‘Fire and the Thud’: Alex Turner’s ode to the torture of desire
“My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn’t stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss.” That’s what it read: a love letter found in a bar addressed to it-girl Alexa Chung and signed, with love, from Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. It was the late 2000s, the rock star was dating the TV presenter, and when the note got lost, he picked up his pen again to write something that would last forever: a song called ‘Fire And The Thud’.
From the very beginning, Alex Turner has had a way with words. Even when Arctic Monkeys were just a gaggle of mates singing about their other mates back in Sheffield, writing rowdy indie rock songs about nights out and local characters, Turner still did it all with a staggering amount of wit, poetry and creativity. Even if the subject at hand was a dodgy bouncer at a local club, he already had this way of turning unique images into metaphors, building his own codified language where he could say so much under the surface of saying little. On first listen, it would be easy to think he was talking nonsense, but as time has gone on and the albums have kept coming, Turner’s creative world has grown and grown.
After their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, and the 2007 follow-up, Favourite Worst Nightmare, that world suddenly swelled. On the 2009 record Humbug, the band turned towards bigger things. It was the first step of them moving away from Sheffield and the gobby kids they emerged as, establishing themselves as mature artists ready to stretch into the future. The lyrics across the board are a masterclass in metaphors as each and every song tells a story through more mysterious imagery than they’d dared to tackle before. ‘Crying Lightning’ turns tears into a magic trick, ‘My Propeller’ is the band’s take on innuendo like the Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’ and then on ‘Fire and the Thud’, Turner paints a picture of a world bending to want, capturing how lust and desire changes the look and feel of everything until each little detail howls the person you fancy’s name.
Boxes of matches, soup, books, and photobooth photos; the images held within the song are largely meaningless. But each time Turner points to an object in the track, it’s suddenly heavy with romance. Suddenly a match box, held in the hand of the girl he wants, is full of potential as it “showed me my tomorrow”. Abruptly, the face of the person he’s thinking of appears to him everywhere as he sings, “You’re hiding in my soup / And this book reveals your face.” As the verses wind out, Turner captures the kind of shroud or shadow that a crush can cause, articulating in few words the all-encompassing feeling of desire. Like in his love letter, when the kiss played on his mind over and over, ‘Fire and the Thud’ extends that fixation out into the whole world.
But that’s the thing with crushes; they’re torturous and utterly intoxicating. They can make you feel crazy when the thought of the person you’re after becomes a permanent presence, but really, would you have it any other way? As Turner puts it in his poetry, “I did request the mark you cast”, knowing he wanted to be in this position, but in equal measure to the fire of desire, he also wants the reality or the thud.
The song’s title represents those two halves. The fire is the thought of it, the daydreams about a person, the contemplations of possible future tristes. But the thud is the reality; it’s skin on skin, face to face, real-life action. So as Turner asks, “Will the teasing of the fire be followed by the thud?”, he’s asking or perhaps even daring, “What now?”
That balance between desire and daringness plays out throughout the song like a gorgeous dance, matched perfectly by the song’s seductive yet simple guitar instrumental. His admittance to thinking about this person is matched in equal measure by grand statements and lines of devotion. “If it’s true you’re gonna run away / Tell me where, I’ll meet you there,” he sings in a song written right before he actually did follow Alexa Chung as she ran away to New York. He wonders if saying all this will burst the bubble of the crush as he asks, “Am I snapping the excitement? / If I pack away the laughter / And tell you how it feels.” But then, he throws caution to the wind and just says it. In the song’s most outright line, and the closest it comes to the love letter that inspired it, Turner sings it outright, “The day after you stole my heart / Everything I touched told me / It would be better shared with you.”
Instrumentally, ‘Fire and the Thud’ is subtle and easy to overlook. It doesn’t have the raging rock and roll energy of their other love songs like ‘R U Mine?’, ‘Arabella’ or even the other ode to Chung, ‘She’s Thunderstorms’. But lyrically, with this interplay between enjoyment and torture, desire and worry, tension and action, Turner captures the reality of a crush in all its lustful and obsessive glory.
