So who will ape the Monkeys?

To judge by the crowd-surfing alone, the headlining gig, halfway through an 18-date nationwide tour with Maximo Park, We Are Scientists and the Mystery Jets, is going to plan. It’s Sheffield’s prodigal sons themselves who seem to have departed from the celebratory script. Their catchy tales of chavs and chips from the record-breaking debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That ‘s What I’m Not, are reproduced faithfully, but the band appear reticent, tuning their guitars, heads down, in the increasingly uncomfortable pauses between songs.

Turner himself is slack-jawed in a denim jacket, occasionally swigging from a can of lager. Addressing a sea of camera phones, he implies that no homecoming party could have lived up to expectations. “You play home only so many times,” he announces, as if already rueing a missed opportunity. “And then people buy a ticket for a moment, and then that moment doesn’t happen. It’s what you make of it, you know?”

A new song about drunken one-night stands, Leave Before the Lights Come On, is halted mid-verse for Turner to bait the crowd further: “Shall we carry on, or what? Well, smile then, for f***’s sake.”

One can only imagine that he was looking into a mirror, as he only manages a grin while the band are breezing through A Certain Romance, the traditional set-closer.



Later, surrounded by protective friends and parents backstage, the guitarist Jamie “Cookie” Cooke and drummer Matt “The Cat” Helders unconvincingly shrug off the suggestion that the gig has been an anticlimax. But Andy Nicholson, the relatively jovial bass player, is slightly more forthcoming. “It were all right,” he says, bluntly. “We weren’t tired, but Sheffield was.”

Earlier, during the gig, Turner had knocked the crowd’s local credentials: “There’s not many from High Green here tonight, I know that,” he goaded, referring to the respectable suburb north of Hillsborough from where the band hails. Perhaps he was recalling an earlier, more intimate homecoming show for family and fans that had taken place just before the release of the album.

But after shifting 363,735 CDs and records in the first week, Arctic Monkeys have reached far beyond their own neighbourhoods.

Since then the quartet, all aged 19 or 20, have been the focus of such unprecedented attention that Helders’s parents Jill and Clive, have had to put a notice on the front of their modern detached home to ward off Monkey-hunters.

Yet, despite all the doors suddenly gaping open before them, the band are shunning publicity. Tonight, for instance, no other publication is granted any access. Last week they declined to perform their latest No 1 single — a tale of prostitutes on the streets of Neepsend, near the band’s rehearsal rooms — on Top of the Pops and are reluctant to give interviews. Instead, they have generated a mythology based on scraps of gossip and fibs tossed mischievously to the NME, sponsors of their current tour.

“We’ve been offered all kinds of things by all kinds of corporations,” the band’s manager, Geoff Barradale, says. “But when a phone company rings up and says: ‘We’ll give you a couple of hundred grand for doing half an hour on the side of the Thames for some kind of launch’, the answer’s no. As a band, they’re not into celebrity, fame or any of the side issues.”

Barradale is a veteran of the South Yorkshire music scene, as is Alan Smyth, who produced the Monkeys’ demos. These early recordings, distributed free on the internet and at gigs, built up a large following months before the band were signed by Domino Records in June.

Smyth dismisses Andy Nicholson’s jibe that anything about the city’s varied music scene could be “tired”. “I moved to Sheffield in 1982, when bands like Pulp were only known locally,” he says. “Before that there was the electronic scene, with Cabaret Voltaire, then the Human League, as well as Def Leppard and ABC. Now in the studio I’m working with everything from funk to heavy metal, concentrating on making the bands sound as exciting as possible.

“With the Arctics and a quite a few others, it seems to have worked.”

Up-and-coming bands that have recently passed through his cramped 2 Fly studio, housed in a Victorian cutlery workshop, include the Reverend, also known as John Rascarlt, 23, a close friend of Alex Turner who has been wrongly named as a secret fifth member of Arctic Monkeys.

Better musicians than their simian counterparts — by the Monkeys’ own admission — are Milburn, an even younger guitar band from Ecclesfield and Hillsborough, who jokingly describe their sound as “postMorrissey northern romanticism”.

“Sheffield is just like a big village,” says their lead singer Jo Carnell, 18, still reeling from his first financial meeting with a record label. “All the bands know each other because they play the same venues or use the same rehearsal rooms. But we’re all doing our own thing as well.”

Carnell and his bandmates quit their jobs after being signed to Mercury Records last week. In a self-fufilling prophecy, if a Sheffield scene didn’t exist already, it is currently being created as A&R men descend looking for the next Monkeys. But bands such as art-rockers the Long Blondes and the punkish Harrisons are confident enough to hold out for the right deal while releasing singles on local independent labels.

By contrast, the guitarist Richard Hawley, whose award-winning solo album Cole’s Corner pays tribute to a local lovers’ lane, has returned to Sheffield after touring the world with Longpigs and Pulp.“It’s a bit of a lost city, really,” he says. “There have been sporadic things that have got away, like Cabaret Voltaire, Pulp or Def Leppard, but they alone show that there are no rules to being a Sheffield band; part of the beauty of this city is everyone’s unique perspective.”

The 39-year-old, who traces his local roots back nearly 250 years, attributes this maverick artistic streak to the city’s heritage of craft and steelwork: “The Little Mesters, those artisans who made the finest cutlery in the world, were fiercely independent people. Something of that free-thinking mentality has drifted down to the music scene.

“There used to be this thing known as ‘the Sheffield semi-circle’. If you played the Leadmill no one would ever stand at the front. They’d all be at the back with their arms folded, saying: ‘I could do that better.’

“Arctic Monkeys have given people a bit of hope and perspective in relation to the rest of country. They may soon have some competition.”

Sheffield’s new pretenders

THE LONG BLONDES Stylish Sheffield graduates reworking the Fifties through the lens of the Seventies.

HARRISONS Sheffield Wednesday fans who also love Oasis and the Clash.

MILBURN Hillsborough residents whose single Blue Note was inspired by a local hostage-taking incident.

MONKEY SWALLOWS THE UNIVERSE Charming acoustic quintet.

LITTLE MAN TATE Green Day disciples championed by DJ Steve Lamacq.

JODY WILDGOOSE Former busker turned psychedelic pop peddler.

65 DAYS OF STATIC Now touring with their visceral brand of “post-rock”.

THE MIRAMAR DISASTER Metalheads with Sheffield steel in their veins.

The old guard

PULP Languished in obscurity for 12 years before Common People made them Britpop heroes.

CABARET VOLTAIRE Post-punk industrial and techno anyone?

DEF LEPPARD Definitive rock band of the 1980s. Also one of the few to boast a one-armed drummer.

THE HUMAN LEAGUE Responded to punk by inventing iconic synth-pop.

ABC Led by the shiny-suited Martin Fry, these New Romantics gave us The Lexicon of Love.

JOE COCKER Gravel-throated star of Woodstock, 1969.

MOLOKO Producer Mark Brydon teamed up with singer Roisin Murphy for adventures in sassy trip-hop.