The best song about drinking to ever hail from Yorkshire
Alex Turner has always had a way with words.
You’ve got to be a special sort of wordsmith to take a night out in Sheffield and turn it into near poetry, grumpy security guards and all, such that 20 years on from its release, Arctic Monkey’s debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, is still regarded as one of the greatest indie records ever made because of how it so brilliantly romanticised the mundane nature of everyday life, drunken fights and Smirnoff Ices included.
While there’s much debate over whether it can truly be regarded as a concept album, as the thunderous drumming begins at the start of ‘The View From The Afternoon’ you can’t help but find yourself transported back in time, stood on a friend’s porch, clutching your fake ID, heart pounding as you prepare for a jittery night out on the town. You’re picked up and dropped in the middle of a sticky club on ‘I Bet You Look Good on The Dancefloor’, and then unceremoniously kicked out of the line for the next on ‘From The Ritz to the Rubble’.
Each song on this LP is a manifesto of the common plights and pleasures of the northern working class, and never before had a night on the tiles in the Steel City sounded so tantalising, but let’s park that for a second, because while those tracks are remembered as quintessential of Turner’s ragtag, awkward teenage era, there are other tracks peppered across the band’s output that are similarly brilliant at capturing the spirit of the bottle.
On Favourite Worst Nightmare, a potential love interest is asked to do ‘The Bad Thing’ and take off their wedding ring while out partying, while on Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino, Turner sits in a hotel dressing gown, dangling his fluffy slippers off the edge of a sofa, goadingly asking: “Who you gonna call? The Martini Police?” Then there’s Humbug’s ‘Cornerstone’, where we follow Turner on a miserable, drunken pilgrimage through several pubs, as he desperately searches for an ex, only to be met with apparitions and lookalikes, much like a modern Heathcliff wandering the moors of Sheffield city centre.
However, my favourite drinking-related track by the band is slightly less on the nose. It comes from their most commercially successful album, AM, which arrived in 2013 clad in leather and dripping with nocturnal swagger. There aren’t many album openers you can recognise from a single note, but ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ is one of them; it is bravado and moodiness personified, and finds Turner at his most cocky and his most brilliant. Gone is the jittery teenager, replaced by a man nursing a heavy glass of something amber, drowning out any nerves in a sticky tide of hair pomade.
“Ever thought of callin’ when you’ve had a few? / ‘Cause I always do,” sings a brazen, boozy Turner, who has finally learned how to weaponise his words with more precision than on 2006’s ‘Still Take You Home’, on which he decided to go with the line: “You’re just probably alright / But under these lights you look beautiful”.
‘Do I Wanna Know?’ sounds like drunkenness personified, that specific moment when you’re sitting in the corner of a house party or a dark beer garden and decide that, actually, it is definitely a good idea to call your crush (or ex) and tell them exactly how you feel. “So have you got the guts? / Been wonderin’ if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts,” sings Turner, and there’s a delicious irony in him asking a love interest if they have the “guts”, when he is clearly too afraid in the sobering, cold light of day to put his own heart on the line.
It’s a song that was made to be played in the middle of the night – you can imagine Turner staring at himself in the bathroom mirror as music bleeds through the walls at four in the morning, giving himself a slurred pep talk: “(Baby, we both know) That the nights were mainly made for sayin’ things that you can’t say tomorrow day”.
It’s not just a song about drinking; it also oozes a hazy moodiness that makes you feel as though you’re drunk yourself, sort of like when you give a kid a sip of cider, and they pretend to be wasted. Whether Turner got round to, you know, actually talking to this person is another matter. Perhaps he fell asleep in the bath, or perhaps his drunken sense of confidence did actually last long enough to merit some success, for after all, on the very next track, he does happen to ask, “R U Mine?”
