BSDD #1 – Arctic Monkeys

What can I say about Arctic Monkeys that has not already been preached on a Sheffield street corner, or beamed by Zane Lowe’s perpetual enthusiasm? ‘The last rock band,’ said Noel Gallagher, though he was always too keen to stop the clocks of music history so that Oasis stayed on top (not that he particularly needs to, though he definitively should have stopped before Be Here Now). Regardless, they released plenty of singles and even more B-sides. How do they hold up?

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

Most of these early B-sides sound like they belong on a Milburn album, or a post-Snatch Guy Ritchie soundtrack. Tracks like ‘Stickin To The Floor’, ‘7’ and (the Grammy-nominated) ‘Chun Li Flying Bird Kick’ have the frenetic energy and skidding riffs of the band’s original demo tapes, Beneath the Boardwalk, but lack the finesse of the album tracks. ‘Settle For A Draw’ is a slower, cooler track, even if it sounds like it should be a Little Man Tate single. No (or a tiny bit of) disrespect to the bands I have used in these disparaging comparisons. However, they just don’t have Alex Turner’s lyrical specificity that make the WPSIATWIM album tracks quite so special. Better than the demos ‘On the Run From the MI5’ or ‘Wavin Bye To The Train Or The Bus’, maybe, but the ‘jerry can of words and tones’ clearly didn’t cut the mustard to make it onto their studio debut.

The highlight of the first album’s B-sides has to be ‘Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts’. Here, the cheeky poetics of Turner is allowed to shine, evoking the glibness of schoolyard relationships and the disappointment that oh so often follows. Other than the unnerving ‘made the most of her’ lyric, it is endearing and wry enough to be album worthy. The simplicity of the arrangement makes the song, with that F#-F step down bass line adding enough bounce to keep the song playful, buoying Turner’s bitterness throughout the verses. The solo is passable. I don’t think it serves the song particularly well, and it seems to be added just to lend a launchpad for the final build into the ending.

Leave Before The Lights Come On

Unfortunately, ‘Put Your Dukes Up John’ slips back into the generic indie snarls of ‘Stickin To The Floor’. The Little Flames song has obtuse lyrics, an annoying spelling bee of a post-chorus, and an all-round jarring mood. It is the kind of song that you write at the beginning of your songwriting career. You feel clever, juggling cynicism and righteousness, toying with convention and cliché, eventually forgetting to make sure the song is actually good. If anything, it’s just another piece of evidence that Miles Kane’s career has been made on Alex Turner’s coattails.

On the flip side, ‘Baby I’m Yours’ is a lovely little slice of early pop bliss, the kind of cover recorded by the barrel of Spektor’s gun. It is a bit saccharin, but the vocals (with help from 747 lead singer Oisin Leech) add a sincerity that I think other bands covering this song would fail to muster. Not much else can be said for this song. It is perfect for a little kitchen boogie, simple enough to learn on the guitar for some romantic misadventures, and catchy enough to amass over 200 million streams on Spotify. Surely this must be the record for an Arctic Monkeys’ B-side? It even has more streams than any song from Humbug, Suck It and See, Tranquility Base, and The Car (with the exception of ‘Crying Lightning’). It just goes to show the timeless magic of some ‘60s pop.

Favourite Worst Nightmare

Personally, I think these B-sides are some of Arctic Monkeys’ best, but god, there’s so many. ‘The Bakery’ sets the blueprint for Matt Helders’ drumming on Suck It and See, underpinning a poignant slice-of-life story akin to ‘Bigger Boys’ (and reminding me of Blur’s ‘Blue Jeans’). Suddenly, the tempo picks up, and they’re blasting grifters* on ‘Plastic Tramp’. I’m not as much a fan of this one, (I don’t know if you can already tell, but I’m a fan of their slower ones), though it is certainly better than their earlier B-sides: smarter images, better production, and more varied energy to make the punchy punchier. 

‘Too Much To Ask’ has one of Arctic Monkey’s best riffs. It is both menacing and laidback, each a signifier of a dying love. Turner lyrically shines here too. Amongst my favourites are ‘Would it be outrageous to say, we’re either shouting or we’re shagging?’ and ‘Would a kiss be too much to ask? When you fit me like Sunday’s frozen pitch fits a Thermos flask?’. The mosaic of internal rhymes and poetic mundanity contributes the song’s steady flow, driven once again by Matt Helders’ SIAS-esque drumming.

The ‘Brianstorm’ single starts with ‘If You Found This It’s Probably Too Late’, the bait-and-switch string intro making way for a fizzing guitar line. Again, you can see an evolution from their first B-sides, which Turner teases with the ‘nothing on the early stuff’ final line. I can imagine it would be great to hear this live, as with all their faster B-sides, but they would suit a sweaty club more than a smartphone-lined stadium. 

As Arctic Monkeys’ most surprising feature, Dizzee Rascal jumps onto ‘Temptation Greets You Like Your Naughty Friend’ with a guest verse that’s pretty disappointing. His early stuff is great, but here he just repeats the subject of the song without adding any of his trademark cheek or boisterousness. The song is still fun enough, the riff builds with an edgy urgency and pomp, but I just expected more from what is probably the most mid-2000s UK collaboration ever. This is followed by ‘What If You Were Right The First Time?’, where the boring chorus is worth it for the mess of noise immediately after. Just pure chaos and drum fills and static. It adds to the paranoia of the verses, where the rhyming proficiency of Turner is once again exhibited, although with less effectiveness than ‘Too Much To Ask’.

The ’Teddy Picker’ B-sides do nothing for me. There’s a cover of a long-forgotten ‘60s tune by Pat Farrel (not the Alpha Papa one), an instrumental by the Sheffield indie hodgepodge Death Ramps, and the start-stop thousand-word ‘Nettles’. Same for ‘Da Frame 2R’, which has a buzz deep in the chorus’ mix that sounds like my phone alarm and panics me, and ‘Matador’, a 5-minute romp where Turner raps a verse for the Japanese market. Who needs Dizzee Rascal?

*My brother has a story from his time at university in Bath. Apparently, there used to be a homeless woman who would beg on one of the main shopping streets in the city. She had a bit of an attitude, but so would I if my next meal was at the whim of Primark shoppers and snooty Southerners. Anyway, I think he gave her some change, the charitable soul he is, only to be metaphorically slapped in the face when he saw her well-dressed, stepping out of a big house to walk her show dog. Plastic Tramp indeed! I think he should have eschewed his degree and set up outside a Debenhams.

Humbug

The band’s sound starts getting darker with Humbug, hence the Nick Cave cover. It has nothing on the original’s industrial gothic atmosphere, but it is two minutes shorter. I suppose if you’re in a rush, it would be the preferred version. ‘I Haven’t Got My Strange’ would be ideal too, at only one and a half minutes. It has the awkward groove of ‘Dangerous Animals’ (a better song), and it’s an interesting enough snippet to listen to once and never again.

‘Catapult’, which charted 14 places higher than its a-side ‘Cornerstone’, sounds like a Last Shadow Puppets’ track. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it, but the acoustic guitars and semi-militaristic drama of stolen love are more Age of Understatement than Humbug. ‘Sketchead’ is an irreverent piece of portraiture, the dirtier, flirtier brother of ‘Brianstorm’, documenting an unshakeable piece of limescale that somehow becomes a fixture of a friendship circle. This song is great if only for the keen observation behind its lyrics, but that wonky solo is a nice addition too. Compared to ‘Fright Lined Dining Room’, which says nothing in particular over a rejected ‘Crying Lightning’ take, it is a cutting-edge social commentary.

I can hear echoes of ‘Dangerous Animals’ in the vocal melody of ‘Joining The Dots’, before it is interrupted by some annoying, hissing guitar stings. I think ‘The Afternoon’s Hat’ has the beginnings of Turner’s later singing style, prolonging every syllable for a second longer than it should be. The three-note guitar line towards the end of the song irks me; it sounds like a metal solo at quarter speed. ‘Don’t Forget Whose Legs You’re On’ starts with a drum beat similar to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings’ ‘How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?’ or Amy Winehouse’s ‘You Know I’m No Good’, but soon devolves to whispered words over staccato keyboard chords.

Suck It and See

Despite this album having some of Alex Turner’s best songwriting (see ‘Love Is A Lazerquest’ or ‘The Hellcat Spangled Shalala’), it did not translate well to the B-sides. There are some great lyrics (‘The Blond-O-Sonic Shimmer Trap’ and its ‘snapped/ Wing mirrors off of Cadillacs’ section), but when they do appear, it is too often a drag to get there. Otherwise, we have the opposite problem for ‘I.D.S.T.’, the repetitive sequel to the album’s worst track, ‘Brick By Brick’, and ‘Little Illusion Machine (Wirral Riddler)’, which sounds like another Last Shadow Puppet’s reject, not just because of Miles Kane’s presence. ‘Evil Twin’ (the name itself is a concept much better handled on ‘The Bourne Identity’) feels like the bridge between SIAS and AM, taking the worst bits of each and presenting an overconfident, underdeveloped rock-and-roll attitude with little substance. Richard Hawley (whose solo output is marvellous) tries his hand at some heavier rock on ‘You and I’, and while his mid-song cigarette drag is a personal highlight, the rest of the track does little for me.

AM

The AM B-sides are either enjoyable modern rock songs or abysmal. ‘Electricity’ and ‘Stop The World I Wanna Get Off With You’ could have made the album, swapped out for the less convincing ‘I Want It All’ or ‘Fireside’. That’s not to say they don’t have their own problems. ‘Electricity’ has a crunchy guitar riff, closer to Ocean Colour Scene than the Monkeys, but the vocals aim for cool and easy-going, and land a little too close to bored and indifferent. ‘Stop The World’ follows the album’s hip-hop/R&B-inspired a sound a bit closer, Matt Helder’s falsetto responding to Turner’s verses (I’m sure there’s some joke to be made about only responding to calls when high-pitched). It feels a little shallow, especially considering the song’s title, but I am still a fan of this song. I’m also pretty sure One Republic (inadvertently) copied the bridge (‘I know that getting you alone…’) of this song for the chorus of ‘Everywhere I Go’, so that shows the pop-crossover appeal of the song, but who’s to say if this is to the detriment ‘Stop The World’?

Now, we come to what are possibly Arctic Monkeys worst songs. ‘2013’ and ‘You’re So Dark’ are feel cynical. One, an instantly dated attempt to tap into some Tumblr fandom; the other, a failed social commentary about technology that turns into a list of brands and remote-control buttons. I can’t believe that Alex Turner, a brilliant lyricist, thought that lazy mentions of Edgar Allen Poe or Facebook would enhance any song. Besides their lyrics, the tracks themselves feel like the most derivative parts of the album’s sound. Between the emotionless ‘you’re so dark’ backing vocals and the swaggerless riff of ‘2013’ (not to mention the awkward chorus of ‘it’s 2013, all across the galaxy’), these B-sides lack any recognisable feature of what makes Arctic Monkeys great. I can’t tell if it’s through trying too hard or not hard enough, and I’m not sure which would be more disappointing.

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

‘Anyways’ is tonic for the last two B-sides. Backed by The Martini Police, Alex Turner croons some of his best lines: ‘oversharing and its bitter aftertaste’; ‘nosebleeds from epiphanies I took full in the face’; ‘devising methods to both have and eat your cake’. The usual irreverent and whimsical trappings are there, but in the framework of Tranquility Base, his lyricism reaches new heights. Pretension, some might call it, but the words are imbued with a self-deprecating humility, a repressed emotional core that help it rise above Turner’s occasional seemingly unmotivated babbling. These conclusions slide over an emphatic lounge instrumental like an elbow over a hotel bar. The bass has a funk to it, as does the drums, but all instruments follow the timing of Turner’s words, and not vice versa. He may be in control of your attention, but only in anticipation of that final ‘anyways’.

The Car

This doesn’t help to dissuade the notion that The Car was more contractual obligation than passion project. Don’t get me wrong, I like the album. But no B-sides? Even TBH+C had ‘Anyways’. Perhaps, they said all that they wanted to on the LP. I read somewhere that the band released so many B-sides and EPs early on as they wanted a fresh rotation of songs to play live. I suppose after two decades and seven studio albums, they didn’t need to add to the setlist anymore. It is a shame, though. Arctic Monkeys’ B-sides laid bare their strengths and weaknesses, and it made their discography that bit more interesting. 

The Best B-Sides

‘Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts’

‘Baby I’m Yours’

‘The Bakery’

‘Too Much To Ask’

‘Temptation Greets You Like Your Naughty Friend’

‘Sketchead’

‘Electricity’

‘Stop The World I Wanna Get Off With You’

‘Anyways’

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