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[Dan]

From The New York Times.

Teen Spirit: Arctic Monkeys Observed in the Wild
By KELEFA SANNEH

GLASGOW, Jan. 29 — He is one of the biggest rock stars in Britain, leader of one of the most exciting bands on the planet. He just turned 20. And on Friday night he could be found in a grotty little room in Glasgow, talking about his grandfather.

He is Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, a scrappy and brilliant group from Yorkshire that is currently awash in hyperbolic praise. The debut Arctic Monkeys album, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" (Domino), has been instantly — and accurately — hailed as a modern classic, even though it was only released a week ago. The British music magazine NME ranked it at No. 5 on a recent list of the greatest British albums ever. It sold over 360,000 copies in the last week, making it the fastest-selling debut album in British history.

But despite this whirlwind, Mr. Turner seemed unusually self-aware but not at all worried as he sat backstage at the Carling Academy Glasgow before playing yet another sold-out show.

"My granddad said to me, 'I think you've overdoon it,' " he said, acknowledging with his Yorkshire pronunciation the huge fuss about the little band. "And I said, 'I think you're right.' "

Hype isn't really the right word to describe the Arctic Monkeys phenomenon, which began with sold-out local gigs and homemade CD's passed from old fans to new ones. Record executives struggled to keep up; Domino Records eventually signed the band and released a single, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," which topped the British charts. The follow-up single, "When the Sun Goes Down," also went to No. 1.

If only the music weren't so thrilling, there would probably be a serious backlash afoot. The Arctic Monkeys specialize in tidy but anthemic little postpunk songs, propelled by bursts of guitar chords and constant zigzags. In "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," the band hurtles through three different riffs — all utterly infectious — in the 30 seconds before Mr. Turner lets loose his thin voice and thick accent.

Then he does, and the song gets even better. Mr. Turner's lyrics are worth waiting for and often worth memorizing, too. He delivers pithy, unpretentious descriptions of a teenage world defined by daydreams and nightlife. And he has an uncanny way of evoking Northern English youth culture while neither romanticizing it nor sneering at it.

One song, "From the Ritz to the Rubble," begins in the middle of a run-on sentence that captures the ordinary desperate experience of trying to get into a nightclub. During Friday's concert, thousands of sweaty Scottish teenagers chanted the first lines (and all the rest) right along with the band:

Last night these two bouncers
And one of 'em's all right
The other one's a scary 'un
His way or no way, totalitarian
He's got no time for you
Looking or breathing
How he don't want you to
So step out the queue
He makes examples of you
And there's naught you can say
Behind they go through to the bit where you pay
And you realize then that it's finally the time
To walk back past 10,000 eyes in the line

As the song builds to a grand climax, the story dissolves, the way wasted nights usually do. There's a threat of violence, but our protagonists never make it inside the club, and eventually anger melts into bemusement: "Last night, what we talked about, it made so much sense/ But now the haze has ascended, it don't make no sense anymore."

With all those red-faced kids singing along, Mr. Turner's ambivalent refrain sounded like a generation's rallying cry.

Maybe it is. (And maybe his granddad was right.) Unlike virtually all of the postpunk bands that have transfixed Britain over the last few years, from the Strokes to the Libertines to Franz Ferdinand to the White Stripes, the Arctic Monkeys don't obsess over rock 'n' roll history, and they aren't nostalgic for an earlier musical era. They have borrowed from all those bands, but they have also done what era-defining bands are supposed to do: they have made all their predecessors seem — and sound — old.

Part of that, of course, is the band's actual youth. They're young enough to have grown up around so-called chavs — white working-class stock characters, ridiculed for their gaudy track suits and hard-partying lifestyle, and known for loutish behavior and conspicuous consumption. (Of alcohol, among other things.) The Arctic Monkeys songs contain a few jokes about chavism, and one mentions that most chavish of accessories: the Burberry baseball cap. But there's something generous about Mr. Turner's lyrics; he always stops short of condemnation. You can hear real affection when he sings, sighingly, about the local hooligans, in a tender two-minute ballad called "Riot Van": "These lads just wind the coppers oop/ They ask why they don't catch proper crooks/ They get their address and their names took/ But they couldn't care less."

Lyrics like these — delivered with a rapper's precision — are one reason Mr. Turner has begun to be described, in Britain at least, as the voice of a generation. Even though he only wanted to be the voice of a band.

"You have a song, and it drops, and it means all this other stuff all of a sudden," he said backstage at the Carling Academy. He couldn't quite explain why he has struck a chord among the country's pimply (and, for that matter, no-longer-pimply) masses. And he couldn't help but feel skeptical when people talk about how the band unites chavs and indie kids, the university-bound and the dole-bound. "I don't think it's half as tribal as people make it out," he said.

In Britain, the Arctic Monkeys' immediate future isn't in doubt: the band's debut CD will keep selling; the sell-out concerts will keep coming; the media coverage will only get more intense and more surreal. (A recent article in The Guardian reported on speculation that Mr. Turner doesn't write his own lyrics; the main evidence, it seemed, was that they are simply too good.) In the United States, though, the band's future is harder to predict. The album is due out from the independent label's American branch, Domino US, on Feb. 21; it is to be distributed through a new deal with the Alternative Distribution Alliance, a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group. Domino has had huge success over the last few years with Franz Ferdinand, whose albums have been marketed and distributed in partnership with SonyBMG.

There is no guarantee that the Arctic Monkeys will sell like Franz Ferdinand. And there is no telling whether American listeners and rock radio stations will embrace — or, for that matter, understand — their slangy tales of taxi rides and street crime and sulking girlfriends. If the Arctic Monkeys remained a British juggernaut but an American cult band, they wouldn't be the first. And it wouldn't really matter. You probably won't hear a better CD all year long.

Back at the Carling Academy, the Arctic Monkeys stormed through their triumphant set, with fans singing along not just to the lyrics but to the guitar lines, too. After "Fake Tales of San Francisco" was finished, the crowd kept shouting the words, which take aim at the indie-rock industry. The acerbic chorus was reborn as an exuberant soccer chant: "Get off the bandwagon/ And put down the handbook!/ Get off the bandwagon/And put down the handbook!"

The set ended the same way the album does: with a grand version of "A Certain Romance." Mr. Turner sang, "The point's that there in't no romance around there," But this isn't a protest song. If anything, it's an acceptance song: an ode to a youth culture that will always seem to be in decline — an ode to all those indefensible, irreplaceable wasted nights:

Well 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.

Another singer might make these louts the enemies, or the heroes. But Mr. Turner isn't sentimental enough to do either. After all, everyone overdoos it from time to time. (Especially pop critics.) And if you're a clear-headed 20-year-old from Yorkshire, all you can do is shrug.

[frizgolf]

"I don't think it's half as tribal as people make it out," he said.

Smart kid. I hope he keeps his head level.

[Nate]

London's Calling But U.S. Fans Aren't Picking Up

By ETHAN SMITH
March 7, 2006; Page B1

In January, a representative of the young British rock band Arctic Monkeys traveled across America to meet with programmers at key U.S. radio stations to deliver a surprising message. He wanted them to take the band's music off the air.

"Normally we have people fly in to ask us to play their records," says Gene Sandbloom, operations manager at CBS Corp.'s KROQ, an influential Los Angeles rock station. "He actually flew in to say, 'We're glad you're excited about the record. But please don't play it yet.' "

The representative, Kris Gillespie, who manages the U.S. office of Domino Recording Co. Ltd, says the request was part of an effort to maintain some control over the growing intercontinental hype surrounding Arctic Monkeys' debut CD. At the time, it had yet to be released in the States. "There's a certain type of music fan who ... might actually be turned off by the radio play," Mr. Gillespie says. "We wanted to have a discovery period where the excitement felt natural."

So far, the tactic hasn't worked. Arctic Monkeys' CD, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not," was the fastest-selling debut in the history of the British music industry, propelled by Internet buzz, seemingly nonstop radio airplay, and breathless reviews. But despite an even louder chorus of praise from American critics, when the group's CD reached U.S. stores two weeks ago, it generated sales of about 34,000 copies -- less than 10% of the 360,000 copies it sold its first week in the U.K.


British rock band Arctic Monkeys has so far failed to generate blockbuster sales in the U.S.


Arctic Monkeys faces a problem that has dogged a string of promising rock bands in recent years -- especially those from England. One after another, British acts awash in homeland success like Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and the Darkness have hit American shores riding a global wave of hype, thanks largely to the Internet.

But in most cases, the rabid critical enthusiasm in the States is followed by indifference from radio programmers, modest sales and a slow fade from view -- in time to make way for the next Next Big Thing from across the pond.

The failure of so many acts to get long-term traction with audiences reflects one of the music industry's most vexing problems: rock bands, once the very core of music industry sales, can be a tough sell in a world dominated by hip-hop. The Monkeys' music is heavily influenced by punk music from the 1970s and 1980s that many of today's teens have never heard.

British acts are hyped so routinely, critics take the hyperbole as a given -- and then try to take the superlatives even further. Publications from Australia's tiny Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper to America's giant People ("Britain's Next Great Things live up to the hype," the magazine declared) have noted the overstatement but declare this newest arrival different. "The Brits routinely mistake mediocrity for greatness," a Time magazine critic recently wrote. "Here's the thing, though: this time there's no mistake."

The puffery has almost become a running joke. Now that the album is out, KROQ is playing Arctic Monkeys -- and winking at the attention the band has received. Last weekend, the station launched a ticket giveaway for an Arctic Monkeys concert. After reading off a string of accolades like "the new kings of England," culled from reviews in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times and other publications, the announcer says on the radio, "Real or hype? Find out for yourself."

The question has yet to be answered. "I've been Arctic Monkeyed to death, but sales don't always live up to the hype," says Don VanCleave, president of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores.

Why hasn't the hype worked yet? Now that fans can go to the Net and listen to music themselves, rock critics and radio programmers may have less power than in years past. In addition, the unusually long window in which the band's online buzz built ahead of the U.S. album release may have prompted some fans to satisfy their curiosity by illegally downloading Arctic Monkeys' music, much of which was widely available for months.

Some skeptics also argue that Arctic Monkeys, with their thick northern-English accents and lyrics full of working-class British argot, will never resonate in the U.S. the way they do in their home country. The group's songs, for example, employ slang phrases like "tracky bottoms," which refers to the athletic-suit pants favored by a particular British species of lounge lizard.

To be sure, an appearance on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend and an upcoming concert tour of U.S. clubs could give Arctic Monkeys a boost. On the other hand, the band's hefty promotional commitments abroad could sap their ability to spend the kind of time in this country that many executives say it takes to "break" a record, or get it into the mainstream.

Many executives at major American record labels, however, are continuing to pursue a deal with the band and its label, the British independent Domino Records, which has limited resources compared with big record companies, and just eight full-time employees in its U.S. office.

"I don't know anyone in this business who doesn't get excited about a band that sells 35,000 records with no airplay," says Michael Goldstone, president of Warner Music Group Corp.'s Sire Records.

Perry Watts-Russell, senior vice president for A&R at Warner Music's Warner Bros. label, flew last week to Europe to woo the band into signing a pact to release its recordings in the future. At the show he attended in Hamburg on Wednesday night, he says, the audience was singing along to at least half of the songs. "If Germans can decipher the accent and intent of a young kid from Sheffield, one would hope enough people in America could connect to make it a worthwhile enterprise," he says.

Mr. Gillespie, Domino's U.S. chief, says his label and the band haven't ruled out a cooperative arrangement with a bigger record company, but for now they believe they can provide adequate promotion and marketing support. Distribution of the CDs to retailers is being handled by Alternative Distribution Alliance, a division of Warner Music that takes a less active role -- and a smaller cut of revenue -- than a record label. A spokeswoman for Arctic Monkeys said neither they nor their managers were available to comment.

Even Mr. Gillespie wonders if the ongoing major-label interest in Arctic Monkeys might reflect the executives' own nostalgia, not just their belief in the band's commercial prospects. "A lot of us in the industry now grew up in the '80s," he says. "There's a little bit of latent youthful taste that may be swaying some of these guys."

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