired United Visual Artists, a London based artists group, to create a large LED backdrop for the video visuals. The decision to shoot the band entirely from behind was a risky move and not supported by everyone initially, but the end result surprised everyone and was highly praised by the fans and critics alike. The music video premiered on MTV on March 17th 2007 but failed to produce any award nominations.
“Brianstorm” was officially first released as a Single on April 2nd 2007, debuting at number 21 in the UK Singles Chart. It charted at #2 on the UK Singles Chart nearly dethroning Beyoncé and Shakira’s “Beautiful Liar”. The music video for the single was being recorded the same day as the Brit Awards Ceremony causing the band to have to mail-in two video acceptance messages. One where they appeared as The Wizard of Oz characters and the Village People in the other. Their manager hired a real builder, Chris ‘Stussy’ Newton, to appear with them in the Village People video spoof after spotting him on a building site and asked him to appear as a joke in place of bassist Nick O’Malley.
The costumes garnered an extraordinary amount of media attention in the aftermath of the Brit Awards that the costume shop owner Fiona Gallagher decided to put them up for sale. The seven costumes included Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow alongside the sailor, policeman and native American Indian from the Village People and were auctioned together as one item. The top bid allegedly went out to a local Hard Rock Cafe who would put it up for display. The Wizard of Oz theme runs through out the album concluding with “Old Yellow Bricks” and the line “Dorothy was right”.
The band took their costume fascinations further when they won the Brit Awards for best album dressing up in traditional English country and hunting outfits, caps, pipes, and all, and even bringing a plastic duck with them to the stage. Their speech would ultimately be cut short from the TV broadcast due to what the producers of Brit Awards perceived to be a somewhat rude tirade about the BRIT School. The school best known for producing the likes of Adele, The Kooks, and Katy B among many others, benefits financially from the Brit Awards. Turner appearing under the influence of alcohol mocking the Pop-factory school. “I’d like to thank the Brit school, of course, which I graduated from,” Turner said mockingly. He continued to single out school’s alumni in the crowd while the broadcast was cut to a backstage interviewer.
The protest from Turner and the band was thought to be a sort of a rebellion against what they perceived as the professionalizing of pop music in the UK. It is widely thought that Brit school alumni have an unfair advantage in the UK’s ultra competitive music industry.
According to some of the people in attendance, the scene turned chaotic very quickly thereafter as the band realized they were abruptly cut off. Allegedly, the band furiously threw their microphones into the audience and tried to catapult the lectern across the stage but to no avail. It was firmly bolted to the ground. “It was chaos and the Monkeys didn’t look happy about being cut off,” an eyewitness recalled. “They were clearly drunk as they were slurring their words, but they wanted their moment in the spotlight,” the person familiar with the event commented.
Adele, a Brit school alumni, took issue with Turner’s diss of the program. “He’s [Turner] not even working-class, His parents are f***ing teachers.” She told Telegraph. “When have I ever said I am working class?” Turner fired back. “I didn’t even know what the Brit School was before that night. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it really, though, is there? So long as you’re good at something, it doesn’t matter where you went to school… And I can see why people who did go there wouldn’t want to see some c*** in a flat cap ridiculing their institution,” Turner concluded.
The band joked that they were deliberating naming the album Lesbian Wednesdays, Gordon Brown (UK’s prime minister at the time), or Gary Barlow (lead singer of the British pop group Take That) but eventually settled on taking a phrase from a song on the album D is for Dangerous.
“But there’s a lyric in the ‘D Is For Dangerous’ song, and it seemed to tick all the boxes for what we were after in a title. As far as concerns what is your favourite worst nightmare, I think I’d describe it by saying it’s like someone with a gambling addiction – they get something out of it, but they know it’s bad for them. But in the song it’s more to do with… a woman,” Turner told Uncut.
The second single, “Fluorescent Adolescent”, officially came out on 4th of July 2007 alongside three B-side tracks; “The Bakery”, “Plastic Tramp”,and “Too Much to Ask”. Band opted to extend the intro to “Fluorescent Adolescent” for the Single release, and cut it down for the LP.
Turner’s then girlfriend, Johanna Bennett, is credited with co-writing the song while on holiday. The two decided to cut away from the News and the Press without access to television they kept each other entertained by singing random lyrics to each other, eventually stumbling on some interesting lines for the song.
“We were on holiday and had cut ourselves off from everything. We were in a really quiet hotel and didn’t watch TV or listen to that much music,” Bennett told The Observer. “So as not to drive each other mad we started messing around with these words like game, singing them to each other,” Bennett explained. “It’s great to think that it came from something we did for fun on holiday. It’ll always be a good memory for Alex and I. He doesn’t usually write lyrics with other people, though I think he enjoyed it.”
Bennett described the process as a more of a “word play game” than song writing. Turner had not collaborated on lyrics before that point, but Bennett believes the process as well as the positive outcome had changed his mind on collaborations. Thematically, the single borrows a lot from John Cooper Clarke, but it’s never hidden from the audience as Turner included Carke’s poem inside of the CD version of the Single.
Miles Kane, Turner’s unofficial sidekick at the time, contributed some very intricate guitar parts to the studio version of the songs for the first time. Appearing on “The Bakery”, “Plastic Tramp”, and the LP’s very dark cinematic closing track, “505”.
On the questions of why he’s writing more honest-love-songs, Turner offered the explanation: “It’s natural, perhaps I’m confronted with it more. I had a girlfriend most of last year so it weren’t like I was going mad after gigs or anything, but perhaps there’s more temptation and stuff now,” Turner said. “There’s a lot of temptation in the album. ‘D is for Dangerous’ is like a fantasy of having done the deed and you need to escape the surrounding you’ve been led to, but it’s more just a fantasy about it, knowing you haven’t actually done it. And ‘The Bad Thing’ is these three things that happened, meeting three lasses on separate occasions and it all ended up in there,” Turner told NME.
“The Bad Thing” offers up a fantasy of hooking up with another man’s woman. “Things just happen don’t they, sometimes? I don’t ever feel like I go out to look for someone or anything. Those two times I’m on about when I were, like, ‘in love have just come along. It’s easy to be very cynical. The idea of meeting someone in the street, that seems like it’s just from films and that, but that did happen to me,” Turner offered a glimpse into his personal life as a new rockstar on the scene.
“I don’t think we got it that bad really, we were never on the front page, but the only thing that was bad about it was when they were ringing up our friends, and trying to get goss out of us mates, and that was a bit much. And my ex-girlfriend got a bit of hassle – ‘If you Were There’ has a bit of a go at that, but it doesn’t really dominate my thinking, so it would have been a bit weird for that to dominate the record. When that all happened there were a few lines about all that kind of stuff, but as the year went on, they got replaced with more important things that I want to sing about every night,” Turner told Uncut.
For the music video of “Fluorescent Adolescent”, the band hired the IT Crowd director, Richard Ayoade, who reached out to his film production company, Warp, based in Sheffield and London. Ayoade floated around the idea to the film company he was working with that he was interested in making a music video, and subsequently the film company put the two parties into contact. Richard Ayoade modestly admitted he was friends with Turner as the two were living in London at the time and moved in similar circles. For the music video the band hired actor Stephen Graham, who they previously hired to act in “Scummy Man” and the “When the Sun Goes Down”, to play the lead clown. The music video borrows a lot from the poem “Out of Control Fairground” (the poem printed inside the CD case) by John Cooper Clarke and portrays a group of clowns fighting people in regular clothing, with flashbacks to a better time.
The video made a lot of headlines and eventually received a nomination for the best music video at the UK Music Video Awards. Both Turner and Cook regarded it as the best music video they’ve ever made. In the end however, the music video failed to win the award, losing to the Supergrass’ “Bad Blood” in 2008.
The band agreed “Teddy Picker” was to be the album’s third and final single for the album and was first released on December 3rd 2007 alongside three covers, “Bad Woman”, “The Death Ramps”, and “Nettles”. Turner again showcasing his deep interest in obscure 60s underground garage rock music. The cover song “Bad Woman” was never a major hit or a well known song from the 60s. It was written and recorded by Patrick Sickafus (who also goes by Pat Farrell or Pat Garrett) in 1969 under the name “Pat Farrell & The Believers” at a studio in Reading, Pennsylvania.
For “Teddy Picker”, the band chose a french director, Roman Coppola. Coppola was to direct heavily Strokes influenced music video of a band playing live and hanging out at the iconic RAK Studios in London. Several shots include the band walking outdoors presumably to the pub. Once again the band recorded a live song much like their very first music video for “I bet you look good on the dancefloor”.
Choosing Coppola isn’t by accident, as he was responsible for directing several music videos the band admired, including “Last Nite”, “The Modern Age”, and “Someday” by The Strokes, “Get Free” by The Vines, “Long Distance Call” by Phoenix, and many more. The band loved Coppola’s quick and dirty approach as they completed the entire music video in a single day. The band won Best Video at the 2008 NME Awards.
On this second album Turner showcases some of his most intimate observations with songs such as “505”, “Do Me a Favour”, and “Only Ones Who Know”. “505”, a song riddled with longing for his partner, and “Do Me a Favour” a song about the ultimate goodbyes between lovers. “It’s about a goodbye, really, and about me being a bit of a knob,” Turner explained the songs’ backstory. “Perhaps I were craving to experience something else and looking back and feeling like you were a bit of a knob-head, just in how you perhaps treated that person. It’s just describing a goodbye. That’s another thing, when you’re with someone they seem happier in photos before you met her, or happier in stories from before. I always think they do,” Turner told NME.
“I’ve been quite fortunate to dodge heartbreak. The only heartbreak I’ve had has been brought on myself. In hindsight you just think, ‘Aw, shit’; everyone has that first love thing, but there’s too much other stuff pulling you away from it,” Turner confessed to NME.
“It’s natural, perhaps I’m confronted with it more. I had a girlfriend most of last year so it weren’t like I was going mad after gigs or anything, but perhaps there’s more temptation and stuff now,” Turner admitted. “There’s a lot of temptation in the album. ‘D is for Dangerous’ is like a fantasy of having done the deed and you need to escape the surrounding you’ve been led to, but it’s more just a fantasy about it, knowing you haven’t actually done it. And ‘The Bad Thing’ is these three things that happened, meeting three lasses on separate occasions and it all ended up in there,” Turner said with a smile.
On December 3rd, Domino Records released a very limited 7” vinyl from The Death Ramps, alias name for Arctic Monkeys, containing the two songs “Nettles” and “Bad Ramps”. The pressing was only limited to 250 copies making it a very exclusive hard find today. Officially the label refused to admit Arctic Monkeys were behind the project, but all but said it with a funny comment, calling it a band with “a certain romance”. The two songs were later included in the official Single release of “Teddy Picker” CD and vinyl.
Arctic Monkeys covered Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” (who also like the Monkeys became a British breakout star in 2006 with her album Back to Black) on Jo Whiley’s Live Lounge on BBC Radio 1 while promoting their first single “Brianstorm”. Also at Glastonbury Arctic Monkeys Covered the James Bond theme Diamonds are Forever by Shirley Bassey who also played at the festival two days later.
“Cookie [Jamie] is a good barometer for things like that,” Turner said of covering songs. “He’ll always go; ‘No, I’m not doing that’. I probably would be more easily led if it weren’t for him. Maybe not so much now but earlier on,” Turner explained.
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The band wanted to do something different for the album artwork, hiring the Juno design agency again who worked on the band’s debut album artwork. The goal was to create a physical art display in an old abandoned industrial building. The agency played a few tracks from the new album to spraycan artists De5ign 4 from Southampton area. The artist spent several days spray painting inside of a house in Garston, Liverpool which was marked for demolition.
The original work done by the artist was deemed to explicit to be used directly for the artwork as it was described as “mad psychedelic shit, with lots of “cocks”. Lots of “pink cocks”. People who witnessed it in person described it: “One of the rooms has got little sperms; they’ve got cocks for heads. There’s a giant holding a severed cock”. The illustrators used the ideas they saw at the house to create the album artwork with the spray painted art visible in the windows from the street outside. It had to be toned down for mainstream consumption.
Just as their band name logo was becoming iconic they decided to switch it up, using a brand new one for the second album. They would continue on this trend throughout their releases against the advice of the labels and the music industry to stick with a logo long term for recognizability sake. Proving once again that Arctic Monkeys are not willing to play by the rulebook.
Turner doesn’t hide the fact on what’s occupying his mind during the making of the album: “I don’t know – probably girls again. It’s normally that, isn’t it?” he shrugged. “They get under your skin, don’t they? I think they leave us alone a bit – we don’t get recognized most of the time, and I think that’s a good thing,” Turner confessed to Uncut.
On the questions on what is next for the band and if he feels “grown up”, Turner offered a glimpse into his mindset: “Nah, I don’t feel like a man yet,” he laughed. “I still feel very much a boy. Maybe this is the year it’ll change, but I do feel very much a boy. I’m probably in a bit of a Neverland kinda way. We haven’t had to really grow up. I still feel quite young and this is just starting,” Turner said with a grin to NME.
Favourite Worst Nightmare sold over 220,000 copies in the opening week, and just like Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not went straight to number one in the UK, but sold 100,000 fewer copies than their big debut. “Brianstorm” and “Fluorescent Adolescent” quickly became UK Top Hits with “505” trailing closely behind.
The Album outsold the rest of the Top 20 combined by shifting 85,000 units, and all twelve songs from the album entered the top 200 of the UK Singles Chart.
The album debuted at #7 in the USA, selling roughly 44,000 units in the first week.
The band narrowly missed out on the Mercury prize as the award went to Klaxons for their Myths of The Near Future, which was coincidentally also produced by James Ford.
Interviewer: “You’ve never been very hurt, emotionally?”
Turner: “No.” Bites his lip, “I’ve got that to come.”