2006 was a phenomenal year for British music. Amy Winehouse released her forever impressive Back to Black album, Leona Lewis won season 3 of the X Factor and perhaps most importantly, Take That embarked on a reunion tour after an eleven-year hiatus from the limelight (albeit without Robbie Williams). However, none of the above have had quite the lasting influence on British popular culture as did Arctic Monkeys’ debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which released on the 23rd of January 2006.
As I was only two and a half years old at the time this album was released, I personally cannot recall the grasp that this album had over the British public, so I’ll let the stats do the talking. At the time of the album’s release, it became the fastest-selling debut album in British music history with an estimated 360,000 copies sold in its first week. To date, it remains as the fastest selling debut album from a band in British music history as well as being certified 8x platinum in the UK by the British Phonographic Industry. Whilst I cannot find the exact number of units 8x platinum is equivalent to, my somewhat decaying arithmetical skills estimate this to be around 2.4 million copies.
Prior to the release of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the album had spawned two number one singles. ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ released on the 17th August 2005 and ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ released on the 16th January 2006 (exactly a week prior to the release of their debut). If you are British and not familiar with either of these songs, it would be a stretch to even claim that you are British. In my humble opinion, of course.
By the time their debut was released, the Arctic Monkeys had already attained considerable hype across the country. This was primarily as a result of the band being one of the first to gain significant traction via the internet – most notably via MySpace. Once upon a time (between 2005 and 2009) MySpace was the largest social networking site in the world. Over the last three months, I have written extensively about the rise and fall of MySpace as a part of my literature review in preparation for my dissertation later this year. Without being dismissive of MySpace’s importance in the Arctic Monkey’s success story, I am quite frankly sick to my back teeth writing about MySpace, so I’ll just provide a few bullet points to provide you with a bit of context behind the Arctic Monkeys / MySpace love story:
- Arctic Monkeys formed in 2002 and played their first gig in June of 2003. Over the following years, the band regularly handed out CD’s featuring Arctic Monkeys’ demos at their gigs
- MySpace was founded in August of 2003 and allowed users to download and share audio files via peer-to-peer sharing (commonly referred to as P2P)
- Fans of the band created a page for the Arctic Monkeys on MySpace, and the tracks from these CD’s subsequently found themselves being uploaded to the internet
By the time that Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not released, hardcore fans already knew the majority of songs included on the album. But for the rest of the British public who had not followed the Arctic Monkeys online and were only aware of the band through their two number one singles, the hype for the album was unprecedented.
The album opens with what is quite possibly my favourite Arctic Monkeys song (perhaps even my favourite of all time), ‘The View From the Afternoon’. Turner introduces listeners to the album by declaring:
“Anticipation has a habit to set you up,
For disappointment in evening entertainment but,
Tonight they’ll be some love”
It would be near impossible to set the tone for the album better than these opening lyrics do. I have always found the idea that Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not is a concept album as fascinating. The prominent theme throughout the album is nightlife – more explicitly British nightlife. Bar only a few songs, the lyrical contents of this record revolve around the experiences that the narrator witnesses or partakes in when on a night out. Whether it be the reluctance to approach a girl as described in ‘Dancing Shoes’ or the chaos that is getting a taxi home as discussed in ‘Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured’, the record covers every aspect of a typical young person’s night out across Northern England. Concept album or not, the ‘evening entertainment’ outlined in The View From the Afternoon is an integral theme of the record, and one of the reasons why it resonated so much with the British public upon its release.
Whilst Turner’s lyricism on this record is magnificent throughout (especially given the fact that he wrote all of these songs whilst he was still a teenager) the track that has always stood out to me as being the best lyrically is ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’. The track depicts the narrator observing the behaviours of a local band (or bands) whilst taking a dislike to them for their lack of authenticity and disingenuous wannabe rockstar behaviour. Some of my personal favourite lines from the song are:
“And all the weekend rockstars are in the toilets,
Practising their lines”
“Yeah, but his bird said it’s amazing though, so all that’s left,
Is the proof that loves not only blind but deaf”
“And yeah, I’d love to tell you all my problem
You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham”
A point of contention as the career of the Arctic Monkeys has progressed is the evolution of their sound. I, as a top 0.008% fan worldwide (according to Spotify) happen to be on the right side of history and be a fan of the direction they have taken over the course of the last decade with ‘Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino’ and ‘The Car’. Whilst the band’s new material is a stark contrast from early stuff, I believe that there are subtle glimpses of the band’s future sound scattered across their debut. ‘Riot Van’ is the seventh track on Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and marks the direct midpoint of the album. Riot Van comes off of six tracks that leave the listener needing to catch their breath (in the best way possible). The fact that Riot Van is located at the midpoint of the album hints that the band were able to anticipate when the listener would require a song to metaphorically ‘catch their breath’ before the amps are turned up again.
Track 9, ‘Mardy Bum’ (a song that should require no introduction) is one of three songs that I believe make up the Holy Trinity of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Mardy Bum alongside the two singles I Bet That You Look Good On the Dancefloor and When the Sun Goes Down are three songs that have defied the test of time and are still as popular and relevant today as they were in 2006. When I say, ‘Holy Trinity’, I do not mean that these are my personal favourite three songs from the record (although When the Sun Goes Down is in there), but more so that these are three songs from the record that the British public favoured upon the album’s release and the three songs from the record that are most regularly played in bars and clubs across the country today.
Around the time the Arctic Monkeys broke on to the music scene, many noted the similarities between themselves and Oasis. Both bands burst onto the scene unapologetically, seemingly appeared out of nowhere and couldn’t give two shits about what people thought of them. I believe the parallel between the rise of these two bands is most apparent when you compare Oasis’ debut single, ‘Supersonic’, to the Monkeys’ debut single, I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor. Both open with raucous guitar riffs, have undeniably catchy choruses and convey the excitement of being young, free and feeling invincible. Both singles carry the same ‘in your face’ attitude that made the British public immediately gravitate towards both bands.
Mardy Bum is the love song of this record. Although a hit all across Britain, Yorkshire especially has adopted this song as their own. The song is so quintessentially Yorkshire that its hard to imagine a time where the lyrics to this song weren’t engrained into the minds of Northerners upon birth.
“Well now then mardy bum,
I’ve seen your frown and it’s like looking down
The barrel of a gun, and it goes off”
Although one of the more singalong songs on the record, When the Sun Goes Down is probably the only song on the record that is definitively dark in nature. The song was written by Turner after the band became apparent of the prostitution ring that resided in Neepsend, Sheffield. Throughout the band’s early years, they regularly rehearsed at Yellow Arch Studios (located in Neepsend). After finishing rehearsals at night, the band began to observe how the area served as Sheffield’s equivalent to the red-light district ‘once the sun had gone down’. The song centres around a ‘scummy man’ who regularly pesters a woman who is assumed to be a sex worker. The music video for When the Sun Goes Down depicts just as such, and features Lauren Socha playing the presumed sex worker alongside Britain’s saviour Stephen Graham, who plays the ‘scummy man’. Watch here.
The album concludes with ‘A Certain Romance’. Alongside the record’s opener, The View From the Afternoon, A Certain Romance takes the crown as being one of my three favourites on the record (again, probably even one of my favourite songs of all time). A retrospective look at the situations that you find observing in your youth, it is the perfect closure to this chapter of the Arctic Monkeys before Favourite Worst Nightmare (the band’s sophomore album) started a new one.
“But over there, there’s friends of mine,
What can I say? I’ve known them for a long, long time
And they might overstep the line,
But you just cannot get angry in the same way”
20 years have now passed since this record’s release, and it’s difficult to think of an album from a band that was as highly anticipated as was Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Truthfully, I think the reason this record is still so popular today is because it still speaks to people as well as it did in 2006. Whilst times have evolved and the world certainly isn’t the same place it was 20 years ago, what this record stood for and what it means to people has remained the same. The album speaks to someone like me the same way it spoke to someone who was my age in 2006 who will now be in their forties. Whilst I loved these songs when I was 14, I didn’t really have any idea what the song ‘From the Ritz to the Rubble’, for example, was about. Now that I am 22 and have experienced turning 18 and all the fun that comes with that, it means even more to me.
Ironically, I didn’t even start Honeymoon Suite with the intention of my first article revolving around my favourite album of all time – just so happened that this week was the 20th anniversary of this album. Guess you could say it’s my way of commemorating an album that has meant so much to me throughout my youth.
Just today as I am finishing this article, the Arctic Monkeys have released their first song in over three years, ‘Opening Night’. Opening Night is the lead single taken from War Child Record’s upcoming charity album HELP(2) – a follow up to 1995’s The Help Album. HELP(2) will feature new songs from a handful of the world’s biggest artists and aims to raise essential funds to support children affected by war from Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and more.
For around a month now there have been rumours of this song’s release. Along with the rumours of a song release, it has also been heavily rumoured that this will be Arctic Monkey’s final release before entering an indefinite hiatus. If the rumours are to be true, it’s been quite a ride, and I will forever feel proud to be from the same city as a band that has meant so much to me over the years.
Hope you enjoyed this, let me know what you thought of it etcetera. See you in a few weeks for another article. Got a rough idea of what I want to write about next so stay tuned.
Honeymoon Suite Music 
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