‘Star Treatment’: The Arctic Monkeys song Alex Turner compared to Federico Fellini
For the sixth Arctic Monkeys album Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino, Alex Turner took the band to space, transporting his witty lyricism to a fictional resort on the moon. The record was released in 2018, and its opening track ‘Star Treatment’ is an exploration of a writer in isolation at the titular hotel.
Turner considers the song to be his “writing about writing” and once drew comparisons between it and Federico Fellini’s 1963 surrealist comedy-drama 8 ½. The film focuses on a fictional Italian filmmaker, Guido Anselmi, who experiences a terrible case of writer’s block and smothered creativity when trying to direct a science fiction epic.
Turner told Mojo (via Songfacts), “That was writing about writing. It was my 8½, the Fellini film – where the director can’t seem to make this movie, however hard he tries. I was thinking about that. That’s interesting to me.” Turner has always had a fascination with cinema, and ‘Star Treatment’ was a perfect example of him exploring its finer details.
Halfway through the song, Turner also references another cinematic classic, that time Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner, adapted, of course, from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He once explained that the line was intended as a shot against film buffs, telling NME, “I’ve only seen this happen a couple of times, but it goes beyond: ‘What do you mean you’ve never seen Blade Runner?’ and gets to: ‘Oh my God, I envy you!'”
Of course, it’s not only cinema that Turner had in mind when writing the song, though, as it famously opens with the line, “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes/ Now look at the mess you made me make.” It serves as a reflection on how quickly time passed from the early days of Arctic Monkeys, when Turner was just a teenager, to releasing their sixth album.
He told Pitchfork, “When I wrote that line, I imagined I would return to it, and it wouldn’t end up on the record. When I circled back around to it, I felt like it was right because it made me think, ‘Shit, the last 12 years just flashed by.’ There’s an honesty and a truth to it.”
He added, “The style of my writing has developed considerably since the first record, but the bluntness of that line – and perhaps some other lyrics on this album – reminds me of the way I wrote in the beginning.“
