Experience has shown that a full sheet of text written by Alex Turner contains just as much poetry as cryptic puzzles. There are also plenty of allegorical tracks on the olive-green inner cover of “The Car”, the first Arctic Monkeys album in four years. A particularly rich one leads from the funky ’70s vibes-stalking ‘Hello You’ to ‘Tread Softly, Stranger’, a free-to-stream on YouTube British film noir set in the 1950s, filmed in a city of steelworks smoke and steam rushing through Locomotives filled the streets of an English industrial town.
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The connection between this black-and-white post-war cinematic work of art and the song in question is made – with a little help from the search engine – by three enigmatically meaningful-sounding words interspersed in its lyrics: “Rawborough Snooker Club”. We imagine a so-named establishment as a wicked, smoky billiard den with latent potential for spontaneous brawls among customers. “Okay, great,” says Alex Turner happily when ROLLING STONE confronts him with this thesis, visibly satisfied that one of his bait has caught. “And what else did you find out in your search?”
Columbo rummages through his notes for further clues from the same song: “I’ve snorkeled the beaches fruitlessly”, for example, Turner can be heard crooning in a mid-Atlantic accent that is difficult to place. He sounds like a white Curtis Mayfield with just enough self-mockery in the decadently silky tongue, what feels like an eternity removed from the pimply boy who once carried his white Stratocaster under his armpits from the British indie-rock ghetto of the noughties on his journey to more glamorous shores left. In the intervening years, the Arctic Monkeys were to become global festival headliners, taking a detour via California (where the desert rocker gang around Josh Homme recorded the groundbreaking American-phile “Humbug” in 2009 and the breakthrough album “AM” in 2012/13 in the studio). mutate. Turner himself transformed into a rock star with a fifties quiff and from then on haunted the arms of actresses and supermodels through the colorful parallel world of clickbait links.
Analogously, the narrator of “Hello You”, audibly disappointed by the venal pleasures of the world, snorkeled along the best beaches. Fruitless, as he claims. Disillusioned with life, his finger thoughtfully moves to the rewind button, drawn back to humble beginnings: “Why not rewind to Rawborough Snooker Club?”
Of course, there is no snooker club in “Tread Softly, Stranger”; that would be all too obvious to an author like Turner, who is hyperactively fishing for associations. But it is no coincidence that his allusion has led us to a film in which a failed bon vivant returns from the big city of London to his native province.
“That’s right, haha!” Turner snorts, sensing which comparison might be next: In his case, could this return from the metropolis also be interpreted as leaving the showbiz bubble of LA behind?
“Maybe not explicitly,” he says hesitantly, “but I think we could say that this record tells different shades of letting go of the past. Things you see when you look over your shoulder as you walk in a different direction.”
A fictitious thank you or farewell letter quoted in the lyrics of the song puts it much more elegantly:
“As that meandering chapter reaches its end and leaves us in a thoughtful little daze, this electric warrior’s motorcade shall burn no more rubber down that boulevard.”
In its sweet sarcasm, it also sounds like a rejection of the “electric warrior” himself, an eternal archetype of the rock star persona at least since the T. Rex album of the same name.
“I keep the rock star persona deep in my heart,” Alex Turner contradicts, this time without hesitation, “and I always will.”
When ROLLING STONE catches up with him on a London summer’s day in an over-air-conditioned hotel suite, Turner is wearing grown-out hair, stubble and a bright blue suit with a white T-shirt, black loafers and slightly the wrong kind of socks (black, but tennis) – a small stylistic misstep, which one would like to interpret positively as the privilege of the still young man. “I could pass for seventeen if I just get a shave and catch some Zzz” as appropriate to “Hello You” in the line right after the Snooker Club. Incidentally, Columbo’s search for the truths hidden in that text is far from over.
Rawborough is an invented place name, or rather the alias chosen in the above-mentioned post-war film for Rotherham, the industrial town in South Yorkshire in northern England, which featured prominently in the Arctic Monkeys’ first hit, “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, in 2005 came up: “You’re not from New York City/ You’re from Rotherham,” the 19-year-old smirked at the time in a broad South Yorkshire dialect with the characteristic condescension that people everywhere reserve for their respective neighboring towns (Rotherham is a fifteen minute drive from High Green, the Sheffield suburb where the Arctic Monkeys grew up).
When he sings today, at the age of 36, about his return to Rawborough, his undertone is not mocking, but – on the contrary – personal and sentimental: “My grandfather worked a bit in the background when we shot ‘Tread Softly, Stranger’,” explains Turner, “He helped out the crew. You can’t see him in the film, but you can hear his voice off once saying ‘good night’ to the lead actor. When I was like sixteen, seventeen, around the time I started the band, I used to go play snooker with my grandfather. Not in the fictional town of Rawborough, of course. But in the snooker club we became friends, my grandfather and I. And at that stage of events I had to think of him.”
Turner’s interviews are sometimes even more cryptic than his texts. By “stage of proceedings” he probably means the current phase in the career of the Arctic Monkeys, who took a certain left turn in 2018 with the subdued, epicurean retro sounds of their last album “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino”. would have. “The Car” doesn’t counteract this, but rather consolidates this change of direction with even more soulful sophistication and lyrical reflections on “the business they call show”. Like its predecessor, the album can be understood as a conceptual work, only this time it is not set on a lunar basis, but in the feverish, uncertain and self-doubting world of the preparatory phase of a large production. Something between showbiz and art, an exhibition, a film, a fashion show, maybe the album itself.
Big ideas are hatched, title melodies are adapted for mandolins and the orchestra is prematurely ordered: “I had big ideas, the band were so excited, the kind you’d rather not share over the phone. But now the orchestra’s got us all surrounded and I cannot for the life of me remember how they go” (from “Big Ideas”). Meanwhile, jet skiers are caught cinemascope-style frolicking in the estate’s moat (“Jet Skis On The Moat”), and the lovers’ arms, legs, and faces are still covered in war paint from the last cover shoot (“Body Paint”). In a song called “Sculptures of Anything Goes,” Turner’s lyrics boldly touch on the realities of his own luxury predicament: “Punctuating your bubble of relatability with your horrible new sound.” Bladder your accessibility”) it says, and: “The simulation cartridge for City Life ’09 is pretty tricky to come by.” A line that Turner himself traces back to his reading of David Foster Wallace, but which also turns out to be a self-ironic description the songwriter’s search for the everyday urban material he used to use to address the crowd in the mosh pit on the level of their shared experiences.
“How do you sing a frigging song like ‘Teddy Picker’?’ Haha”
Today’s Alex Turner no longer pretends to share his audience’s world, but his voice sounds all the more open, vulnerable, freed from the protective layer of youthful cynicism. “That’s good, I’m glad it’s coming across more openly,” he says. “I find the sound and presentation of the voice to be at least as meaningful as the lyrics.”
He has a name for his former performer ego, which always sang with teeth bared and mouth turned up in disdain: Mr Snarl. “Sometimes Mr. Snarl shows up,” Turner explains. “We’ve just been rehearsing some old songs for the upcoming shows and it’s weird what feels right and what feels forced when there’s five of us in the rehearsal room. It feels completely insane to embody this guy singing to a carpeted room. I’m standing there staring at the carpet and I’m like, ‘How do you sing a frigging song like ‘Teddy Picker’?’ Haha. But I’m counting on it all making sense again once other people are in the room.”
People who sing your songs to you?
“Well,” he says, “let’s keep our fingers crossed that they don’t throw anything.”
Should we take away from Alex Turner this uncertainty about the longevity of his radiance, or is he just flirtatious here? In any case, he openly admits that the challenge of tolerance for loyal Arctic Monkeys fans is definitely a topic of discussion within the band. The 2020 “Live At The Albert Hall” album documents the state of affairs in 2018, when the songs of “Tranquility Base” approached those of the earlier rock phase in volume and vehemence in the heat of the stage battle. “To be honest, went [die Richtungsdebatte] probably started at the end of the last tour,” says Turner. “The general feeling was, ‘Let’s be the loud version of the band that we’re touring.’ But I don’t think I can go back there again. I might have even tried it right after the last record. But it just doesn’t sit right trying to do something like ‘AM’ ten years ago. It sounds like a parody of ourselves.”
Minor bands have never been deterred by such concerns. But Alex Turner is an ambitious character whose mind as he writes is haunted by “this character, maybe someone like Mastroianni in [Federico Fellinis] 8 1/2”, in the meta-role of the director plagued by a creative crisis.
“I think I just realized I’m going to sell fewer records.”
As the penultimate line of “Perfect Sense,” the last song on “The Car,” says: “Keep reminding me that it ain’t a race when my invincible streak turns into the final straight.” that it’s not a race when my invincible run turns into the home stretch”, which can also be translated as: Even if the golden times of the Arctic Monkeys should be over in terms of sales figures, that would by no means be a measure of their artistic success.
Turner laughs sheepishly. “Er… Hmm… Yeah, maybe that’s what it’s called. Sorry, you got me. I think I just realized I’m going to sell fewer records.”
Maybe, maybe not.
“That hit me.”
But your fans are getting older too.
“Yeah, they won’t be around forever.”
Or vice versa: maybe they prefer what you are doing now to what they wanted to hear when they were young. Maybe they’ve matured like you.
“Right…” says Alex Turner, tearing his stubble skeptically, “There’s a remote chance.”
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