#am interview

By Tom Engelshoeven // Photography: Zackery Michael

We’re not allowed to know anything beforehand. Not even the album title. Listening to the songs is allowed though. In a room of the Town Hall Hotel in London, a lady from Domino record company informs me that the new album has been recorded, mostly, in Paris and that Alex Turner is extremely involved in the production process. Then the 32-year-old singer enters the room in expensive designer clothing, including a military jacket carrying his name TURNER on the chest pocket. His shoulder-length hair is tied back in a short ponytail. And the goatee which has gotten an earful from the internet. You may think he’s lost his cool, but there’s little to notice about that in our conversation. In the hour that follows Sheffield’s most famous son, currently residing in Los Angeles, tries to carefully and accurately explain his thinking methods. In that attempt, he shows a pleasant kind of openness. He often loses his words, resulting in long quiet pauses in which he searches for the right way of explaining, yet there isn’t one second where I get the idea that he actually tells me everything he knows.

– So, France. In La Frette? Yeah, La Frette is the name of the studio, but also of the town, La Frette-sur-Seine.

Surprisingly enough the internet is buzzing with rumours. It was often said that you would be working at some mysterious location. You’d been spotted in Sheffield, but Paris had never been mentioned. It was a secret! I almost recorded a Shadow Puppets record in that studio, but we didn’t get to it. The producer had already come over to Los Angeles for a recording session, prior to this one. Now it was our turn to fly over to Europe.

You mean James Ford? Yes. I started writing and recording this album in my own little homestudio in LA. We took those recordings to a real studio where we continued working on them wth James and the rest of the band. In September we made our way to the studio in La Frette to really tie it all together and finish it.

How long did that take you altogether? About five weeks. In the first two weeks it was just us, the band, to rehearse everything. After that James Ford and some other friends came in to play as well. We all stayed in La Frette and only sometimes got out to spend a weekend in London. The previous Monkeys record we made in a very different way. Back then, we all lived in LA, spent the day in the studio and then went home in the evening. Obviously this time it was not like that. Back then, we were all in a town in the midst of farmlands in Lincolnshire. Doing everything together: getting up, having breakfast, dining out.

Did spending all that time together in La Frette result in a different kind of record from the one you had in mind at the start of recording? No, to be honest it didn’t change that much. I already did a lot before we started, so it didn’t deviate that much.

– If I had to find an adjective for this new record, it would be ‘elegant’. It’s not music that bangs on your door, but songs which creep up on you like predatory animals. That was exactly how I wanted it to sound. I can’t disagree with you, I can see how you’ve managed to draw that conclusion. I guess your next question is going to be ‘why’?

Maybe in contrast to your previous album? AM was heavily based on hiphop beats. The guitar really took up the spotlight back then, but this new record sounds much more like a piano record. A piano in an old nightclub with those red, velvet curtains. It’s good to hear you describe it like this. Maybe you’re even better at that than I am. But perhaps I can give an explanation for how we’ve gotten to this red, velvet carpet? Did you say a tapestry on a wall? I like the idea that this album sounds like a wall of velvet tapestry. Yeah, that’s rad. For the first time, I wrote everything on the piano. When I was young, I played a bit of piano before I got to the guitar. But to be honest with you, I was never that good at it. I remember getting that guitar for my 15th birthday, I slept with it in my bed that night. I was constantly busy noodling around on it. Such a relationship I’ve never had with the piano, but I was able to play a couple of chords. For the past couple of years, I’ve visited a lot of studios and spaces where there was a piano available. More and more often I sat down at them and when I turned 30 I got one from my manager, a good friend of mine: a Steinway Vertegrand.

You’re singing about it twice on this album, if I’m correct: ‘Back there by the baby grand’ in One Point Perspective, and ‘It stays between us, Steinway and his sons’ in album closer The Ultracheese. That’s right, suddenly that piano became the epicentre of my small room. And there I was. The more I was sitting there, the more my fingers slipped to various places. A kind of character was born in my head. That way I convinced myself to start writing songs again.

You became a piano man? Exactly.

– From the first two songs, Star Treatment and One Point Perspective, a character starts to grow. I’m wondering, are those songs perhaps about your future as a singer: a scenario that’s looming in the future? Once upon a time you used to be that extremely promising young lad, but on here you sound like an artist singing about his bygone days. It starts with looking back.

Yes, that excellent first line: ‘I just wanted to be one of the strokes’. That was really how I looked at it back then. Star Treatment was the very first song I wrote for this album. In that song, as I hear it these days, there is a lot of uncertainty. It’s almost a song about an attempt to write a song. I’m lost somewhere, no idea whereabout. I’m reflecting and suddenly thinking: ‘here I am right now, and long ago, I used to be there’. That theme and that tone, it reaches past this one song and continues on the whole record.

You just wanted to be one of The Strokes? You could explain that as not so respectful towards The Strokes, though that was absolutely the last thing I meant to say with it. I just told myself. Just two minutes ago, or so it feels like it, I was standing in the crowd for one of their gigs and I thought I wanted to be in a band. And now I’m here and searching for something to write about. That feels very confusing: what do I want to express? And when I’ll know, how the fuck am I going to say it? Without it sounding washy. That’s the puzzle which sparked writing Star Treatment. The title is, of course, a play on words with a two-sided meaning. In that time and place, I had already thought about what the album was gonna be called: The Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino. It’s a place on the moon. I fantasised about writing a commercial text for a hotel and casino on the moon. In that case ‘The Star Treatment’ would have been the ultimate slogan! I can already visualise the commercial in my head. I love those commercial visuals for hi-fi devices from the 70s. Highlighted just like that, accompanied by neon lettering. Yeah, if I had to create and advertisement for a hotel, I would definitely put ‘Star Treatment’ in there. But it also comes from a different place. 

My dad used to tell me, on evenings where the sky was really clear and we were outside together, how far away those stars were from us. I’ve hear him say that a hundred times. I thought it was so fascinating, again and again I asked him ‘tell me again!’. Then he would point out the brightest star and say: you’re not seeing the light of that star as it shines right now, but like it was many years ago. That light took all those years to reach your eyeball. And then he would explain how fast that light had travelled to blind me. It blew me mind.

Just like how one second you wanted to be one of The Strokes and then another you’re sitting here. To be honest, I still want to be one of the strokes.

That ‘golden boy’ who’s in bad shape you’re singing about on Star Treatment, that’s you then? That confused character who doesn’t know whether he’ll ever write again. Yeah, more or less. I believe I stole that ‘golden boy’ description from Leonard Cohen.

In One Point Perspective you’re also singing: ‘A singer must die’. Also from Cohen. That’s why I thought were singing about the future of a star or a singer. The unavoidable moment where he’s stuck in The Tower Of Song. I put that line by Cohen in the lyrics because he died in the week of the American elections. I don’t think we need to talk about the historic impact of those days. There was a real feeling of despair in the air, like: this is the beginning of the end. Everyone was so upset, scared of the future. And then to top it off, Leonard Cohen passed away! That’s the feeling I’m reporting on in the song, that the Apocalypse had become a priority. ‘A singer must die’ was the most beautiful way to work Cohen into the song without having to drop his name.

– If I had to view the album from a helicopter’s perspective… Drone! Haha, I really think drone recordings ruin everything. Every time I see an aerial shoot I just know it was a drone that did that. It’s just not cool. I’m sorry for interrupting, keep going.

… then I had to say this record is about the USA, about how computers and machines direct our lives, the language of the digital era and sir Trump. I have tried so hard to keep him out of this.

Well, there’s a song called Golden Trunks. Yes, he finds his ways to sneak in. He’s very skilled in that area. He’s getting enough air time as it is, and I didn’t want to grant him anymore. Now it’s just one verse that’s about him. But look, he’s even entered our conversation!

You’re singing: ‘Leader of the free world reminds you of a wrester wearing tight golden trunks’. And still, something kept me from confronting him. It’s become a sort of competition: who’s got the most witty way to say something extremely denigrating about him? That competition is absolutely going nowhere, except again it’s about him.

In that song Four Stars Out Of Five you’re observing how we’re constantly letting our lives be led by digital devices. Like, there’s a nice restaurant on the internet, oh Gosh four stars, we need to go there. You’re also singing about the digital age in The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip: ‘The exotic sound of data storage, nothing like it first thing in the morning / You push the button and we do the rest’. How the young and hip are being herded like sheep. And the words that help them: ‘start your free trial today’. Everything you just mentioned is so present in our daily lives, it’s impossible to ignore. I found it quite hard to dig up some poetry from that. It took me a while before I succeeded. The simple fact that I was writing about stars and science fiction has helped me. Science fiction is a recurring theme on this record.

One number is even called Science Fiction. You’re almost ridiculing that genre a little bit. Yeah. Namely because science fiction is really funny most of the time. I just can’t help it. It’s so fascinating to me how writers of sci-fi books keep making up new worlds to comment on their own worlds. Essentially, that’s wat happens most of the time. I realised I am partaking in this as well. You’re inventing this Moon Casino thing to be able to talk about Facebook. Not that I’m actually talking on Facebook.

Science fiction is easily outdated though. That’s something really amusing as well. On the news, everyone was raving on about 1948. Like, now it seems like it really is fucking 1948! It was so funny, I had to put it in Star Treatment. Everyone saying it’s fucking 1948. But a lot of the lyrics on this record are inspired by a book I read, Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. I can’t remember when I first heard about it but when I read that title, I immediately thought: this is what you have to read in the modern age. Even though, it’s practically written when television was the most dominant factor in our lives. Postman argues how that time – but I think also ours – bears much more resemblance to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley than to 1948. Because in Brave New World people are letting themselves be molded by something they have called onto themselves and not by a power from outside, like in 1948. That was the point I wanted to make.

Something else I took form that book was the idea concept of the information-action ratio. Like, what actions are to be expected when people are being fed information. I read Amusing Ourselves To Death around the time of the presidential elections. Retroactively, I thill think of it as an interesting read. It really hit the bull’s-eye for me. In that time, I was fanatically keeping up with the news, I’m laying off that a bit for now.

According to our conversation, it appears as if you made a really politically-themed record but rather than that, you’re describing your life as of right now without really judging at all. Yes, I think it is really important to preserve a sense of discretion. Good writing stills are based on the ability to suggest. You don’t need to provide a roadmap, but you do need a sense of humour. That is important, yes.

I laughed out loud at the line ‘swamp monster with a hard-on for connectivity’ in Science Fiction. It reminded me of all those people working in IT who really do pay their bills with their ‘hard-ons for connectivity’. What’s also funny is that character from Batphone who introduces a perfume called Integrity. ‘I sell the fact that I can’t be bought’. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if one day I would drive past a billboard advertising a perfume called Integrity. It feels like it already exists in this world. The rest of the song just wrote itself.

One of the reasons it took you so long before this album was born, was because the other members of the band suddenly became fathers. You didn’t, obviously, but has that changed your view on the world? Has it changed you guys as a band? Yeah, because they need to take care of their kids now! The real scope of the impact is yet to be defined. Touring around when everyone has got families at home, it’s something we haven’t done yet. Well, no. Nick [O’Malley, bass] had a boy when we were still touring around with AM. All the other babies have been born after that. How it has influenced our life on the road, I wouldn’t know yet. I think they’re more capable of answering than I am. But parenthood has had absolutely no negative impacts on our spending time in the studio. We had a fantastic time. Because of all those family happenings we hadn’t seen each other as often as we would’ve liked. But there was a great lot of enthusiasm, energy and excitement when we were in France. It’s just that sometimes they were facetiming with their kids.

 – Your previous album was very much about lust from the perspective of someone at the end of his twenties. ‘I want that woman in my hotel room tonight!’ It’s the complete opposite of the baby monitor life of a young dad. A friend once told me: I’d love it if you wrote something else than ‘I love you, you love me, why’d you only call me when you’re high, blahblahblah’ for once. That was when I thought: I’d like try because I had never done that before. On our last Puppets record I detached myself from that image, it was already lessening. Not that shit anymore about a girl in a hotel room and I want to meet you. That’s how I got to the songs The Dream Synopsis and Sweet Dreams, TN. I’d never walked the road of love that far along. Maybe I even exaggerated on purpose. It caused a definite fracture with the past, which pleases me.

Lovesongs become cheese really quickly, that’s just the way it is. The closing number which is also about love, is called The Ultracheese and appears to not contain a single hint of irony. Is it hard for you to ignore the irony factor? Well, one of the many things Cohen teaches you is that he’s prepared to take time to deliver his message. The more songs you hear from him, the more you discover who he really is. It’s a large scala of oeuvre which makes that clear. Listening to his songs, but also his commentaries, has encouraged me to take my time. Not just in terms of working pace. You can also take the time to spread out your message over one whole record, or maybe even several records. A few nice punchlines here and there, that’s all right. But I don’t really feel that urge anymore to wrap all the things I have to say up in one short moment. This insight is relatively new to me.

How much of The Last Shadow Puppets has actually flowed on in this Arctic Monkeys record? The fundamental difference between both projects us that The Puppets are based on a partnership between me and Miles Kane. That’s the distinction, but lyrical-wise I’m less and less thinking about what project I’m writing for. Back in the days, it was very much like: now I’m doing The Puppets, then The Monkeys, then The Puppets and when that’s done, the Monkeys again. In the meantime, we’ve come to a point where AM somewhat started resembling the last Puppets record. I had already been working on the piano loop for Star Treatment when I was writing Everything You’ve Come To Expect. That was when it all started to become more intertwined.

There has been a lot of speculation about this new album, maybe causing a lot of pressure on you. Was that difficult for you to handle? That’s mainly part of a world I try not to stick my hands in. If I had heard anything about it, I might’ve been more worried. But I don’t really have any social media, so I’m not entirely conscious of it. I do feel that people have been looking forward to this record a lot because, since I’ve left the UK, people keep asking me: when is that record gonna come out? That level. But it’s not as if I’m looking at my phone every other minute.

Your girlfriend Taylor Bagley was trying to pick a fight with some fans, saying ‘he doesn’t do it for any of you cunts, he does it for himself’. Does that even reach you or not at all? No it doesn’t, I try to stay out of it on purpose. In any case, it doesn’t bother me with making music.

Is that maybe why you’ve thought up a hotel and casino? To escape everything? The idea to name a record after a place comes from how I feel about albums I really love. An album like that really is like a destination to reconnect with yourself. I so urgently wish I could rent an apartment on Dion’s Born To Be With You, an all-time favourite of mine. I’d pack my bags this instant and just leave for a while. I told you about that room with the piano in LA, right? At my place we call that room The Lunar Surface. It’s from that rumour how Stanley Kubrick just staged the whole moon landing in his basement. Every time I sat down to work on songs in my basement, I thought: he’s gonna come down to fake the moon landing any time now. That’s how the moon entered the story. And the calm, thanks to an Apollo mission.

The hair is tied back. The scene light is reflected in the pomade and the smoke flows slowly and sensibly from the cigarette between two fingers. Alex Turner stands with a furrowed brow and looks at his audience. He does not look anyone in the eyes. He stares into the void from the top where he is standing. And without the public’s attention, the British band is moving towards pulling the plug - just for a period. There is nothing missing where Arctic Monkeys are - it is all going in the right direction, and so it has been since 2002. It was then Alex Turner took a break from school to focus on making music. There is no one in front of Orange Scene, aware that Arctic Monkeys move around the circus ring for the last time. There are more years to come after the ones passed before the bands want to put down the instruments. It is Saturday evening at Roskilde. The festival’s last day, and here we are worrying more about how we are going to dance the pogo in the pit in our drunkenness.

Four years later the Arctic Monkeys are back in Denmark. They are back from the silence and have taken a break from family life and side projects. They have turned up the noise but everything has been done at their pace. Nobody knew if it should be the continuation of the cloudy, deserting expression, Arctic Monkeys since Humbug has grown. Alex Turner has grown a beard. The band has grown up.

“When I turned 32 in January, my mother congratulated me and asked me if I had realized that I had now spent half of my life in this band,” says Alex Turner, as GAFFA meets him at Town Hall Motel in London. “She would like to know if it was not time to do something else, something sensible.”

Alex Turner keeps to himself. He talks openly about TBH&C, yet he is secretive around the people listening. He is immersive and positive. He is aware of his position in music industry. He has spent half of his life in a band that has grown to be among the world’s largest. No one would have guessed when he showed up with greasy half-long hair and pimples at Roskilde Festival in 2006. Arctic Monkeys had entered unknown territory - far from the starting point.

“My parents have actually supported me a lot ever since I picked up playing guitar as a boy. And when Arctic Monkeys first began playing together, we started in my parents’ garage,” says Alex Turner. “My parents even gave me the permission to take a year off school to focus on the band. But even though my mother did not mean her question seriously, I still thought about things a little.”

That band name …

“Every fucking day,” declares Alex Turner when asked how often he regrets the Arctic Monkeys’ name. It seems to be a bit of the Strokes and that kind of bands Alex Turner would feel honored to be compared to and it’s no secret that the Arctic Monkeys have never been very fond of their name.

The beginning is changing

The release of AM was the starting point for the shift for the group that followed the year after. The album was the culmination of a career where there was no time for reflection. A career where Arctic Monkeys had been in the driver’s seat on the fast lane in 2006 with their debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. The beginning had rounded its first decade - without major changes or intentions to do things differently for until AM, it all worked. But AM was the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of the ellipse which had first met its predecessor.

"When we were touring with our last album there was something that ended for us,” says Alex Turner. “Then nobody could say how to proceed. Until then it was just like the endless summer camp. Now some of us are married, some of us have got our first children […] and all that. There were some changes in the air. And that was how it unfolded. Throughout the last five years we have seen each other much less than we have ever done before in our lives.”

Arctic Monkeys had met what might be called the midterm crisis in a music career. But for Arctic Monkeys it just happened at an age when several people first experience their breakthrough. Family life began to catch up with them - or at least the wish for it. Likewise, the idea of exploring new areas of music and launching new projects. Alex Turner returned to the side project, the super group  The Last Shadow Puppets and guitarist Jamie Cook became a father for the first time. Drummer Matt Helders met up with Iggy Pop and together with Josh Homme and Dean Fertita from the band Queens Of The Stone Age, they worked on the album Post Pop Depression.

"It’s still extremely surreal for me,” says Alex Turner. “I’ve known Matt for a longer time than I’ve known many other people in my life. We went to school together and he lived just around the corner from where I lived. I was at two of their concerts and it was emotionally mind-blowing.”

Matt Helders took advantage of the break from Arctic Monkeys and lived his childhood dream. He became part of the crew Iggy Pop is in charge of.

“The best show was in New York,” says Alex Turner about seeing his childhood friend and comrade on stage together with one of the greatest characters in rock history. “But I did not really want to go out. We had a shoot with [TLSP] all day and it was really exhausting. But when the first tones of the concert started playing, exhaustion completely disappeared - they started with ‘Lust for Life’. It was like being seven years old again. I was so insanely proud to see my friend up on stage with Iggy Pop. He came around in a crazy and complete way and it was just so sweaty. The dog chewed chewing gum while playing - fucking well done!”

The simple starting point

Alex Turner is still the centre of attention of the Arctic Monkeys. He is the driving force of the new beginning. The hiatus lasted for three years before it began to tingle in the fingers of the front man from Sheffield. Alex Turner tried to access the music in a way he never did before. The starting point was loneliness, simple methods and limiting tools.

”[TBH&C] started with a piano, a tape recorder and me locked in a room,“ says Alex Turner. "But something about making and recording music in the bedroom was quite new to me. That’s how we’ve never worked in the band. At that time I was in the middle of a production for Alexandra Savior and we had made a lot of demos that we had recorded on the little tape recorder. I really enjoyed working that way and I wanted to work with Arctic Monkeys like that.”

"We met after touring with Iggy Pop and [TLSP] but none of us had an idea about what we should do,” continues Alex Turner. “There was not much that came out of that encounter besides we found out we still liked each other and wanted to continue as band. But we had more fun than one who put on Original Pirate Material with The Streets. The record was on for at least six consecutive times and suddenly it was just like being 16 years old again.

New beginnings

[TBH&C] is a new chapter for Arctic Monkeys. They have moved down a road that has so far been unexplored and has led to an album that is unlike what they have done before. [TBH&C] represents a new beginning for the band, but at the same time it is a natural continuation after a break that has been the result of more than ten years with far too much speed. But [TBH&C] is also a reflection. It is a balanced edition of the history of Arctic Monkeys until today.

"In fact, we have already begun to look back,” says Alex Turner. “Our debut album was about how we used to be when we were young. Of course the new album is obviously a reflection of how the future is uncertain. I recently sat at home and thought about how things had evolved. I had just discovered indie-disco and danced to The Strokes - suddenly I’m one of those on the stage. Since then I did not really have the time to sit down and think about things - it just happened. I felt like a pretty deep urge to write about those things but at the same time I could not find the poetry in those thoughts and how it would be possible to make music out of it.”

Alex Turner has looked back to find the beginning of [TBH&C]. He has gone back to the starting point, back to growing with a father who was a jazz musician. How music can create a mood that can lead to the creation of stories and characters. But the movement from thoughtfulness and reflections to a poetic and musical result are unimaginable and challenging and hard to put into words.

"You might imagine a sculptor who is working on a marble block for a very long time,” explains Alex Turner. “And quietly refines the block more and more until finally a sculpture comes out of it. But it’s really an extremely cheesy image. At least I just tried to get myself into a position where I could write music and words and for me it was the piano that made the breakthrough. It reminded me a little of my dad and how he made these well-laced jazz chords that got me in a mood where I could create a character for the lyrics - a fictional character if you want to.”

From Frank Sinatra to the Arctic Monkeys

Alex Turner has grown up with music around him. This is how the story often goes when it comes to artists of that caliber. But the fact that he has been raised with music around him has never been as distinct as it has been in the case of [TBH&C]. Not even Alex Turner has been so open about the effect the jazz has subconsciously had on the musical performances Arctic Monkeys have moved towards.

"My father would probably call himself a pianist even though he only plays a little,” says Alex Turner. Maybe he has taken a step back to the roots with Arctic Monkeys in his heels because [TBH&C] has the jazz drawn to the soundtrack. However, Alex Turner emphasizes that nowadays [the piano of the rock universe that Arctic Monkeys have explored for more than 10 years is far from Frank Sinatra]. “At that time, it did not sound so good at all. I could not play any of the songs very well at all. My father plays saxophone and trumpet and I really thought about him and his music when I wrote this album. Some of these piano parts reminded me of what I had heard from the room next to when I was a child.”

The balance of the music

Arctic Monkeys are unconventional. That is the reason for their success because they are of the bands that are hard to hate. The music kicks you right in the face, and it has even Liam Gallagher envious, even though he may not admit it. Arctic Monkeys with Alex Turner as the songwriter have moved undisturbed down the paths that managed to inspire.

“Throughout the production, I was convinced that the texts were written in a modern enough way that could create some kind of counterbalance in the music,” says Alex Turner. His approach at song-writing differs from most other rock musicians, and may seem closer to hip hop than anything else. “It was the goal to make the album classically composed, but not retrospectively sounding. That was quite important to me.

Away with the beard!

Alex Turner has grown a beard. There are many who don’t like it, but Alex Turner is not going let that bother him. The phenomenon has moved into the internet – there has even been a petition on change.org, launched with the purpose of getting Alex Turner to shave. “There’s a petition? I did not know,” says Alex Turner. “It’s funny and ridiculous. It’s wild how people are interested in hairstyles and looks and all that.”

With [TBH&C], Arctic Monkeys have entered the narrative universe. It is not an unknown universe. It is a universe in which Alex Turner has found his foothold for many years. The texts lean on journalistic narratives or appear as sections of memories of dreams and idols. In Star Treatment, Alex Turner is dreaming of joining The Strokes. For him, The Strokes is that band. That band, Pixies was for Kurt Cobain, The Stone Roses for Liam Gallagher or The Who for Eddie Vedder. The dream of being mentioned in the same breath as those who inspired him. In One Point Perspective, journalistic observations are in the focus, mixed with surreal metaphors and authentic dialogue sequences. The line “The stunning documentary that no one else unfortunately saw / Such a beautiful photography, it’s worth it for the opening scene / I’ve been driving 'round listening to the score” might refer to the cliché and pretentious smalltalk flowing through the fernish of a hip art gallery.

"I always write down things that I like,” says Alex Turner. “And the use of dialogue as a method is a very effective way of putting topics I would like to discuss in a particular context or scenario.”

“The intention was to underscore texts through music,” continues Turner, referring to One Point Perspective from [TBH&C]. “You know what I mean - at parties where everyone is full and going wild and constantly loses focus on the conversation. That’s what I’d like to try to illustrate through the end when the entertainment suddenly disappears.

The dynamic front man

At times, Alex Turner can be seen as driving force in the Arctic Monkeys. He leads the show when he stands on stage. His attitude alone brings it home. He swings his hips and turns the guitar over his back as he croons through a somewhat near flawless backdrop. But he has an undeniable dependence on the band. It’s not his band - they all have equal ownership. Arctic Monkeys work interdependently, across their respective roles, and produce quality content through lifelong friendships.

“I was never interested in making a solo album. I am a part of this band and it would be disrespectful towards the others if I made music on my own. But nevertheless, it’s important for me to make music that I find in myself, and that I have long wanted to bring forward,” says Alex Turner. [TBH&C] is composed on a piano locked in a bedroom and with impulsiveness as motivation. "If you compose on a piano, the results are automatically different compared to how they would be on a guitar. And it has been important for me to say goodbye to the realism that has been in the focus on much of Arctic Monkeys’ music. In the end, it was quite clear to me how this album could not have anything to do with what Arctic Monkeys fans would probably expect.”

Back to Denmark

Today marks the 4th anniversary of Arctic Monkeys last standing on Danish ground. It feels like it has been ages ago because never before has the break been so long. Arctic Monkeys have been frequent guests at Danish venues and festivals, but since the end of 2014, Arctic Monkeys have cleared their agenda to focus on other things. But before long, Arctic Monkeys reappear in front of the Danish audience when they take the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 27 June.

Alex Turner has made the start in the song writing process. It’s nothing new, because it’s like that every time. Alex Turner is the catalyst of creativity, armed with demos and raw sketches of new material, he presents to the rest of the band. The starting point is independent work, but it is not long before the rest of the band can take part in the creative development of the music.

“As soon as the demos were finished, I invited Jamie to listen all the way along with me and to continue working on the songs,” says Alex Turner. “He added a little guitar, developed some of the ideas and was generally enthusiastic about it all. His enthusiasm helped me overcome my insecurity. Later, Nick (O'Malley, bassist) came into the studio where we played Star Treatment for him and he was loving it to bits. And then I started quietly being given green light on the rest.”

From Sheffield to L.A.

Today, the thick northern English dialect has ever so slightly been replaced with American. For some, it seems pretentious. As if it was an insecure attempt to fit into the same club as Josh Homme and the rest of the clientele from the Rancho de la Luna studio in the Californian desert. Liam Gallagher is certainly not a fan, but where his love for the hometown and the Sky Blues is clear, Alex Turner has a little different relationship with Sheffield and the cultural impression that Arctic Monkeys is said to have made on the town. Alex Turner has lived in LA for a couple of years in the USA’s golden state, and the city moved quietly into his heart like a home away from home.

"L.A. is more or less the opposite of Sheffield,” declares Alex Turner. “But I do not miss Sheffield because nothing has changed since I moved from there. But nevertheless it’s hard for me to explain why I moved from there. I have a lot of really good friends in LA but what else do I have? What is it that keeps me in this city? I think that most of all it is all the equipment that has gathered here. Really bad answer, right?”

Do you have a better answer?