articolo del "The Guardian" che riassume il fantastico 2006 degli artici
Cocks of the North
It's not every year that throws up a band like Arctic Monkeys. In this week's OMM, Chris Heath tells the full story of an amazing 12 months that changed their lives for ever. Read an extract below
Friday December 8, 2006
The Observer
In each new era, there are always plenty of good pop groups. That's part of the problem, really, because if you're after songs to rub up close against your dreams, or fire your sense of previously unimaginable possibilities, or bewitch you into not feeling alone, or tinker unpredictably with your insides, or spark unreasonable joy, or allow you to feel understood and misunderstood in whatever proportions you require for any given day or year or lifetime, good isn't really good enough. But there are very few groups that are magical.
It seems obvious to me that the Arctic Monkeys are one. Today it is the middle of November, and they are recording their second album in an underground studio in east London. (They started off in west London, and are now hatching plans to do some time in Liverpool.) Sitting on the sofa in the tiny studio foyer, waiting to speak with each of them, I hear occasional muffled snatches of different songs leak out - recognisably the Arctic Monkeys, but often a little more manic. Once, when the studio door is left open for a few seconds, I can hear Alex Turner's voice. 'Some want to kiss and some want to kick you,' I think I hear him sing. It doesn't sound like a manifesto, just an observation.
Perhaps it is wise that the Arctic Monkeys have followed their instincts and refused to participate in too much analysis of what they have achieved, because anything that made too much sense of it - how some youths from near Sheffield, who had barely played an instrument between them four years ago and who are only, even now, either 20 or 21, could have created something so unexpected and natural and weird and wise and fully-formed and graceful - would surely miss any point that mattered. And a certain suspiciousness - about the worth of doing the kinds of things routinely expected of people who find themselves in this position, and perhaps also of the motives of some of those doing the asking - has served them very well, both in the grief it has saved them and in what it has preserved within them.
Still, I have been dropping in and out of their lives over the past few months, watching whatever is happening and talking to them about what has happened... seeing the different kind of truth you get when you face them as a gang ('Together we just talk fucking bollocks,' Alex will apologise, though he is not quite right) and when you find them alone. Perhaps, slowly, gaining a little of their confidence; enough that they can explain a little about the world they have created and the world that they have found themselves in. And, of course, the story of the remarkable year in which it has taken place. In one of our conversations, they start talking over each other, laughing, acting out how, one day, the tale of the Arctic Monkeys will be told as TV nostalgia in I heart 2006.
This, for the most part, is an account of everything 'I love 2006' will manage to forget:
What's your contribution to the Arctic Monkeys?
Jamie Cook (guitar): 'I don't know. I've never thought about it. We all, like, just contribute in different ways - I think if you took one of us away... Al's, like, always on it. As a songwriter and that... to be in a band with one of the best songwriters around at the moment. And [Matt] Helders is one of the best drummers by far. But I don't really know what I do. Guitar, I suppose.'
Matt Helders (drums): 'I don't know. I don't really get involved in songwriting because I don't really know enough about stuff like that. I can't play a melodic instrument or anything. I make the drums up, but obviously Alex'll have an idea in his head when he's writing a song what kind of feel he wants, and he'll do some gestures, and I'll just do it. But sometimes, like the beginning of "...Dancefloor", the whole intro just came from something I made up, just messing about in practice. And I'm probably the one who's always happy. Not that they're unhappy, but I like to think I inject a little humour.'
Nick O'Malley (bass, since June, when he replaced Andy Nicholson): 'I never take things that seriously. I can, obviously, if it's important, but I'm quite laid-back and I suppose it can be good to have someone like that around who's not constantly worrying. We all like having a laugh. If you start taking things mega-seriously, it'll reflect in the music.'
Alex Turner (singing, guitar): 'Like, I suppose, binding it together a bit, I suppose. I'd probably be that knobhead that's like, "Come on, let's do it again. We'll do it again, then we'll get a drink."'
November: Noel Gallagher speaks with horror about real life.
Interviewed in the NME to promote Oasis's greatest hits album, Gallagher - mirroring the fashionable, if illogical, belief that Alex Turner's artfully evocative lyrics simply offer an unmediated documentary of teenage life in Sheffield - says this: 'I think they were a good kick up the arse, but I'm a bit worried about what's going to follow in their wake. If it's going to be loads of cunts with guitars up here going, "and my mum works down the fucking chip shop, she met a geezer..." and all that. Great pop music is not about real life, it's about how great life can be. Real life's fucking shit.'
'We've met him now loads of times,' says Matt, 'and we get on with him right well.'
'He's sound, Noel,' says Alex. 'We always have a good time when we speak to him.' He laughs quietly about this latest outburst. 'Real life's shit...? But he hasn't been in real life for 10 years or summat. It might have gone amazing.'
August: a semi-secret concert in London.
In their dressing room, Jamie watches a video on YouTube of two kids having a boxing match, replaying the bit where one gets knocked down and out. He's just seen a snake eat a hippo. I ask what they've learned so far this year.
'Snakes can eat a hippopotamus,' says Jamie. 'It weren't a full-size one,' points out Nick. 'It were a hippo, though, regardless,' says Matt. Jamie nods. 'It's still an achievement.' That aside? 'I'm sure I should have learned something,' says Matt. 'That people are very fucking inaccurate with what they write, to an unbelievable degree,' says Alex. 'Apparently last night we played a gig in the old sports hall...' says Jamie. '...and they let us use the staff room as a dressing room,' says Matt. 'That's what it says in the Sun today: "Arctics Go Back To School". It said that the music teacher begged us to play there, in a sports hall. It says it brought back bad memories because it's where we did our A-levels.' In fact, they played in a Barnsley pub. As they soundcheck this afternoon, behind them is a plastic backdrop showing a somewhat clumsy line drawing of the cover image of their album: one of their friends, cigarette in mouth. It's new, and was made for their upcoming festival performances. After a few songs, they jump offstage and stand facing it, considering. The image is printed off-centre, but that isn't the main problem. 'It looks tacky as fuck,' says Jamie. By the evening, it is gone. They will appear at Reading and Leeds without a backdrop. No audience will ever see it.
Which question do you wish never to hear again? Alex: '"How does it feel?" And that "What are you going to write about now...?"' Jamie: '"So you made it through MySpace...?" No, we didn't.' Nick: 'Probably "What can you bring to the Arctic Monkeys? What difference will you bring?"' Matt: 'Something regarding MySpace. Or the internet in general.'
January: the Arctic Monkeys' album is released. At the end of 2005, the band's first proper single, 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor' had been released and gone to number one. They celebrated in their local pub; manager Geoff Barradale, who was at a wedding in Ireland, spoke to them on the phone. 'Alex was like, "This shouldn't be happening to the likes of us... What's happening, Geoff? What's going on?" He was just quite chuffed, I think, that so many people were into it.'
In late January 2006, a week after 'When the Sun Goes Down' became their second number one single, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was released, selling 363,735 copies in Britain in its first week. Within the media this was greeted as marking the rise of a phenomenon - not of a wonderful new group, the Arctic Monkeys, but of the power of the internet and, in particular, MySpace. The suggestion seemed to be that these newfangled tools had hyped the group - that there was a brand new trick in town, and that the Arctic Monkeys were the first to use it.
They found this rather annoying. Their demos and concerts had been widely exchanged and discussed over the internet, but anyone who actually used such sites knew that this was a product of the excitement they were generating, and the vehicle through which it was being expressed, not its cause. 'We wrote the tunes and we played them and we tried to push on musically and do something a bit different, and put a lot of thought and work into it,' says Alex, 'so when people pass it off as sort of this internet phenomenon, it right gets under the skin.'
In fact, at a time when the media was also crammed with doomsday stories about how downloading would kill the record industry, there was a far more encouraging moral to be drawn from their album's success. Versions of most of these songs were, indeed, freely available to anyone who knew their way around the internet, and yet, instead of cannibalising sales, this inspired people to buy a physical copy of this music in record-breaking numbers. (This was the biggest first-week sale for a debut album in Britain ever.) The lesson seemed to be that if the music is good enough, and people are excited enough about it, then they are still thrilled to be able to own their own, tangible copy of it.
The album's title is a line spoken by Albert Finney in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, a film Alex had just seen for the first time. 'He wakes up and he's looking in the mirror... it's like a voiceover... "They don't know a bloody thing about me... a bloody thing about me... whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not..."'
He seems amused by what now seems its premature defiance. 'I suppose we thought that people were talking about us then,' he says. 'We had no idea what it became.' Soon he would be reading all kinds of madness - of how, for instance, his mother had warned Kate Moss away from her son ('I've never even met her'). On the week the album came out, Alex remembers speaking with his grandad. It was already getting crazy. Some journalist was knocking on family members' doors. His grandad said he'd be fine, but he also told his grandson: 'I think you might have overdone it, sausage.'
February: they fail to appear at the Brit Awards.
On the night of the awards, the Arctic Monkeys were on an NME tour with Maximo Park and We Are Scientists. (Even after their recent success, they had insisted on keeping their place on the bill before Maximo Park.) Though they were voted Best New Act, they declined to attend, using the tour as both reason and excuse.
'I think we might have decided not to go anyway,' says Matt. 'We'd just get chucked out,' Jamie agrees. 'It'd probably have been a more negative thing if we hadn't had a show,' says Matt. 'It wouldn't even cross us mind to cancel that,' says Jamie. 'What's the point of cancelling something that you right like, to go and sit in a room full of people that you fucking hate more than anyone? You'd just be sat there in the room going, "Oh God, I'm going to punch someone..."' He shakes his head. 'I can't imagine doing the Brit Awards ever.' Most groups these days, I say, seem as though they can't wait to be part of all that. 'They look like they love it, don't they?' says Alex, puzzled. 'I think we've always said "Why?" a lot more.' 'It's like, "Do Top of the Pops,"' remembers Jamie. (Back before ToTP cancelled itself, the band refused to appear.) '"All right, can we play?" "No." "We're not doing it, then." "You've got to do it." "Why?" "Because that's what you do."' (Jamie's conversation is peppered with these internal dialogues.) 'Because everyone does it,' says Matt. '"No, we're not doing it,"' says Jamie, repeating their conclusion. Where does that instinct come from: first, to say 'why?' and then, often, to say 'no'? 'Just watching bands,' says Jamie. 'We want to be able to look back and never have compromised,' says Alex. 'That's what we've always said,' says Jamie. 'It kind of upsets you when you learn stuff and all about other bands. What have you got to lose?'
'There were no reason why we had to,' says Alex, 'because it wasn't our last stab at it, so there was no desperation to, like, cling on and, like, "make it", whatever the fuck that means.' Their one regret is over something they did do, rather than something they didn't: appearing on the TV show Popworld. They remember the interview seeming quite amusing while they were filming it, but hated the way it was edited to make Simon Amstell look clever. 'He says something funny,' says Matt, 'and then it cuts to you and you don't react...'
For the Brit Awards, they filmed an acceptance speech to be shown in their absence. As they walked to the tour bus to do so, they grabbed Keith Murray from We Are Scientists, and persuaded him to accept the award as though he were their leader. The four Arctic Monkeys said nothing while he offered thanks in a broad American accent. Nothing in the way the clip was presented on TV let the audience know what was going on, as though the Brit Awards either didn't know, or refused to draw attention to, what was happening.
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sta benissimo!!!! è molto credibile come elfo...