‘Submarine’: how did Alex Turner’s solo album transform the Arctic Monkeys?
It’s easy to feel like the last ten years of the Arctic Monkeys’ output has been a massive curveball. At best, it is an interesting sidetrack from their true calling and, at worst, an outright betrayal of Alex Turner and the band’s roots. I, for one, am thrilled the Monkeys are making fuckwits that won’t stop stamping their webbed flippers about “real rock ‘n’ roll” desperately unhappy. However, I can’t say I love the recent records the way I loved Favourite Worst Nightmare and Suck It And See.
What I can see, though, is precisely where the roots of records like The Car and Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino come from. After all, for all the good work Matt Helders, Jamie Cook and Nick O’Malley do for the band (especially Helders, one of the 21st century’s great drummers), the Arctics are Alex Turner’s baby. As the singer and songwriter, what he writes goes. When he wants to make an indie record, they make Whatever People Say I Am… When he wants to make a louche cross-breed of 1970s heavy metal and 1990s G-Funk, they make AM.
In the 2020s, the Arctic Monkeys exist to be the place where Alex Turner explores his musical horizons. A decade and a half previously, if Turner wanted to explore something that wouldn’t be considered Monkey-esque, he had to find something new. When he wanted to be The Walker Brothers, he formed The Last Shadow Puppets with the Scrappy to his Scooby, Miles Kane.
The most interesting of all these side quests, though, was the one time (so far) that he ever pulled the trigger on a fully fledged solo project. The time he teamed up with director Richard Ayoade to make the soundtrack for the 2011 film Submarine. If you haven’t seen Submarine, rectify that immediately. It’s a charming coming-of-age love story with a killer comedic performance from Craig Roberts at its centre.
The film’s atmosphere is also quite wondrously unique: retro without ever feeling dated, like a proto-Sex Education. Turner’s soundtrack matches this perfectly. Bringing to mind the gentle, ruminative side of 1960s folk-rock like Simon and Garfunkel, Scott Walker and Cat Stevens, but with Turner’s lyricism giving it a timeless quality that still hits over a decade later.
The 2009 Monkeys record Humbug had signposted a more abstract, surrealist quality to Turner’s trademark storytelling, but Submarine is where he was truly able to combine the two. Crafting breathtaking lyrics like, “I have been searching from the bottom to the top / For such a sight as the one I caught when I saw your / Fingers dimming the lights / Like you’re used to being told that you’re trouble / And I spent all night stuck on the puzzle”.
Maybe this record was the one that fully convinced Turner that the Monkeys was where he could truly progress as an artist. After all, a song that first appeared on this very album, ‘Piledriver Waltz’, showed up as the high-water mark of 2011’s Arctic Monkeys masterpiece Suck It And See. Ever since then, the band may have changed direction, but they’ve never strayed far from the songwriting masterpiece first shown by Turner on this underrated little gem.
