To look at the Arctic Monkeys now – all expensive leather, spunked-up Teddy Boy hair and riffs as sizeable as Queens of the Stone Age’s weekly tequila bill - it’s kind of difficult to picture them as those tracksuit-sporting louts who put out the brilliant, sarcastic cultural sideswipe that was “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”. Back then, in the heady days of 2006, they were skinny teens in nylon trackiebums, trying not to set their Clearasil fumes ablaze with the embers from a half-smoked B&H Gold. Alex Turner was the smarmy but charming little brother who’d read a bunch of decent books and seen all those films that Morrissey liked in 1985 and wanted everyone to know about it.Arctic Monkeys’ arrival on a musical landscape dominated by US acts – The White Stripes were five albums in and pretty much ruling the world – was long overdue. Meanwhile, the UK’s last homegrown guitar heroes had just disintegrated in a heap of Whitechapel crack and grubby guardsman jackets.Despite this, the Sheffield teens’ schtick certainly didn’t point towards a career for life. In fact, if they were still counting the likes of Little Man Tate, The Dead 60s and The Twang (1) as contemporaries; it’s highly doubtful they would have crafted one of the best albums of 2013 – and there’s no way they’d be dropping snippets of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” into their sets, as they’re doing right now. So instead of continuing to straddle the middle ground between bus stop delinquents and Alan Bennett, over the course of eight years they up-ended their game, gave themselves a Wild Ones makeover, relocated to the other side of the world and in September, after a triumphant summer of headline festival shows, gave us the majestic AM.Read the rest over at Burberry Sound + Rhythm
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