Alex Turner explains how Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones inspired the new Arctic Monkeys album
In a new interview with The Big Issue, Alex Turner has revealed the new Arctic Monkeys album, The Car, was inspired by Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.
The interview was conducted by Line Of Duty star Martin Compston, who spent the weekend with the band in Budapest for their performance at Sziget Festival. In the piece, Turner discusses how they retreated to rural Suffolk to record their seventh album, and likened it to methods used by legendary bands of yesteryear.
“There’s a bunch of Led Zeppelin and Stones records where they were in this house in the country and then they went and sorted it all out and overdubbed it elsewhere,” Turner explained to the Scottish actor. “We went there in the summer, took all the equipment, got the raw material and then took it on elsewhere.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the frontman explains it does share similarities with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino but “on this record, sci-fi is off the table. We are back to earth”.
Ahead of their headline performances at Reading & Leeds, Turner also explained why the band are currently rotating their setlist, and how his relationship with some of their songs has changed.
“It’s quite mysterious, to me, right now, at this moment in time, the setlist and what the order of that should be,” Turner said. “This time has passed over the last few years and certain things don’t feel the way you expected them to anymore. That sounds sad, but it’s not. There are just certain things that represented certain moments in the past that now feel like something else, so they should be somewhere else. I’m still definitely very much working it out,” he added.
The full interview with The Big Issue will be available to buy from local vendors on August 29th.
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