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

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The first album was not just good, and worthy of the sales and accolades it received, it had rejuvenated and revolutionized the British music scene. Yeah, it looks like it’s a closeup photo of the air above the dude on the covers head, or something.

With their record released just seven months earlier by Domino Records, the Arctic Monkeys’ ascent was rapid, but it was one of substance. Thanks to those demos posted online – which were re-shared on MySpace initially linking the band’s rise to the social network despite them not actually having an account – everyone in that festival tent knew every word to every – still officially unreleased – song.Yeah, it was like the last wave of that rock revival with them putting out Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. 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. Almost everything that’s appealing about Arctic Monkeys is down to singer Alex Turner, who possesses a gritty voice that gets increasingly appealing the more he allows it to stretch and wander. It’s a well of nocturnal naughtiness this album draws from repeatedly, yet the band emerges with something fresh, as the chart-topping “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” confirms. Reflecting his era of cheap DVDs and satellite TV movie channels, Alex Turner’s similarly channeled the “literature” of his day, emerging as as the director of his scenes his lyrics create.

What struck me, as someone who had been sent his seven-inch copy of Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys (which featured early versions of “Fake Tales of San Francisco” and “From the Ritz to the Rubble”) by the PR, was not only were the band brilliant, but without a debut album, the fans’ passion for Arctic Monkeys was a kind of intense you only see for bands with multiple albums out.Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. This is an album that’s also a coming-of-age Internet story; this was an album that went from the teens and Internet kids finding this and loving it, and then that filtering up to record labels and music journalists. singles, a few breathless reviews, and a load of thinkpieces about how The Internet Will Change Music Forever later and in the UK the Arctic Monkeys are suddenly the biggest band of the decade. To the rest of us, however, the album is at times charming, oddly affecting, and certainly promising but understandably something less than life changing. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

I love M People,” he enthused, before making me feel positively ancient by adding “They remind me of when I was a kid and my mum and dad used to listen to them!

On Monday, the Arctic Monkeys sold 118,501 copies of their debut album in the UK, more than the rest of the top 20 combined.

Having concluded the speech warning against “too many tricks” in music, the band were ushered in front of the cameras of the British press pack for a fractious inquisition. This album could be a blueprint for an imagined future; a reminiscence of the past; or your existence now. Much of the credit for that quick rise is rightly given to the power of the internet: The then-unsigned band first caught the public ear when its demos circulated last year.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 Sheffield quartet eventually signed with Domino and the label wisely hosted the buzzmaking tracks, a move that allowed anticipation for the group's studio recordings to spread rather than stall. He has contributed to MOJO, the BBC, The Guardian, Q and NME among others, and has interviewed Arctic Monkeys on many occasions.