He who scares wins

Alex Turner, 21-year-old frontman of the Arctic Monkeys, is answering a hotpress question in a clean but featureless dressing room backstage at midsize Liverpool venue the Carlsberg Academy.
“Well, the thing was that we did was... uh... ”
The singer pauses for a moment to rub nothing out of his eye, before continuing his answer. Actually, he doesn’t continue, he goes right back to the start again. “Well, the thing was that we... uh... we... ”
Sighing heavily, he lays his hand flat on the table and examines it carefully, perhaps hoping that the answer will be written on the back of it. “Ah, you see, the thing was... what we did was... aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!”
He places his head against the wall and lightly bangs it a couple of times. “Well, what we did... em... what was your question again?”
Actually, I’ve forgotten it myself at this stage. Welcome to my favourite worst nightmare interview...

It’s the mid-afternoon of Saturday the 14th of April, 2007, and, with a clock quickly ticking towards their soundcheck for tonight’s sold-out gig, I’m attempting to extricate a cover story’s worth of quotes from the four members of the biggest and most exciting new British rock band since Oasis.
Needless to say, this is no easy task. They’re not natural born interviewees. Despite their likeably ludicrous moniker, the Arctic Monkeys don’t chatter. In fact, interviewing them is something akin to having a forced polite conversation with your teenage sister’s friends. In simian terms, with an average age of just 21, these extremely successful rock musicians are practically chimps (though they’re definitely not chumps).
Turner and lead guitarist Jamie Cook look like proper rock stars, all cool hairstyles, mod shirts and skinny hips. In standard rock band tradition, the rhythm section – drummer Matt Hedler and bassist Nick O’Malley – look like a pair of shy counter assistants in a provincial supermarket. Which makes perfect sense because, up until last year, new recruit O’Malley was actually working in a Sheffield Asda.
Don’t get me wrong, they come across as a genuinely likeable, modest and decent bunch of lads, seeming determined not to be seen to be going up their own monkey rumps. So much so that, for the first while, they don’t really say anything at all. Alex is acting more Arctic Junkie than Monkey, while Jamie and Nick are friendly and reasonably talkative without saying much worth taping (“Australia were right proper mad!” “Japan were dead cool!” etc.).
Matt spends the first minute or so of my precious interview time playing with his mobile phone. Eventually, I have to ask him to stop (mobiles play havoc with my recording equipment).
“Oh right, sorry mate,” he says, putting it away.
I don’t think he’s trying to be rude, he’s just not thinking. And in fairness to all of them, they’ve just travelled up from London, having played two sold out nights in the Astoria. So their lethargy is somewhat forgivable.
However, adding to my woes, their strong Sheffield accents can be a little hard to decipher at times. At one point, Alex explains how he first got into The Smiths.
“The guy who taught us to drive gave us a loan of a couple of Smiths albums,” he tells me. “They were proper cool.”
“Oh?” I reply. “Did you all learn how to drive together?”
He looks at me blankly for a second or two, and then laughs. “No – uz,” he says, indicating himself. “Me! I were the one learning to drive!”
Well, nobody ever said this was going to be easy...
But then again, as one of their publicists later tells me, “The thing about these lads is that they’ve had the media all over them pretty much from day one. They haven’t ever had to try to get publicity or court journalists. So they’re sort of unique. The way they took off, they never even had to try.”
So much so that they’re also reputedly charmingly oblivious to a lot of the careerist stuff other bands would give their front teeth for. Last year, they famously missed their soundcheck for Saturday Night Live because they’d gone out shopping. Apparently, they were totally unaware of the show’s massive influence in America. When they did play, actor Matt Dillon introduced them.
“Stuff like that is good,” says Matt, “but often you don’t really know what is good or not, because you don’t know the country. In England, we have more control because we know the shows and the hosts ourselves. What’s worth doing, and what’s not. But when you go abroad you’ve just gotta trust the people who’re telling you what to do.”
Nick: “We’re lucky that we’ve got managers who look after us well and never try and force us to do anything that we don’t wanna do or any stuff like that. So we don’t really have to think about it that much. If we get offers for stuff, it don’t even come as far as us really. If it’s summat shit, they’ll just say no and won’t even bother us with it. So we’re quite lucky like that really.”
Actually, they’re lucky in lots of other ways too. The shortest book never written is titled Our Struggle by the Arctic Monkeys.
A wise philosopher once defined time and space thus: time exists so everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so it doesn’t all happen to you. However, in rock and roll terms, this definition sure doesn’t apply to the Arctic Monkeys, a band to whom it seems everything has happened – and is continuing to happen – all at once.
It’s been a rollercoaster for them. From their very first gig in Sheffield pub The Grapes in June 2003 (where they distributed free CD copies of their demos, leading to them becoming a MySpace phenomenon) to their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not becoming the fastest-selling debut album in British history took a little over two years. Now, just 13 months later, their sophomore effort Favourite Worst Nightmare – not so much a sequel as an upgrade – is set to consolidate their position as the UK’s number one band.
There’s a rock & roll tradition whereby the genre’s elder statesmen pass on their words of advice and wisdom to the new cubs. While the Monkeys have met their share of rock legends in the last two years, they say that nobody has dispensed any advice (though Keith Richards has expressed an opinion which we’ll deal with in a while).
“Nobody’s said owt to us really,” Alex shrugs. “Nobody’s been able to give us advice because it hasn’t really happened to anyone else the way it’s happened to us. We’re a bit of a unique and weird thing.”
This is certainly true. Thanks to a combination of their early internet popularity and their own blatant disregard for copyright, the Arctics found themselves playing sold-out shows to roomfuls of strangers who seemed to know every word of every song before they’d even released a record. That’s the Noughties for you!
When Alex describes the band as “a bit of a unique and weird thing”, is he referring to the fact that they rose to fame through the internet?
“Yeah,” he says. “No. Well, not really, like. More just the way it took off immediately.”
Did you ever think it would happen like this?
“Not really,” says Jamie. “There were no big plan, like. It just sort of ‘appened. It’s great, though. I always wanted to do summat like this – summat creative, like.”
You’re certainly doing it fast. Your first album only came out in January of last year, and you’re already back with a follow-up!
“Well, you could get really bogged down just thinking about it,” says Nick. “We decided to just get on with it.”
“We didn’t really have much time,” adds Matt. “Well, to be honest, we didn’t give ourselves much time off, because we just wanted to get on with it again – the second one. It weren’t like we were fed up with playing or anything. We were right eager to do it again.”
Still, it must have been fairly frenetic for the last 18 months?
“Yeah, but it’s not as bad as you’d think,” laughs Jamie. “We’re having a really good time and that. It’s almost like been having a year off for us. You see, the thing is that we haven’t had much life experience really, do ya know what I mean? We’re only really young so we’re learning as we go.”
Do you miss seeing family and friends?
“It’s not as bad as it probably seems because we still, like, go home every now and again,” says Matt. “They still go to gigs and stuff – like my mum and dad are coming tonight. All of our mates are here today as well, so that’s sort of good to bring them along.”
Had any of you travelled much before you were in a band?
“No, not really – not before this,” says Nick. “But it were very good and we proper enjoyed it. Strange to feel that you’re at the other end of the world playing music and that, and people are enjoying it. Australia was probably the best time of my life really. It were amazing.”
Matt: “Going to places like that – and Japan, especially – seeing places so far away that you never thought you’d ever see it is proper mad, really. As a kid, I never thought I’d see Japan, so it was amazing to see it.”

Let’s talk about the new album. Last month they told Rolling Stone that amongst the numerous rejected titles for Favourite Worst Nightmare were Don’t Take Tech-no For An Answer, 24-Hour Zoo and... Lesbian Wednesdays. So what was the thinking behind that last one?
“Em, we just sorta thought up a load of daft names,” Matt smiles. “And that was one of ‘em.”
Nick: “We couldn’t get serious about titles until they really came to the crunch. So we had loads of jokey ones until we came to the serious ones. And Favourite Worst Nightmare were the one we chose.”
Right, well that explains it...
Favourite Worst Nightmare (the title comes from a lyric in the song ‘D Is For Dangerous’, incidentally) was recorded in Miloco Studios in Shoreditch, East London, with production duties handled by Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and Mike Crossey. The pair had actually begun working on Whatever People Say I Am, but, for whatever reasons, the sessions were abandoned and the job was completed by Jim Abiss.
However, the band were delighted to get them back in to work on this effort. “I think it was very obvious from when we did that first session that it was sound with them,” says Alex. “They understood it.”
“And they’re not much older than us really,” adds Jamie.
What’s the band’s dynamic when it comes to writing songs?
“We don’t really have a routine in the way we write songs,” he says. “Sometimes Alex will have a song written before he comes to us, acoustically or whatever. And sometime I’ll have a guitar part written and he’ll come up with a lyric. Actually, a lot of songs on this album were written from drumbeats.”
“Yeah – we sparked off a lot of beats on this one,” Alex affirms. “Matt would come up with a beat and Jamie would write a riff around it, and then I’d come up with some words.”
The songs on Favourite Worst Nightmare are louder, punchier and at least as memorable as those on their debut. Thematically, they haven’t strayed too far from their small town scenarios either (though there is a song about media intrusion). Alex’s simply phrased but always razorsharp wit is in strong evidence from the album’s opening cut, ‘Brianstorm’ (which opens with the brilliant line, “Brian – top marks for not tryin’”). Apparently, the Brian of the title is based on someone the lads met backstage at a Japanese gig.
Alex recalls: “What happened were we met this guy, and when he left the room we were a bit freaked out by his presence, so we did like a brainstorm for what he was like, drew a little picture and wrote things about him. And the song came really quickly.”
“He was right weird,” shudders Jamie. “He just appeared with, like, a business card. He was wearing a roundneck T-shirt and a tie loosely around it. I’d never seen that before. It felt like he were trying to get inside your mind. We were checking out his attire, freaked out. He definitely left a mark on us. He might have been a magician. He might even be here now. But if we ever found out who he was, it might spoil it.”
There’s a definite John Cooper Clarke influence on some of the tracks. I ask, does Alex read much poetry?
“I really like John Cooper Clarke but I’m not really all that into poetry or anything,” he says. “I don’t know really. It’s just like... ” A long pause fades out to nothing.
I try a different tack. Were you good at English in school?
“Yeah. I liked it. I had a decent teacher, and I’d a good one in college as well.”
You don’t seem too into talking about your writing...
“No, I don’t mind really,” he smiles apologetically, aware that he’s not exactly being forthcoming with information.
Given the speed with which you’ve put this album out, it’s obvious that you don’t suffer from writers’ block...
“I’m not saying it comes naturally, but I can’t imagine not writing songs,” he says. “I’ve written probably six or seven new ones already since we finished this album.”
So you’ve a strong work ethic?
“Well, it’s not really work, though, is it? I’ve always liked just sitting down with a guitar and coming up with stuff.”
By all accounts, the new album is already illegally available on the net. As a band who rose to fame thanks to the world wide web, does that bother you?
“Not really,” says Nick, shrugging. “We’ve sort of accepted that that’s the way it is these days. I must admit, I’ve got a few albums that way in me time so I can’t really complain.”
“Anyway, a lot of people only download stuff to see if they like it,” adds Matt. “If they do, then they want the real one afterwards. That’s what I do anyway. I might get it early just because I can’t wait to hear it. But I’ll buy it when it comes out. True fans will always want to own the real thing.”
Needless to say, despite their massive success, not everyone is an Arctic Monkeys fan. Did they read the recent Keith Richards interview in NME where he slagged you off?
“I read that!” Nick laughs. “He tells them that he snorted his dad’s ashes and then he says the Libertines and the Arctic Monkeys are a pile of shit! But it’s fine. He deserves to be allowed to say whatever he wants.”
Jamie is somewhat less forgiving: “Come on, he’s just a fucking silly... actually, I’ll say nowt about that. I’ll only say the wrong thing!”
Alex: “Did he fall out of a coconut tree? Or was that just a figure of speech?”
No, it was a real tree, I assure him. Albeit only three feet off the ground...
“Right,” he nods. “He said The Libertines were shit as well so he obviously got a bad bang on the head.”
The band are huge Libertines fans, they tell me. The Coral are also up there. “Great rock band – no bullshit about them,” as Alex succinctly puts it.
But back to their own. Last year, on the eve of their first American tour, the band split with their original bassist and childhood mate, Andy Nicholson, in circumstances that are still largely unexplained.
“It happened basically at the end of the European tour,” says Matt. “He said he didn’t wanna come to America with us, which were like a week later. And we were like, ‘Shit!’ So then we got Nick in. But there’s no hassle with us.”
At the time, Nick O’Malley was preparing for his end of year exams and working in his local Asda. The decision to chuck job and college and join the Arctic Monkeys on their American adventure wasn’t difficult. “I was supposed to be doing my end of year exams,” he explains. “I were doing media and film studies and business and psychology. But when I got offered this, I were just like... fuck it! Ha, ha! No regrets!”
Did you already know how to play the songs?
“No, not really,” he says. “I mean I’d heard them a lot obviously, because I had the album and stuff, but I’d never actually learnt them. So it took a few days learning as much of them as I could.”
O’Malley is an Irish name – do you have family there?
“Both sets of me grandparents are from Cork, but I’ve never been,” he says. “Well, I’ve been to Dublin, but I’ve never been to Cork.”
They’ll be back in Ireland in the coming weeks, though they’re playing Malahide Castle rather than OxEgen this year. However, although it’s been rumoured that this is because they were put off by the messy crowd situation at Oxegen 2006, they claim that it’s purely for logistical reasons.
“I don’t think we could play Oxegen because we’re playing the Friday night of T In The Park,” explains Jamie. “The festivals are connected in some way, and for whatever reason, we can’t do both. But we’d a massive time at Oxegen last year. It were my 21st birthday that day. It were raining and windy as fuck. But we’d a great day.”

Time is almost up and hotpress still has much to ask. But the costumes thing needs explaining...
When the band won two awards at the recent Brits ceremony, they appeared in their acceptance films wearing Wizard Of Oz and Village People costumes. They say they were actually shooting a video in Pinewood Studios that day, which is why they didn’t show up personally to collect their gongs. But why the silly costumes?
“What costumes?” says Jamie, looking oblivious.
“The day we had to do the acceptance speech just happened to be costume day,” Alex deadpans. “We have costume day every Tuesday in this band, and it just happened that that fell on it. Ha, ha! Nah, it was just a bit of a laugh.”
“We didn’t wanna make twats out of ourselves,” adds Jamie. “You know, get up and try and do a really wacky speech. So we decided to give a serious speech, but wear wacky costumes.”
“I think we just wanted to say a bit of a serious actual speech – like, an actual thank-you rather than pissing someone off or saying something funny – but we didn’t want to be taken too seriously either,” says Alex, being serious now. “It was just easier to hide behind the humour while we were a bit more sincere in the speech.”
I get the sense that you really don’t want anybody to think that you’re getting too big for your boots. Is Sheffield a very begrudging place?
“No, not at all,” says Jamie. “Where we live isn’t in the centre of Sheffield. It’s far out and everyone there seems just dead chuffed. It’s a really small community. Everybody knows everyone – but in a good way.”
“We still drink in the same pubs we used to drink in,” adds Matt. “Nothing’s changed, really. The same people back home who used to take the piss out of me still take the piss, and I give it right back!”
Not that they’ll be back in Sheffield for any length of time in the near future. And while they might be anxious to record album number three, it’ll be a while before they can get back into a studio either. The Arctic Monkeys’ future is completely mapped out until next February – with tours of America, Europe, Australia and Japan already pencilled in.
Matt: “We’re up to doing another album definitely. We’ve already got a load of songs. And we’ll probably do an EP as well. But we’re gonna be busy for the next while.”
Do they have any longer-term plans?
“We’ll probably go on doing it for as long as we’re having a laugh,” says Matt.
Nick: “We never wanna be a job band, if you know what I mean. We never want it to be a career. We just wanna do it for as long as we enjoy it. We don’t wanna be cynical millionaires releasing albums to tour them and just make more money. But we do like the idea of making a lot of albums.”
Is it a big deal for you to break America?
“We don’t know what breaking America is!” laughs Jamie. “I’d love someone to write down on a piece of paper exactly what it means – breaking America. If someone does that then I’ll tell you if I want it.”
Well, surely it simply means selling loads of albums and being able to fill a stadium in every state?
“Oh right. Well, if that’s what it is, I don’t want it. In that case – no. Ha, ha!”
Their tour manager sticks his head around the door and requests the band’s presence on stage for the soundcheck. The interview’s over, and it’s been so disjointed talking to all four of them in such a short space of time that I’m not sure I have what I need. Or even that I get them. C’est la vie...
“You coming to the gig later?” Alex asks, shaking my hand as he heads out the door. “Sound! Pleased to meet ya, mate!”
Several hours later, though, watching them doing their thing onstage in the Academy, it all makes sense. The gig is totally sold-out (actually, this entire tour is totally sold-out) and the venue is like a furnace. From the moment the first chord is struck, it’s like petrol igniting. Whoosh!
They play a set peppered with songs from the new album, but it’s the older stuff that really gets the crowd going. All around the venue, buzzed-up young men and women are jumping on each other’s shoulders and dancing like apes. It’s madness!
I realise that these aren’t a press band, they’re a people’s band. They’re not too glamorous, not super smart, not contrived or cultured – just very, very real (although Cook has been doing his best to up the band’s glam quotient; it has recently been reported that he’s currently squiring millionairess page three model Katie Downes). They’ll probably never give good interviews, but they’ll turn out smashing songs.
Alex Turner will never need an autocue – not so long as he has a devoted crowd in front of him who know all of his lyrics. At least half the gig is sung by the audience. In a few weeks time, once Favourite Worst Nightmare has been officially released, they’ll doubtless be able to sing-along to the whole show.
Whatever people say they are, that’s what they’re not. But whatever people sing they are... well, that’s the Arctic Monkeys.
Favourite Worst Nightmare is released on Domino on April 20