❝ I Have To Make An Effort Not To Take A Moment To Think About What I’m Doing Up There. That’s

Alex Turner (loving these photos from GQ Magazine, October 2012!)

“People think I’m a miserable bastard, but it’s just the way me face falls.”

Take it easy for a little while, come and stay with us…

Alex Turner's track by track of 'WPSIATWIN'

1 THE VIEW FROM THE AFTERNOON “This is one of the last songs written for the album. There’s nothing clever, it’s just about anticipating the evening, finding comfort in familiarity and the fact that you know you’re bound to send a daft message or something before the sun comes up. I think I’ve stopped doing that now.”  2 I BET YOU LOOK GOOD ON THE DANCEFLOOR “I get the impression a lot of people imagine an evening scene when they hear this song but it conjures up daytime images for me. ‘Lustful’ is perhaps a good word to describe it. It’s far from our finest work but I’m not going to bang on about that.”  3 FAKE TALES OF SAN FRANCISCO “We first played this song in 2004 as the summer came to a close. At this time we’d just started playing what then seemed like a lot of gigs – sometimes we’d go mad and play two a week – and so we were rubbing shoulders with a lot of other bands at a similar stage to us. The gigs were usually four bands or sometimes more, no-one in the crowd except a few of their mates or girlfriends who all left as soon as they could. The bands rarely had anything in common, musical or otherwise, and right beside the angry 13-year-olds playing Green Day or whatever you would find the cool bastards that provided the topic for the lyrics of ‘Fake Tales…’. “If it’s a Tuesday night in Sheffield that’s fine, why pretend it’s anything else? I think the easiest way to describe this song is as the sound of us getting annoyed at people pretending. Another way to put it would be it’s the sound of us when given something to whinge about – depends how profound you want it to sound.”  4 DANCING SHOES “It’s the oldest song on there. It’s about people always looking to pull when they go out however much they mask it.”  5 YOU PROBABLY COULDN’T SEE FOR THE LIGHTS BUT YOU WERE STARING STRAIGHT AT ME “I’m into the arrangement on this because there’s no chorus as such and it doesn’t do the same thing more than once. It’s our love song I suppose. It’s about a girl we knew who was in a band.”  6 STILL TAKE YOU HOME  “A while ago, before all this madness, pin-up Jamie Cook and I were sat in a club in town one evening. A conversation was struck up about the clientele of this particular establishment and this little chat and other events that night led to this tune. I remember a dark-haired girl in a green dress was a particular inspiration.”  7 RIOT VAN “This one is a bit against the run of play I suppose, in terms of the time it’s about. I think of most of the songs as being ‘set’ in the present day, whereas with this one it’s more like 1999 or 2000, when we were 14 or so even though it was written at the same time as all the others. ‘Bigger Boys And Stolen Sweethearts’ is set in the same time as this. It’s all about when we used to hang about around our end and the things we saw. We were never really bad lads, we just used to have a laugh. I think Helders [Monkeys drummer] described it best when he said, ‘Just ’cos you’d hang around near people who might burgle houses or summat it didn’t mean you had to.’”  8 RED LIGHT INDICATES DOORS ARE SECURED “It’s about hovercrafts, obviously. We recorded the album in the order it’s presented and did a song a day pretty much. We used a funny microphone called a bullet or something on ‘Riot Van’ and left it up when we went onto ‘Red Light…’ so I could do a guide vocal when we did the take. It turned out the guide sounded great so we didn’t bother doing another in the end. There was a few more verses written for this, but it was all too much and it never got past practice because the same riff was just going round and round with all this verbal on top. Everyone got bored so we cut some stuff out.”  9 MARDY BUM “The hit! This is the only recording that we didn’t do when we did the others. We recorded this one in Munich when we were on tour, in a little studio not too dissimilar to 2Fly studio in Sheffield where we did all our demos.”  10 PERHAPS VAMPIRES IS A BIT STRONG BUT… “About this time last year we’d played outside Sheffield a little and were in the process of just trying to play in new places a little more. You got expenses covered most of the time but that was all – you never made a profit or anything like that. We didn’t really care, we were getting to play and having a laugh and not a great deal of people outside Sheffield had really heard of us so we didn’t expect anything in return. When you talked to people about it however, it was somewhat frowned upon and perhaps sniggered at that we were playing for free. Everyone’s an expert about this band lark and it seemed like a bit of a joke to a lot of people – while they’d wish us all the best I think behind our backs they were really convinced we were just wasting our time.”  11 WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN “We used to have a practice room in an old industrial sort of area just outside town. Loads of bands practice round there and we still do as well. There are sandwich shops and some other businesses that are run there by day. At night, as well as studios and practice rooms there is perhaps some less celebrated activity. When we moved into our room the man next door actually really said, ‘It changes around here when the sun goes down,’ and you would get asked for business [by prostitutes] out in the street sometimes, or it would be the middle of the night and there would be a bloke with a carrier bag just walking about as we left. It sounds like there’s a bit of a humorous tone but it’s really pretty sad. It’s strange how these different worlds exist in the same space.”  12 FROM THE RITZ TO THE RUBBLE “The bouncer thing is really just me having a bit of a dig. I still get asked for ID now when I go to clubs so when I wasn’t actually old enough it was a nightmare trying to get in anywhere at all. I actually had one of the best nights ever after getting turned away once though so it’s not always a bad thing. I remember one night walking from my mate’s house in Hillsborough to get the bus back to ours one Sunday and the second verse and the ‘last night what we talked about’ bit was dreamed up during that journey. We always try to show the same attention to the rhythm and the way the parts work together as we do to the words or any of that stuff. I think this is a good example of when we’ve had a really good crack at both.”  13 A CERTAIN ROMANCE “All our other tunes are quite specific to a certain incident or series of incidents. This one is more reflective and a bit of an attempt at summing up perhaps. This is definitely a special one for us and it could only ever have been the conclusion to the first record. ‘Nobheads don’t dress in a certain way’ is an important theme in there I suppose – at least they don’t where we come from.”

petsitting 🐕

HHAHAHSHSHA

Same freaking reaction just different hair and age.

ICON’S MAGAZINE TRANSLATED

“What the hell is this?”, says a fascinated Alex as we enter the Bethnal Green Town Hall Hotel in London, an old building where the interview is having place. “I don’t know, I think people get married here”, answers the press girl. Alex starts running in the room, where the plenary sessions of the former city council used to be carried out back when the building was constructed. He sits in the chair in which they guess the mayor used to sit down. “What do you want, a fine or a wedding?”, jokes Turner who can’t be still. He starts to run between the seats, until he stops at the place assigned to the spokesmen. “One hundred pounds! Man, there’s one hundred pounds in here!”. He picks up a couple of 50-pound notes, and I suggest him to keep them. He laughs. The moment to begin the interview has come, after all, we are not here to get married but to talk about Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, the band’s sixth LP. His laughing ceases. It’s unfortunate that Alex is so shy and cautious when the recorder is turned on. "Would you get married here?”, asks Alex before getting started. My answer is no, the place is interesting, but not romantic at all. “I agree. Motion denied.”

[Now the journalist describes the journey of the band, from its Internet expansion to the end of the AM tour.]

“When the tour finished in 2014, almost everybody in the band was about to get married, or about to have a child or another one… The end of those shows seemed to be the end of an era. We all were 28 or 29 years old and it felt like everything was going to change. During that never ending tour I thought the album was going to stay with me forever. It was the longest tour we had ever done. Now I think that we prolonged it because we knew that when it finished, it would mean the end of something bigger than a series of shows. I thought everything would change, because I felt we had less than we had in the beginning, even if the numbers said otherwise” recalls Turner about the last days the band was seen together.

Then Alex went back to The Last Shadow Puppets […]. In 2016, they headlined Primavera Sound Festival. The show was grotesque. Turner’s looks made sense in the framework of AM, but in that particular context, it appeared as a joke. Turner, that boy who as a teen was not hired by a Sheffield thrift shop because of his shyness, had lost the plot. “That is part of the past”, intervenes Turner, who talks very slowly, leaves sentences half said and might not even finish a joke if he thinks it’s not going to be funny as he was expecting. “I think that the things I wanted to say with that image and attitude are already said. Now it’s over.” Nowadays he sports long hair and a beard that has been object of controversy among his fans, who even started a Change.org petition for him to shave it.

“A lot of attention is put into our next step, I know. We’ve always tried to be careful about where, with whom and what we did. It’s healthy, but I don’t think we do it on purpose. In times like this it’s complicated to keep secrets. We already tried with our last album and just when we got to the studio, the engineer posted a picture of us. Everyone’s so crazy now, they’re acting as if this was Columbo. I’ve seen this, I’ve seen that guy…”, explains Turner after being asked to explain how it is possible that, with a band as great as theirs, he has achieved to go completely unnoticed for everyone when the most awaited album will be released in less than a month. “I don’t know if not getting involved with social networks is something that we now do on purpose to protect the band, but maybe it helps,” points out Turner introducing the “offline” element into the equation. “I guess that wanting to expose ourselves is not into our DNA. I’ve put so much into the music that I don’t know what else I can do with that. I can’t open a Twitter account, because I think everything’s there, in the songs. I’d make a fool of myself if I began to use Twitter. Well, if I’m honest, it’s not as if I dislike social networks, but when you become that version of yourself that you’ve created in the virtual world, there’s something in there that allows people to take out the worst of themselves against you. And you can also take out the worst of yourself against them. I can’t even imagine the consequences, but I don’t want to either.”

We’ve had to listen to Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in a dispositive that would be self-destructed in a week. We’ve been told not to ask anything too personal after Alex had a brush with a journalist from The Times some days ago. There won’t be any promotional single, but there is a new band logo. The most recent photo of Alex is one that he took with a flight attendant in the airport days before our meeting which has reactivated the debate about his beard. It’s a release like in the old days, but Turner doesn’t really appear as a world star. I tell him about the time I interviewed Beyoncé, being told not to touch her under any circumstance. I also tell him about how, in order to talk to Chris Cornell, I had to get in a completely dark hotel room and, in an act of faith, believe that the voice that I was hearing belonged to the grunge star. “Would you like some water?”, interrupts Turner when, before I can even answer, begins to pour some into the glass

Days after our encounter in the town hall, the first new picture of the combo appears (they look as if they had been dressed for a wedding right in the middle of December from 1972 in Iceland) and the titles of the album’s 11 tracks as well as details about the recording are revealed. But it’s been the first verse of the album what has caused more of an upheaval. “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make”, sings in Star Treatment, a gem of a song that sets the tone for the rest of the album, one destined to confuse all those who were expecting something bombastic, expansive and hormonal. The LP contains songs with titles as fabulous as The Ultracheese, Batphone, or The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip. Imagine Richard Hawley going on tour together with comedian Andy Kaufman and performing only in hotels from Sheraton’s chain, or Scott Walker reciting in a pub after Sheffield United’s match. It is deliciously decadent, and it promises to polarise the opinions of their millions of fans. Is he nervous? And, above all, is he sure? “Well, I sort of remember feeling a bit like that with our last album. I wasn’t sure if it was the right album. Won’t we be going through the wrong path? It always happens. When I showed the first songs to my manager, people from the label and my mates, most of their reactions were ‘This is so different.’ I thought it was different too, but not that much. I was doubting if it’d be appropriate for a Monkeys’ album. Then, Jamie came home and spent two weeks with me recording. His enthusiasm about the songs confirmed that it was right. If this is what’s inside of me, this is what it has to be. I believe that we can be whatever we want to be, it’s our band. So there’s no need to worry about whether it fits or not”, explains about an album which lyrics refer to solitude continually. “Yes, a little”, concedes Turner. “There’s always been something in my life that has led me to isolation. But, even to this day, I don’t know why I’ve tried to avoid this topic creatively. The lyrics have been through a very long process of polishing. It was complicated to reach this stage. For example, that first line about The Strokes. I fought a lot against it, I wanted it but I didn’t want it. I was thinking: ‘Whatever, it’s staying, but I know I will change it in the end because there’s no way I’ll end up saying such atrocity.’ And it came to a point in which I thought: ‘If this is how I feel, why can’t I just say it? It’s better to be honest.”

EXTRA

This is how Icon #51 was made

Arctic Monkeys

Everything was supposed to be a secret. The hotel, hidden in the east side of London. The artist, in an unknown place, and the room in which the pictures were to be taken, small enough for the editor to have to stay outside during the session. When Turner got out, he said: “It’s a boy.” Everybody’s happy.

Translated by @jurametio and myself (some parts have been omitted because the journalist was explaining the beginnings of the band and other information that we all already know by now)

(054/100) → Alex Turner

The View From… The Marriott Spa Jan 29, 2009

thetrianglekid: Can you make a gifset of Alex like laughing/smiling/being silly/etc.