The feud Alex Turner regrets most
In 2011, Alex Turner, the enigmatic frontman of Arctic Monkeys, offered an apology. In the mid-2000s, he’d taken a potshot at one of the decade’s most maligned musicians. Five years later, he confessed to having jumped on the bandwagon somewhat. So, who was the target of Turner’s take-down? Let’s take a closer look.
In 2006, British boyband Take That reunited after almost a decade apart. After the boy band’s split, Garry Barlow disappeared from public view, resurfacing as a solo artist before returning to the spotlight with the 2005 TV documentary Take That: For The Record. The band’s subsequent reunion came amid a wave of renewed interest, with Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and Jason Orange coming together for a sell-out arena tour. The outing coincided with the release of their comeback single ‘Patience’, which spent four weeks as UK number one.
In 2006, the single won a Brit Award for Single Of The Year, but not everyone was so impressed. That same year, Arctic Monkeys released their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. The Sheffield group had already garnered a devoted fanbase and won critical acclaim with singles like ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor‘, which seemed to foreshadow a new wave of British guitar music rooted in the same no-fucks-given attitude that had endeared the public to the Madchester and Britpop scenes of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Perhaps intending to distance AM from the Poe-faced pop of Barlow and his mother-loving bandmates, Alex Turner dubbed Take That’s music “a load of old bollocks”. The frontman would later say he’d been unaware of all the stuff going on behind the scenes: the drug abuse, Barlow’s struggle with the limelight and his subsequent reclusion. With all that in mind, the band’s return from the depths seemed rather impressive, perhaps even admirable. Speaking in 2011, Turner told NME: “We love Gary Barlow. I think I really offended him a few years ago though, which I’m sorry about. I didn’t understand it then. Didn’t know what was going on, trying to ruffle some feathers.”
