Arctic Monkeys' debut album turns 18

“Mum called me barmy when I told her I fell off a gasometer for a bet. But I’m not barmy,” Arthur thinks to himself as he gets out of bed and lumbers over to the mirror. Defiant, his reflection stares back at him, with a bruise to show for the fight he had with two soldiers some nights ago. He won’t have anyone telling him who he is, no siree. All of a sudden, though, there’s not a trace of courage in his eyes; he just looks helpless.

If you’ve never seen a so-called kitchen sink drama, this scene from British director Karel Reisz’ 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning gives you a good idea of what to expect from the genre: a bitter, disillusioned young man struggling to make sense of life in post-war Britain, feeling lost and convinced that the whole world is against him. Some 45 years later, a young four-piece band from Sheffield called Arctic Monkeys borrowed a phrase from Arthur’s inner monologue to name their debut album: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. Released on 23 January 2006, it’s no longer a minor. If it was a person, it could go out and get some booze.

In an interview at the time, drummer Matt Helders said the film quote “kind of stood out as a thing for us” and that the title was a theme of the album as well. A lot like Arthur, most of the characters in the songs are stuck in a rut, and they too find that the only escape from their mundane existence is a night on the town spent getting hammered and trying to hook up with someone. Also, the film is set in Nottingham, only about 50 kilometres from Sheffield, and the lads - two of them still teenagers in early 2006 - were only a few years younger than Arthur. So, despite the half century that separated their worlds, the five men had quite a bit in common. Crucially, though, there was a major difference between Arthur and the band. Unlike him, they were going places.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not became the fastest-selling debut album in the UK, shipping over 363,000 copies in its first week and hitting the charts at number one. A few weeks later the group would win a Brit Award in the category British Breakthrough Act, and that September the prestigious Mercury Prize for the year’s best album. That’s quite a series of feats for a band that had formed their own label, Bang Bang Recordings in 2005, to release their first single. And all they needed to pull it off was a shrewd move.

They used to record demos and burn them onto CDs which they would then give away at gigs. Not the first ones to do so, sure, but it being the mid-noughties, they had a distinct advantage over generations of bands that had come before: online file sharing existed. Not only did it exist, it flourished, and music lovers could swap songs on the Internet to their heart’s content. It only took a few clicks and you owned a bunch of Arctic Monkeys tracks; maybe even more than would be featured on their debut album. Fans were busy swapping files and word got around. But that’s just it: being astute enough to realise that you should make the most of digital technology won’t get you very far unless you have something to offer that makes people at a record label like Domino sit up and take notice. You know, talent, charisma, potential, stuff like that.

There were plenty of bands knocking about in England at the time who could have made it, but didn’t. Or rather, they were around for a while but are largely forgotten today. The Futureheads, the Cribs, the Rakes, the Rifles, the Holloways all put out debut albums between 2004 and 2006 - can you name any of their songs? If not, it’s because none were memorable or had anything that could have made them stand out, much less stand the test of time. And while Arctic Monkeys didn’t exactly revolutionise rock music, drawing on the diverse influences they listed in an early interview - the Clash, the Smiths, Roots Manuva, Queens of the Stone Age, System of a Down, the Strokes, the Streets - was always going to sound interesting enough. Their frontman, Alex Turner, made sure they wouldn’t just settle for that, though.

English rock has never had a shortage of great lyricists but, starting with the sixties, you could pick one from every decade who stood head and shoulders above his peers: Ray Davies, Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker. These artists didn’t just have a way with words, they also provided a perceptive social commentary on contemporary England by giving a detailed, vivid description of people’s lives. The characters might have ranged from a fop (Dedicated Follower of Fashion by the Kinks) to a snoot (Common People by Pulp) but they were always memorable and familiar - we all know people like that. Turner joined this long line of songwriters with an incisive mind and a sharp tongue, and on Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not he regales us with tales of Sheffield nightlife in the mid-2000s.

“Anticipation has the habit to set you up for disappointment in evening entertainment, but tonight there’ll be some love, tonight there’ll be a ruckus, yeah, regardless of what’s gone before” is quite a way to kick off proceedings. It offers a bit of wisdom, words atypical of mainstream pop lyrics and a summary of what you can expect: stories about people who have had their fair share of failure but keep hoping their luck will change. But what makes this opening sentence work is Turner’s assured delivery. Following his mates’ boot-stomper of an intro whose speed even a speed metal band would approve of, he fires off rather than sings the words on The View from the Afternoon, and the music turns into tense, jerky indie rock as he does. Then there’s a guitar bit reminiscent of grunge, and the lads keep switching between styles until the song ends. Except it doesn’t end, it only stops for a few seconds before they storm back to repeat the opening line and the chorus. Two choruses, actually, the second one ending with “And you can pour your heart out around three o’clock when the 2 for 1’s undone the writer’s block”. One night out down, 12 more to go.

The band don’t let up on I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor either. In fact, they up the ante and play even faster. It’s a tune for the mosh pit and it earned them their first UK number one. Again, though, they’re not content with thrashing around for three minutes, and turn their gallop into a canter for the verses - thankfully, because if the words gushed out of Turner any faster, you might miss some of them, which would be a shame. Not only does he reference Duran Duran’s Rio, he rhymes “Capulets” with “DJ sets” and twists idioms to create his own metaphors (“your shoulders are frozen”). Would Arctic Monkeys have got as popular as they are - six chart-topping albums and over 50 million monthly listeners on Spotify as of January 2024 - with a lesser lyricist?

Though the boys have a knack for writing songs that alternate between laid-back and in-your-face, and manage to keep you guessing, by the time track five (You Probably Couldn’t See For the Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me) comes on things have started to get a bit familiar. In fact, that song is a shoddy version of I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor. And Mardy Bum sounds like a rip-off of a tune by the Libertines, if a touch edgier. With eight of the thirteen songs being shorter than three minutes, you never feel like skipping any of them, but for the most part it’s not the music that makes you stick around; it’s being curious to hear what Turner has to say and how he’ll say it. That doesn’t get tedious at all.

He swears (“fucking wank”, “can’t be arsed”, “dickhead”), he uses dialect words (“owt”, “nowt”, “summat”), he drops British cultural references (“go a bit Frank Spencer”, “Topshop princess”), turning each song into a fascinating account of all the youth get to experience while painting the town of Sheffield red - or of the morning after. Booze-ups, awkward chat-ups, wannabe rock stars, the police harassing boys, prostitutes making propositions… And people who patronise the band, pretending to stand by them. Turner sees straight through them, though: “I know you’re certain we’ll fail.”

Well, they were wrong. Arctic Monkeys had too much going for them to fail. How could they, a bunch of 19-20-year-olds with so much vigour and spunk? And with the ability to play a casual riff that is a nod to Television’s Marquee Moon and to come up with the line “so all that’s left is the proof that love’s not only blind but deaf” - within the same song. 18 years on, they may not sound anything like they did on their debut, but Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not is a fun and clever album, still well worth a listen. In fact, if you happen to be 18 yourself and haven’t yet heard it, you’d be barmy not to give it a go.