‘Do I Wanna Know’: the song that defines the Arctic Monkeys
This may be my Brit bias speaking, but the Arctic Monkeys are one of the few bands who’ve never been as big as they were on their first album. Of course, on the surface, this sounds ridiculous. Since 2013, they have transcended their fiercely parochial popularity to become arena-slaying superstars worldwide. Their last tour supporting their 2022 album The Car saw them sell out three nights at LA’s Kia Forum, two nights at Mexico City baseball stadium Estadio GNP Seguros, and one night at Sydney’s 30,000-capacity concert space The Domain. They’re a huge deal wherever you look.
Take it from me, though; it’s got nothing on the furore that surrounded Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not in their home country. I know this because I was there nearly (God help me) 20 years ago, and I saw it first-hand. They weren’t just the most exciting thing in music; they were the most exciting thing in pop culture in general, riding a tidal wave started by the likes of The Strokes, The Libertines and The Streets to become the biggest band since Oasis.
It wasn’t just the frightening number of records sold either. My sister was lucky enough to catch them at Brixton Academy during the Whatever People Say I Am… tour and was astonished to see their support act, The Little Flames’ set completely deafened by boos and “Monkeys!” chants. Their meteoric rise from MySpace to the top of the charts was extensively covered by mainstream news outlets. Funnily enough, a misheard quote about them from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown followed him around for his entire political career.
To this day, you ask a person on the UK streets to name an Arctic Monkeys song, and it’ll almost certainly be one of the singles from their debut album. ‘When The Sun Goes Down’, ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’, or the immortal ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’. However, that’s not the piece that defines them, is it? Maybe to me and to the people of my green and pleasant land, but as mentioned earlier, the ‘Monkeys’ are a comparatively much, much bigger deal these days. To me, there’s precisely one song that defines them today.
At an AM concert in the UK, the biggest reaction of the night is bound to come from those terrace anthems. Fair play to them—they’re good songs, even if you can tell the band is tired of playing them. Anywhere else in the world, though, there’s one thing to listen for: a simple, swaggering rhythm from drummer Matt Helders. Then comes one of the sleaziest, raunchiest riffs of the 2010s—mostly sung by the entire audience—but buried in that wall of sound is Alex Turner’s 12-string guitar. In a career packed with bangers, ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ stands as the defining Arctic Monkeys track.
It’s not even that it’s my favourite. I stand by those first four ‘Monkeys’ records as being as close to perfect, with AM coming across as a fairly dramatic drop in quality. However, it is this song that widened their scope from the UK to the world, and a key part of how they achieved this evolution is in the lyrics. The first two ‘Monkeys’ records are deeply down to earth and in Favourite Worst Nightmare’s case, nakedly personal.
Humbug and Suck It and See are the sound of Turner developing that glorious vein of surrealism that defines his lyricism to this day. With ‘Do I Wanna Know’ and AM, Turner drops the specifics. He drops the solipsism and starts singing about “you”. Previously, when Turner hadn’t been singing about himself, he’d been singing impeccably drawn character sketches like in ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’.
In much the same way that the biggest country music artists play stadiums in the USA and literally nowhere else, Turner’s lyricism struck a chord in the UK in a way that it couldn’t anywhere else. ‘Do I Wanna Know’, in its depiction of dazzled, completely beguiled horniness, is a much more universal experience. The piece has knowingly provincial touches (“summat in your teeth”), providing flair and flavour rather than having to know what a “Mecca Dobber and a betting pencil” is to get the best joke in the aforementioned ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’.
To be clear, that doesn’t make them worse than what Turner had penned previously; far from it. The ‘Sheffield Shakespeare’ has never written a bad lyric in his career. If anything, he’s doing what the whole band is doing with the music. There is not so much filing down the sharp edges but keeping them only where those in the know will see, while everything else feels sleeker, catchier, and cooler than anything else the band had made to that point.
To some, this was a sell-out move. I know plenty of people jumped off the bandwagon at this point, wondering where their ‘Arctics’ had gone. Why had Alex Turner swapped polo shirts and Converse for leather jackets and Cuban heels? And what in God’s name was he doing with that quiff? What the band were doing, though, was something their forebears, Oasis, were too mediocre and lazy to attempt: evolving from local heroes into global megastars—and making music that matched that ambition.
Considering the band has since gone from strength to strength commercially while following nothing other than their own creative vision, I’d say they never needed the fair-weather fans who only want to hear ‘A Certain Romance’. That fearless, genuinely ambitious version of the Arctic Monkeys was unlocked by ‘Do I Wanna Know’, thus making it their defining song.
