Where is the hotel room that inspired Arctic Monkeys song ‘505’?
The song ‘505’ started life as the sombre closer on Arctic Monkeys’ 2007 sophomore album Favourite Worst Nightmare, but it’s since become a standout moment in almost every gig the band plays. Over 15 years on from its initial release, the track is now a favourite worst tearjerker for many fans and is widely hailed as among the best things Alex Turner and the band ever put out.
The moment Matt Helders snaps on the snare and Turner goes up an octave to lament, “I crumble completely when you cry”, is the signal for crowds in their tens of thousands to explode in ecstatic, bittersweet unison. It really is a lovesick anthem for the ages.
Yet what initially grabs the attention of the song isn’t the heartache its singer is facing but the nostalgia trip he takes back to the place of the song’s title. What and where is “505” exactly? He tells us it could be a “45-minute drive” or even a “seven-hour flight” away. The extent of the journey doesn’t matter. Either way, his distant lover will be waiting for him there, lying on her side, with her hands between her thighs.
It’s an image as intimate as it is universally accessible, giving us perhaps the first glimpse of Turner’s innermost romantic feelings. Feelings that would become the primary subject of Arctic Monkeys tunes for years to come.
Who is the song about, though?
At the time he wrote ‘505’, Turner was in a relationship with Goldsmiths University student Johanna Bennett. The pair were only 20 and 21 at the time when they started going out, and it was the Sheffield singer’s first proper committed relationship. Yet the two of them spent much of their time together physically apart, as Turner set off on a whirlwind world tour throughout his band’s breakout year as the undisputed next big thing in British music.
Soon after the release of Favourite Worst Nightmare, Bennett recalled the one occasion she got to spend some quality time alone with Turner in an interview with the Guardian. “We were on holiday and had cut ourselves off from everything,” she told the newspaper. “We were in a really quiet hotel and didn’t watch TV or listen to that much music.” Ironically, it was this sojourn that led to another Arctic Monkeys classic, ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, on which Bennett shares a writing credit with Turner.
But could it also be that the quiet hotel she mentions gave rise to ‘505’? Perhaps Turner is referencing the number of the room where they stayed as he harks back to the happiest time he spent with his first love. It is, after all, in his imagination. He can go back there whenever he returns to this iconic tune on stage.
Alternatively, the “going back” described in the song’s refrain could refer to a more literal journey. Since Bennett was a student living in southeast London during her relationship with Turner, maybe she lived in a university halls of residence, or rented a flat on the fifth floor of a high-rise building. The door number of her accommodation could have symbolised a home-from-home for Turner, a place to escape from the intrusions of fame, the exhaustion of touring and the trappings of the music industry. And be with the person he cared about most.
These explanations are speculative, based on what little we know about the couple’s living arrangements at the time and Bennett’s description of their holiday. Alas, the distance and pressures of Turner’s career got too much in the end. By January 2007, the pair had broken it off, and Bennett had since married Kings of Leon guitarist Matthew Folliwell.
Turner has had his own fair share of more mature relationships since Bennett as well. But they’ll always have ‘505’ to go back to. Even if it now belongs to millions of fans around the world, too.
