The first song Arctic Monkeys wrote together
Alex Turner brought new life to the Sheffield music scene in the early 2000s with his indie group Arctic Monkeys. The band’s early success owes thanks to the advent of internet download websites, which allowed them a platform to share their first EP, Five Minutes With Arctic Monkeys, with the world.
Quickly snapped up by Domino Records, Arctic Monkeys set about recording their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which changed the game upon its release in January 2006. Over six subsequent studio albums to date, Arctic Monkeys have evolved from a chaotic guitar-driven frenzy toward something increasingly refined and textured.
Regardless of your thoughts on Arctic Monkeys’ recent material, their most important and influential release is undoubtedly their 2006 debut. Thanks to an intense local gigging regime and a swarm of bootleg demos following their formation in 2002, the band had already garnered a respectable following before their debut single of October 2005, ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’.
In a conversation with Pitchfork in 2012, Turner discussed the crucial impact of Britpop legends Oasis on the band’s early formation. The frontman remembered how he and drummer Matt Helders had once turned up to school dressed like the Gallagher brothers to perform during assembly.
“In the UK, you go from primary school to secondary school at age 11,” he told Pitchfork. “And when we left primary school, all the kids would form groups and do a performance, like the girls would do a dance to the Spice Girls or whatever.”
“So me and Matt and some of our friends put on ‘Morning Glory’ – we ‘played’ some tennis racquets and pretended to be Oasis,” he added. “Matt was Liam Gallagher, he had the bucket hat on. I was the bass player. We were just standing there, doing what Oasis did onstage, which was not a great deal. I don’t think we got as good a reaction as the Spice Girls.”
Continuing, Turner discussed the influence of Oasis’ 1995 sophomore album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. “With Oasis, it’s just that attitude, like it’s resistant against everything else that’s going on in music. I don’t know if you can fully understand that, it’s like an impulse, isn’t it? Especially at that age, you don’t rationalise, you’re just like, ‘That looks cool,'” Turner opined.
“And I feel like that’s the fucking way it should be now, in a way. Guitar music or rock ‘n’ roll or whatever you want to call it sort of goes away with trends, but it’ll never go away completely. It can’t die because it’s so fundamentally attractive.”
At Christmas 2001, Turner and guitarist Jamie Cook received guitars as presents from their parents as a more practical replacement for tennis racquets. After forming an early incarnation of Arctic Monkeys, the school lads wrote their first song, ‘Matt Dave Rock Song’. The track was named after an early singer who subsequently left the band.
Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a recording of ‘Matt Dave Rock Song’ publicly available – ostensibly for good reason, with the band later describing it as “junk” and “total crap”. Instead, enjoy a live recording of ‘Ravey Ravey Ravey Club’, another early track that didn’t make it to the studio.
