The real people behind some of Arctic Monkeys’ best characters
Whilst many of the later Arctic Monkeys‘ tracks would feature romantic yearnings and imaginary trips to a lonely hotel and casino complex in outer space, their early output was largely comprised of the ‘kitchen sink reality’ that naturally arises as a product of growing up in working-class Sheffield.
As such, we can closely examine the songs from Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and Favourite Worst Nightmare and try to discover exactly where the inspiration for the tunes came from. Of course, this can also be aided by what the actual band members have said about them.
One of the tunes that got it all going for the four-piece was their second single, ‘When The Sun Goes Down’, formerly titled ‘Scummy’. The track is about the dodgy characters that would hang around outside the band’s rehearsal room in Neepsend, Sheffield. Alex Turner once said, “You’d see a bloke with a carrier bag or [something], and it’s like, ‘What the fuck is he doing here at this time of the night?’ Or you’d be packing your guitars away, and somebody [would] walk past and be like, ‘How much is one of them worth?'”
Harking back to that now nostalgic mid-2000s era of indie rock, ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ is a nod to the time that Turner worked at The Boardwalk venue in Sheffield. The track references the ill taste of clothing worn by people who thought they were better than they really were during that period; “the trilbies and the glasses of white wine”. Essentially this song is all about the people who were trying to act like they were big shots from “New York City”, but they were rather from “Rotherham”.
The second single from the band’s sophomore effort, ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, started as a word game between Turner and his then-girlfriend Johanna Bennett. Bennett once revealed, “We were on holiday and had cut ourselves off from everything. So as not to drive each other mad, we started messing around with these words, like a game, singing them to each other.” So there are large parts of Bennett within the track.
Bennett is also likely to be the real-life figurehead behind the inspiration for the sombre-sounding ‘505’. Turner once said that the tune was “The first proper love song we’ve done. As in like, ‘Oh, it’s that one person.'” The track primarily revolves around a seemingly long-distance relationship and the struggles that come with it, with Turner longing to see his lover through a rose-tint but may have to face an alternate reality when he finally gets to see them.
Turner would frequently return to his romantic losses and conquests over the span of his career, and ‘Do Me A Favour’ also seems to be about a real person (perhaps Bennett again, or maybe even Alexa Chung). Turner said of the song, “It’s about a goodbye, really, and about me being a bit of a knob. Perhaps I were craving to experience something else and looking back and feeling like you were a bit of a knobhead, just in how you perhaps treated that person. It’s just describing a goodbye. That’s another thing – when you’re with someone they seem happier in photos before you met her, or happier in stories from before. I always think they do.”
