The Arctic Monkeys 'Whatever People Say I Am That's What I Am Not' album

...so I'm on the bus in Hillsborough, or Siberia if ya close your eyes - It’s that cold - and some bloke called Jonny rings up and says: "Can you write Arctic Monkeys press release?" and I’m laughin….n’sayin: "Course mate, no bother" ..as if I’m Max Clifford n’that, thinkin all the while, like...what the fuck do I know about press releases? So ya toy with ideas about how to put the spin to the spinners. Then it dawns on me, I’m not selling tupperware boxes and there's no need to come on like New Labour is there?? This is ARCTIC MONKEYS guvnor! The one. The one what we've all been waiting for. The thing that's gonna make all them drunken nights and rows with the missus and daft conversations in sweaty clubs all make sense. The thing that's gonna make the indie kid dance like a knob next to the heavyweight skinhead and the shy girl whose sister went to your school. This is the one that ya can stick on and sing out loud and mean every word…. cos it's all happened to ya, times many. The gangs who used to hang around in town: punks, teddys, mods or whatever are give up and go home and become fuckin accountants or something. The invisible line in the sand that used to mean that them lot liked this type of thing, and them freaky looking kids are into this has been blown away. All that remains is a mixed bag of everything in the 21st century and to me this album soundtracks it perfectly.

So I'm grooving away to the first full listen and lookin down the tracklisting and startin to think: ‘The View From the Afternoon’, I know how that feels. ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’... that too. ‘Still Take Ya Home’...without a doubt! I've done that. ‘A Certain Romance’??...damn right! Shit writers would call it 'the soundtrack of your lives' but I won't....have a word!!...I'm better then that! You see what I’m saying though? This moves me and I hope it'll move you too.

Even if I didn't understand a single word then it still bangs and grooves in all the right places so all's well I guess! Because the spinners await with their boxes and categories, but the album’s on as I write, and as soon as they could create one, it steps right out of it. They want it to be like this band or that, but this is a different beast for sure. I'm getting to think its got 4 tablespoons of Curtis Mayfield and 2 dashes of Sly Stone for every fl oz of The Jam or The Who or whatever. Cooking analogies are lame so I’ll leave that there, but the point is that the mixture makes for something fresh, something new...This sound hasn't been around before...

Oh and it's got nothing to do with number ones or being on the telly a lot either. Or cos' he says Arctic Monkeys are great, or cos' them trendy kids love ‘em. As Alex said himself: "you don't have to love us just cos' they tell you to". It's about the record. The believers of this world would have ya think that all that remains when ya die is the spirit. So likewise if all the hype stopped tomorrow or the band splits or become monks, all ya got is this piece of metal, or vinyl or whatever it be. The music endures way past the gigs. I want to think this record will endure not only in ya head as ya whistle your way to the bus stop every morning but past that to something else. Something altogether outside of 'shifting units' or beating the Sugarbabes in the Top 40 countdown.

For instance, just as the middle age couples in Homebase on Sunday think Ronan Keating’s latest mush is 'their song'; so every kid who owns the mp3s and hears the tunes thinks the songs on this record are about them. Herein lies the beauty of it all. It's the stories and the music that matters, and what each kid takes 'Dancefloor' as meaning to them. 'A Certain Romance’ is a song for any kid in the world looking at his friends. Take ‘Mardy Bum’. I know who my mardy bum is, I'm sure you do!! My Mum even calls it my Dad when they're havin a bull and cow! I'm sure Alex never had my old man in mind when he banged the lyrics on the back of a beer mat. And so it passes through….and the band become bit part players in their own story by the time the plastic hits the shelves.

And so these songs, and the way people will dance away to them and sing along, have come back to the people who made it possible for them to make it onto a record in the first place. Arctic Monkeys were pushed to this point by people who wanted to hear the way they felt set to music. And now its here. Boring lecturers at The University of Nowheresville might make a song and dance about a cultural blah blah blah of all this one day, but then that's why they have food in their beards and beans on their tank top. It makes no odds, for all that will remain of all this is the disc and of course the memories. enjoy it…n’ta ra

Walter Mitty

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The Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am That's What I Am Not