Esquire: Why Haven’t Arctic Monkeys Messed It Up?

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)

Alex Turner iPod start playing a T Rex tune out of the blue.

Arctic Monkeys Problem #213

That one day the Arctic Monkeys will stop making music forever

The View From… The Marriott Spa Jan 29, 2009

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

7 September 1533: Elizabeth I is born.

On 7 September, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, Queen Anne Boleyn was delivered of a daughter at Greenwich Palace. Henry VIII and his second queen put on a brave face, refusing to show their undoubted disappointment that the child was not the longed-for son and heir. Although the jousts and other planned entertainments were cancelled, a Te Deum was sung in the new princess’s honor and a lavish christening ceremony was planned for the following Wednesday. The infant was named Elizabeth, in honor of both Henry and Anne’s mothers. Anne Boleyn immediately sent out the letters she had prepared to announce the birth of her first child, with one addition: “prince” was modified to “princes[s].”:

Right trusted and well-beloved, we greet you well. And where as it hath pleased the goodness of Almighty God, of his infinite mercy and grace, to send unto us, at this time, with good speed, in the deliverance and bringing forth of a Princes[s], to the great joy, rejoice, and inward comfort of my Lord, us, and all his good and loving subjects of this his realm; for the which his inestimable benevolence, so showed unto us, we have no little cause to give high thanks, laud, and praising unto our said Maker, like as we do most lowly, humbly, and with all the inward desire of our heart. And in as much as we undoubtedly trust, that this our good speed is to your great pleasure, comfort, and consolation, we, therefore, by this our letters, advertise you thereof, desiring and heartily praying you to give, with us, unto Almighty God, high thanks, glory, laud, and praising; and to pray for the good health, prosperity, and continual preservation of the said Princes[s] accordingly. Given under our signet, at my Lord’s Manor of Greenwich, the 7 day of September, in the 25th year of my said Lord’s reign.

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

Detail of Flaming June, 1895, by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896)

lOOK hOW ADORABLE THEY ARE, SUCH A CUTIEE!

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