Alex Turner’s favourite part of Arctic Monkeys album ‘AM’
When Arctic Monkeys released AM in 2013, the Sheffield foursome truly transcended their roots and became international stars. The album quickly became a defining record of the Internet age, elevating the band’s status to unparalleled heights. During this time, you only had to quickly scroll on Tumblr to find images of the band plastered on every blog, signalling their mighty dominance over 2010s indie rock.
AM contains some of the band’s most well-known tracks, such as ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, ‘R U Mine?’ and ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?’, which have become staples of their live sets ever since. As they did for Humbug and Suck It And See, Arctic Monkeys recorded the album outside England, distancing themselves from their once distinctively British sound. AM came to life in California, particularly the Rancho De La Luna studio in Joshua Tree.
The band first used the studio for Humbug, working with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, who co-produced the album with James Ford. For AM, Ford and Ross Orton took charge of production, although Homme still made several contributions to the album.
The singer lent backing vocals to ‘One For The Road’ and ‘Knee Socks’, which QOTSA fans will instantly be able to recognise. Homme once discussed the album, stating: “It’s a really cool, sexy after-midnight record,” adding, “It’s like a modern, dancefloor sexy record. It’s really good.”
For Alex Turner, Homme’s contributions helped to get the band “out of a rut”. Talking to NME, he once revealed that Homme’s vocals in ‘Knee Socks’ are his favourite part of the whole record. He performs backing vocals on the bridge and the last chorus of the track, piercing the falsetto melodies with his potent voice.
Turner explained: “I think he sounds a bit like Bowie. It’s my favourite bit of the record, that breakdown, that 30 seconds where it all goes weird. What’s most interesting about it is how accidental it was – I’d sung on the new Queens record a few weeks previous, and we were kind of in a rut a little bit, in this dark rooms.”
He added: “So Josh came down, Nick [O’Malley] made cocktails and we just hung out for the night. We got him to sing on ‘One For The Road’, and then we were playing him ‘Knee Socks’ because we’d just been working on it. We were thinking about putting someone on that section, possibly to do the bit that the three of us were originally doing, which is this really fast R&B bit.”
“But then he heard it, and then he said, ‘I’ve got this really great idea for a counter-melody background thing,’ and he went and did that and it suddenly became this whole other thing that you never excited it to be. I think it kind of makes the tune. Suddenly, we were out of the rut and re-energised – Josh saved the day!”
Listen to ‘Knee Socks’ below.
