The abiding influence of one of Alex Turner’s favourite lines in literature
Alex Turner hinted at the literary depth he ladles into the Arctic Monkeys right from the off. The title of their debut album was plucked from the pages of a classic novel. The Alan Sillitoe ode to working-class weekend exultation, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, was published in 1951, but Turner recognised that the pertinent points had a prescience even in the early ‘00s and perhaps forevermore as the mechanical oppression of the daily grind only shows signs of intensifying.
The novel portrays perfectly the blueprint the Monkeys were working from – “All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda,” it reads. “I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think or say I am, that’s what I’m not because they don’t know a bloody thing about me. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop the bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”
The Monkeys procured that mantra for their record, took the ball and ran with it, and the frenetic sound achieved is like a tyrannical detonation against the clocks that chow down all the quicker on the time of youth. This encapsulation seems to saturate every angst-strained sinew of the record; not just Turner’s prose, but Matt Helders’ excitable pounding drums, the vying euphonic guitars, Andy Nicholson’s rollicking bass, the crisp but carefree engineering and even the artwork – it all seems some perfect crystallising time capsule not only of an era but of a chapter of life, one that is echoed on the pages of Sillitoe’s novel.
But the clock moves on from the pages of juvenile angst and exultation, and Turner has briskly read on. Aside from the abiding influence of classic British literary depictions of working-class life, the rest of his bookshelf is crammed with quirks and mysteries and requires some guest work, mainly because nobody has bothered to ask him.
However, in an interview with Kevin Perry in Time Out, he writes: “We sit and chat about books, and as befits the sharpest lyric writer of his generation he’s the sort of reader who can quote his favourite novels. He’s a fan of [Joseph] Conrad and [Ernest] Hemingway, but above all [Vladimir] Nabokov. He recites a line about internalised anger from ‘Despair’: ‘I continued to stir my tea long after it had done all it could with the milk.’”
It’s the sort of line that Turner has been conjuring ever since. Its concision offers up a punch and implies there is more waiting in the wings of the simple sentence. As he croons in their new single ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’, “So if you wanna walk me to the car.” There is weight to those words that lies beyond a casual stroll, just as Nabokov’s tale of absentmindedness implies a lot more than stirring tea.
On both counts, these simple everyday acts gone awry are relatable gateways into the bigger picture. Sometimes, a walk to the car is just a walk to the car, other times it’s a heavy-hearted long goodbye; sometimes, over-stirring the tea implies your mind has simply wandered to last night’s painful football result, but other times the tea ripples with heftier reverberations than that. On both counts the concision proves cutting, the words have inherent melody, and the picture they swirl to the surface adds a lustrous cinematic depth.
They are words that paint a scene that pops up in the playground of your own imagination rather than staying in place on the page or lyric sheet. That’s an active pursuit to craft prose that poeticises the minutia of moments in our lives and imbues the surrounding work with an air of lived sincerity.
