Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'M Not

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People have asked for a while to have the cocktail cards in a way that’s easy to organize and collect, and this solves that. Mardy Bum” with its “cuddles in the kitchen” is probably the closest thing Arctic Monkeys have done to a proper love song, so much so that despite its obvious popularity with live audiences, it was absence from sets for a while after a fit of teenage embarrassment kicked in. The product of listening to the Strokes’ debut LP and Roots Manuva albums after school--plus paying attention in English class while in it-- guitar lessons-- everyone learns Roxanne here to practice barre chords--and plenty of youthful indiscretions and adolescent adventures (more to follow), Arctic Monkeys’ first collection of songs emerged from a set of influences and experiences not just common between the band and their contemporaries, but ones which most people with half an interest in writing songs all share. Witty, clever, inspired, daring and acknowledging its influences – fellow Yorkshire musician Hawley whose record Coles Corner was also up for the same prestigious UK award – the Arctic Monkeys frontman’s off the cuff reaction to the band’s first major honor in many ways captured the spirit of the album they had triumphed with, their irrepressible, eccentric and energetic debut: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. And it’s true it is a love song, a touching vignette of domestic diplomatic relations (mainly the boyfriend narrator trying to dig himself out of a hole) but it’s a charming, perfectly shot scene from the heart so it works.

The art print is packaged inside the album on the back cover, and the obi strip will actually have the cocktail print on its inside. Despite their tender years--or perhaps because of them-- with Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Arctic Monkeys found a new and unique way to chronicle the rushes of youth, and in doing so created a classic take on a stage of life we all experience. Then I asked Alex if he’d had inkling that he was on to a good thing when they first started writing songs for their debut.Taking its name from a line in an Alan Sillitoe novel published nearly half a century beforehand, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not represents a decade-defining peak for British music in the 2000s. The band’s more starry-eyed backers compare their hardscrabble tales to those of predecessors such as the Specials, Smiths, Pulp, and the Streets.

This detailed account of an accidental encounter with the dark but not quite fearful world of a provincial red light district, brilliantly not only captures the “scummy man” whose “got a driving ban amongst some other offences…” who bosses the place, but also that ‘can’t stop looking’ shame and loss of innocence that comes from chancing upon a ‘safe’ area during in the day for the first time at night. The album was the best selling British record of 2006, yet, the achievement of Arctic Monkeys is bigger than just articulating shared experience in a catchy manner – after all, they had already achieved that with their online demos as those early festival audiences showed. No matter where you are in your life, this album will always make sense and resonate, and that is Arctic Monkeys’ true achievement. The Strokes and Kings of Leon were a big deal, but the mammoth rock n’ roll band was kind of gone from the landscape by then. They resonated with Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’s energy, they recognized the experiences Alex Turner’s snapshots captured and then they moved their “dancing feet” to the cavalcade of of riffs and rhythms.

Yet from the urgent drum rolls and pulsing guitars of opening song “The View From The Afternoon,” it’s clear this ‘band DNA’ has meshed into something uniquely exciting.