‘Big Ideas’: The Arctic Monkeys song Alex Turner wrote as a movie theme tune
Some songs fall from the sky; others need time to gestate. As one of the UK’s most revered songwriters, Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner has written his fair share of both.
During a conversation with BBC shortly after the release of the 2022 album The Car, Turner revealed that some of the songs on the album went through massive changes before he was happy with them. ‘Big Ideas’, for example, began life as a movie theme.
Turner has often spoken about his respect for film composers like Ennio Morricone, once naming ‘Una Spiaggia a Mezzogiorno’ from Vergogna Schifosi as one of his five all-time favourite tracks. That appreciation for the syrupy bliss of late 1960s film scores undoubtedly made its way into The Car. In a four-star review of the album, Far Out’s Tom Taylor called it “heroically cinematic,” adding: “The lack of choruses seems like a progressive move in the modern guitar era. It chucks in tritone moments to fit the prose like a composer of old.”
According to Turner, many of the songs on Cars came slowly and required much tweaking before they revealed themselves. “I can vaguely remember times in the past where I’ve been struck with the inspiration and written something quite quickly, but it feels like that happens less these days,” he explained. “But I’m not worried if it takes a little bit longer.” Apparently, Turner sat with some ideas for three years before he “persuaded them to be a pop song”.
One such motif is the sultry jam at the start of ‘Big Ideas’. Played on an electric piano, the instrumental wouldn’t feel out of place in a ’70s Italian erotica score. “I felt like it had aspirations to be a movie theme,” Turner revealed. “It hung around for ages, that melody, and I’d play it whenever I found myself sitting at a piano [until] one of the band asked, ‘Is that one of yours?’ And that’s about as excited as they get.”
The band’s support encouraged him to work the motif into a song that explores Turner’s feelings of alienation and disillusionment: “I had big ideas… the kind you’d rather not share over the phone,” he sings. “But now the orchestra’s got us all surrounded, and I can’t for the life of me remember how they go.” In the studio, guitarist Jamie Cook patched a Moog synthesizer into an old drum machine to create a dark, industrial sound. In the end, of course, the track “went on its own journey” and slowly morphed into a sumptuous orchestral recording, leaving the band with an intoxicating hybrid between classic AM songwriting and ’60s cinematic bliss.
