From this weekend it is going to be difficult to avoid the former school chums. NME, the music magazine, predicts that no sooner will their second single go to No 1 today than their first album, out tomorrow, may become the fastest-selling debut rock album since British records began.
It sounds like hype, but that is a commodity Arctic Monkeys have shunned throughout their meteoric rise. The group, three of whom are 19 and all of whom live with their parents, must be the only chart debutants to turn down playing their previous No 1 hit on Top of the Pops. No videos, no promos, no “bollocks”, as they put it.
Arctic Monkeys are the first “blog band” to build a huge fan base before the record industry had even cottoned on. They seemed to come from nowhere, at the head of their “Arctic army”.
The title of their new album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, is a quote from Albert Finney’s working-class rebel in the 1960 kitchen sink movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Their new single is called When the Sun Goes Down.
The means of their ascent via the internet, in the face of the industry’s fears about the illegal downloading of music, is not the only thing that distinguishes them. Their raw power and driving songs have caught the public imagination and rescued rock’n’roll from complacency — as did the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana and the Strokes in earlier years.
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Reviewers wax passionate about Alex Turner, the group’s singer-songwriter, whose lyrics follow the British tradition of local social observation conjured up by Ray Davies, Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker. They love his demented voice, described as a blend of Joe Strummer, Eminem and George Formby. Last year he was named by NME as the coolest man in the business, displacing the previous year’s joint winners Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, both formerly of the Libertines.
His sharp songs describe the experience of being a teenager in the provinces — disputes with club bouncers, chatting up girls, the temptations of two-timing, being slapped around by police in the back of a riot van, and trying to fit six blokes in a taxi made for five.
Unusually for such a young band, its musical talent is spread evenly, encompassing guitarist Jamie Cook, the eldest at 20, drummer Matt Helders and bassist Andy Nicholson. “It’s a brilliant rhythm section,” says Mark Edwards, The Sunday Times rock critic. “The vibe is there and it’s really well rehearsed.”
Since the first Strokes album appeared in 2001, guitars have returned with a vengeance, but the scene has become dominated by arty, knowing new-wave rock music. At one extreme is Doherty, the troubled singer of Babyshambles. In a sense Arctic Monkeys have occupied the musical terrain where Doherty would be if he could concentrate long enough to stay off Kate Moss and the drugs.
The group rubbish the idea that their instant success last year with the single I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor can be attributed solely to the internet. “That’s what the media said; they have to put a dampener on it,” Nicholson said last week. “No, it got to No 1 because it’s a f****** good song that people wanted to buy.”
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They have a point. New groups have always been obliged to build a fan base before a record company will sign them. The Beatles’ instrument was the Cavern; for many new groups it’s the internet. Hundreds of bands hope to be discovered there, but only exceptional ones succeed.
Yet there was was no internet masterplan, Arctic Monkeys maintain. They had posted a couple of songs on their website and gave away 20 demo CDs at each gig. The CDs carried their own artwork, many featuring a picture of Helders’s uncle with an airgun, which they thought looked “right cool”.
Unknown to them, the fans uploaded the songs to the website myspace.com, the launchpad for many unsigned bands. The group were largely ignorant of the site, but were not bothered that their music was being dispensed free. “There’s nowt you can do to stop it, and we were just chuffed to bits that people wanted to hear it,” said Turner.
Word spread rapidly. This first became plain to the group when they were playing the Sheffield Forum: the fans knew the words to their unrecorded songs better than Turner, who had not learnt them properly.
Even when their Dancefloor record shot to the top of the charts, they seemed uncaring. “We didn’t know we were going to No 1, we didn’t want to know,” said Cook. “We all went down to the local pub.”
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Soon they were fighting off journalists. “It were amazing,” said Turner. “That day it was like, ‘Sky News wants to talk to you’.” They refused to perform on Top of the Pops (“It didn’t seem right,” Turner said) but relented for Later . . . with Jools Holland because it was live and “proper”.
It’s odd to think that rock music’s hottest band had their first gig as recently as the summer of 2003 at a Sheffield pub where they earned £27 from the ticket money. “We were very nervous but it were right exciting,” Turner recalled.
Arctic Monkeys are from High Green, a northern suburb of Sheffield. Turner and Helders had been friends since primary school and knew Cook as a neighbour. Nicholson joined the latter two at secondary school. They would all hang out near the school playing fields.
“We weren’t hooligans but we knew people that were,” Turner said. “We’d be drinking White Lightning — Woodpecker was too upmarket, too expensive.” When broke, they would settle for penny chews and Taz bars from the local newsagent.
Turner, whose mother taught German and whose father was a music teacher, received a guitar for Christmas in 2001, as did Cook. Seeing other Sheffield friends forming bands, the pair got together with Helders and Nicholson.
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The band “sort of formed itself”. They had little idea what they were doing, but playing any kind of music together seemed like an achievement.
Their influences ranged from hip-hop and Queens of the Stone Age to the Smiths and Oasis. There were other inspirations: Sheffield had produced the synth-pop innovators the Human League, the heavy metallers Def Leppard, the soulful rocker Joe Cocker and the arch indie rockers Pulp.
The band’s name was suggested by Helders’ father, who had once played in a group called Arctik Monkeez. Turner, who believed Helders had a better voice, only took on the singing role when nobody else would. He sounded initially like a strangled American and wrote meaningless lyrics just for the sake of having something to sing.
However, inspired by the Mancunian punk poet John Cooper Clarke, he developed a sardonic style of chronicling what he saw around Sheffield, and found his singing voice by reverting to his local accent.
Steering clear of record labels and eschewing London, the band played all over the Midlands, the north of England and Scotland.
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Even by the end of 2004, when the music industry was taking notice, Turner and Helders were still considering university. Cook was working as a tiler and Nicholson was on the dole.
“I’d have been a builder or summat,” the tiler confessed. “I’m a big lad. I can carry bricks. I’d have built a house of my own.”
London record agents swarmed up to Sheffield, but the band signed with Domino, an independent label that has found success with Franz Ferdinand. On the strength of their hit single, they toured Japan, the US, Spain and Italy.
Even now they see fame as a poisoned chalice. “We’re the Macaulay Culkins of this game, aren’t we,” Helders mused. “We’ll get the child star curse.” They fear they will be burnt out in a few years.
They cannot wait to get back on tour. Playing live is the only time they feel in control. All the rest is “propaganda and bollocks”. The Beatles believed that once, but not for long.