“One of the greatest songs of all time”: The track that transformed Alex Turner’s songwriting
Few bands in UK music history shot to fame with such dizzying acceleration and entirely on their terms like Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys. While the indie’s new incarnation that dominated the charts was already shifting toward landfill saturation, 2005’s ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ effortlessly muscled past the likes of The Bravery or The Futureheads with confident songcraft and intelligent lyricism far beyond what should be capable for a frontman still in his teens. When the follow-up single ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ dropped in January 2006, Alex Turner was already hailed as one of Britain’s greatest songwriters.
Any suspicions that Arctic Monkeys had been bolstered by an overzealous music press were quashed with their equally acclaimed Favourite Worst Nightmare sophomore effort in 2007 and a Pyramid Stage headliner slot at Glastonbury Festival three months later. As indie finally petered out, Turner proved himself the adaptable songsmith, jumping between desert rock, psychedelic surf, leather-clad groove blues, and spacey jazz crooner.
Arctic Monkeys were indie’s great survivors, reaching a stratum of mainstream appeal and global fandom wholly unmoored from the Topman-sponsored nostalgia trappings that befell scores of their MTV2 contemporaries, including the original New York pioneers The Strokes.
A combination of factors fuelled their rise and rise. One was a healthy eschewing of press overload, successfully cultivating a grounded mystique by offering sparing interviews and media spots. Another was their mentioned creative dexterity, but crucially, Turner’s deep veneration for the classic songwriters of old ensured a canon that would endure with universal permanence.
Nick Lowe, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen have all been highlighted by Turner over the years, but it’s 1970s Los Angeles roots rocker Leon Russell whom he credits with gifting a song that fundamentally altered his approach to songcraft.
“The melody is what makes you commit to saying shit,” Turner told Vulture in 2018. “Some people think that writing words just to fit a melodic idea makes those words meaningless, but I think the opposite is true. There’s a line in Leon Russell’s ‘A Song for You,’ one of the greatest songs of all time: ‘If my words don’t come together / Listen to the melody cause my love is in there hiding.’ That makes a lot of sense to me”.
It’s not just Turner who praises the 1970 cut that opens his Leon Russell LP, The Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, and Amy Winehouse all offering acclaimed renditions of the plea to an estranged lover. “I was in my studio in Hollywood and actually I was trying to write a standard,” Russell told Atlantic City Weekly in 2011. “I was trying to write a blues song that Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles both could sing… I wrote it in 10 minutes. It was for a specific occasion. And I went in there and wrote it very quickly… that happens sometimes. Sometimes they’re very quick. It’s almost as if one is not writing them, you know? Like they’re coming from another place”.
Charles would go on to record a version, winning him a 1994 Grammy Award for ‘Best Male R&B Vocal Performance’. Earning a reputation as a ‘songwriter’s songwriter’, Elton John credited him with being the biggest influence on him as an artist, later collaborating on 2010’s joint The Union six years before his passing.
