‘Riot Van’: Arctic Monkeys’ most embarrassing song or an inadvertent masterpiece?
When videos now surface online of an elusive Alex Turner smiling with excited fans, there’s often some form of Cuban collar on show, paired with mildly tinted sunglass underneath a scruffy haircut you can place somewhere between Richard Hammond and Serge Gainsbourg. While he’s comfortable in his own skin, the transition from tracksuit rocker to flared trousers crooner has often been a cause of concern for early, dare I say, narrow-minded Arctic Monkeys fans. But, as he told Annie Mac in 2018, to achieve artistic freedom, he had to “take his Berghaus off”.
Such is the band’s artistic transformation that it’s hard to remember the rugged demeanour of their concrete-treading debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. While the lyricism of recent albums focuses more on rocket ship grease and moat-dwelling jet skis, their debut was rooted firmly in the broken soil of Britain.
Turner’s gaze was directed straight at his peers, whom he analysed with cunning humour and profound enlightenment as he made sense of British adolescence at the turn of the millennium. For most of the album, it was delivered with spitting venom, breathless vocals and frantic guitar parts, relentlessly driven by the beating rhythm of Matt Helders.
But on the album’s B-side, the pace slows for a song where Turner timidly tells a story of underage drinking and running from coppers in what became a counterculture anthem. Its brilliance ultimately lies in its barefaced honesty—documenting the delinquency of youth and romanticising rebelliousness in the way we all do when we are 16.
But as days pass and I grow older, my frequent revisiting of the Arctic Monkeys’ discography centres around the later, more musically dense works that offer more than just a view into a time capsule of British culture. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is indeed somewhat of a concept album, but you can detach yourself from the musicality of the record, if you so wish. Whereas the enjoyment and undoubted genius of their debut lies in how immersive it is as a listen. So, with that being said, 20 years on from the release of ‘Riot Van’, does it still hold up or read like a cringe-inducing Facebook post?
It’s indeed true that for Turner, it probably feels like a cringeworthy memory. As he himself admits, his life is so detached from what it was during the band’s infancy that when he plays songs from the first record live, it feels like karaoke. So there’s probably something about this song in particular that conjures up certain feelings of laughable embarrassment; it’s that time you put wet-look gel in your hair and stuck your two fingers up at your mum, or at four-foot tall sang ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’ to your older brother in the terraces.
That’s simply how Turner, I suspect, feels about it. The song is undoubtedly brilliant and lyrically witty, but it is nowhere near as nuanced as the rest of his work and a forthright take on misguided delinquency. But for us as fans, the insecurities don’t matter. The song is a much-needed time portal to an age of rogue innocence that is not only showcased by Turner’s storytelling but is a muted sonic composition that is plainly representative of a period in time.
The most troublesome aspect of the song is its accuracy, which often tries to grab Turner and the Arctic Monkeys by the ankles and hinder their artistic evolution. Maybe it’s not the sentiment of the song that is likely to make Turner cringe but rather our mythologising of it as an anthem and desperation for a return to the yesteryear.
