The story of Arctic Monkeys

Four kids from High Green

Alexander David Turner was born in Sheffield on the sixth of January 1986, the only child of two secondary school teachers. His mother Penny taught German, and his father David taught music and physics and had played saxophone, trumpet and piano in big bands. The family lived in High Green, a suburb on the northern edge of the city. From the age of five, Alex grew up next door to Matt Helders, and the two went through primary school, secondary school and college together. At their primary school leaving ceremony the friends mimed to the Oasis song Morning Glory. Matt played Liam Gallagher, while Alex pretended to play bass on a tennis racket. As teenagers they skateboarded, rode BMX bikes and made rough hip hop beats on his father's computer.[1] [2]

At secondary school the pair met Andy Nicholson, who lived in nearby Hillsborough, and the three bonded over Dr. Dre, the Wu-Tang Clan, Outkast and Roots Manuva. Then the Strokes arrived in 2001 and changed everything for them. Alex and another local boy, Jamie Cook, both got guitars for Christmas that year. In the summer of 2002, after watching other friends start bands, they decided to form one of their own. Alex suggested Andy learn bass, and Matt bought a drum kit, later joking that drums were the only thing left. At first the band played instrumentals, and Alex only took the microphone after two other school friends turned the job down. Matt thought he was the obvious choice anyway, because Alex had a thing for words.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They rehearsed for about a year before playing live, first in Alex's garage and later in an empty warehouse. Matt's mother drove them to practice three times a week, and she remembered that the boys would stop playing the moment they noticed anyone listening. Their first gig came on Friday the thirteenth of June 2003, supporting a band called the Sound at the Grapes, a pub in Sheffield city centre. The set mixed four of their own songs with covers of the Beatles, the White Stripes, the Undertones and the Datsuns. According to the BBC, the night earned them twenty seven pounds in ticket money. That same summer Alex also played rhythm guitar in a funk band called Judan Suki, after meeting its singer, Jon McClure, on a bus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

While recording with Judan Suki at 2fly Studios in August 2003, Alex asked the producer Alan Smyth to make a demo for his own band. Smyth agreed, and later recalled telling Alex off for singing in an American voice at that first session. Through Smyth the band found their managers, Geoff Barradale and Ian McAndrew, who paid for a string of three song demos through 2003 and 2004. Barradale, who had once sung in an indie band called Seafruit, drove the teenagers to gigs across the north of England, the Midlands and Scotland in a battered old Saab. At their rehearsal rooms at Yellow Arch Studios in Neepsend they earned a reputation as hard workers, and the owner's wife helped Alex with his singing.[1] [2]

Free CDs and a number one

From the start, the band burned their demos onto CDs and handed them out free at gigs. Fans copied them, swapped them online and gave the collection a name. The first person to share them called the files Beneath the Boardwalk, after the Sheffield venue where he had picked up the discs, and the label stuck as more demos appeared. A fan and amateur photographer, Mark Bull, filmed their shows, made a video for Fake Tales of San Francisco and posted the songs on his website. When people asked about the band's MySpace page, the members said fans had built it and that they barely knew what it was. By the end of 2004, crowds were singing along to songs that had never been released.[1] [2] [3]

After finishing college in 2004, Alex took a year out and worked behind the bar at the Boardwalk, the venue that lent its name to the demos. Andy worked there too. Behind that bar Alex met the singer Richard Hawley, and one night he watched the punk poet John Cooper Clarke open for the Fall. Clarke's rapid, funny delivery in a thick regional accent blew him away, and the early song From the Ritz to the Rubble was his attempt at the same style. Late in 2004, Zane Lowe played the demo of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor on BBC Radio 1. In April 2005 the Daily Star gave them their first national newspaper mention, calling them the most exciting band to emerge that year.[1] [2] [3]

In May 2005 the band put out a limited single, Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys, on their own Bang Bang label. Bang Bang had once been floated as a new band name, because some people thought Arctic Monkeys sounded silly. The songs were Fake Tales of San Francisco and From the Ritz to the Rubble. That month Jamie quit his job as an apprentice bathroom tiler. In the summer they played the stage for new and unsigned acts at the Reading and Leeds festivals. Record labels were fighting over them, and in June 2005 the band chose the independent label Domino, run by Laurence Bell. They liked that Bell had started the label from his flat and only signed acts he personally loved.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their first full single, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, came out on the seventeenth of October 2005. It had taken three attempts to record, first with Alan Smyth, then with James Ford, and finally with the producer Jim Abbiss. The video was shot live in a studio on old television cameras, in the style of the BBC show The Old Grey Whistle Test, and it opens with Alex telling viewers not to believe the hype. The single went straight to number one in Britain, knocking the Sugababes off the top. Around the same time the band sold out the Astoria in London, a show upgraded twice because of demand, with touts asking over a hundred pounds a ticket. Andy was still on the dole when the record came out.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fastest selling debut

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was released on the twenty third of January 2006, a week earlier than planned because of high demand, and possibly to blunt an internet leak. It sold three hundred and sixty three thousand, seven hundred and thirty five copies in its first week, the fastest selling debut album in British chart history. It beat the record held by Hear'Say, and on its first day it outsold the rest of the top twenty combined. A spokesman for the retailer HMV said nothing like it had been seen since the Beatles. The title came from a line in Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the BBC reported that Sillitoe wrote to the band to say he liked the album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The cover showed Chris McClure, a friend of the band and brother of Jon McClure, smoking a cigarette in the small hours at the Korova bar in Liverpool. The band had given him seventy pounds for a night out. A public health doctor at NHS Health Scotland said the image made smoking look acceptable, and the band's product manager replied that the picture showed smoking was not doing him any good. Inside, the songs were snapshots of teenage Sheffield at night, full of bouncers, taxi queues and nightclub rejections. When the Sun Goes Down, first called Scummy, was about the street prostitution the band saw near their rehearsal room in Neepsend. A Certain Romance mocked the local lads, then forgave them.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

America was harder. The band made their American television debut on Saturday Night Live in March 2006, and reviews of their first full tour there were lukewarm. Variety said Alex was openly hostile to the crowd at first, and the Miami Herald mocked the drummer's out of tune harmonies. The album entered the American chart at number twenty four, still a strong result for a new indie band. None of the four was old enough to drink legally in the United States. At home they skipped the Brit Awards, which they had skipped the year before too. In February 2007, collecting best British group and best British album, they sent acceptance videos dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz and as the Village People.[1] [2] [3]

In May 2006 the band announced that Andy Nicholson would miss a North American tour because of fatigue after months on the road. His place went to Nick O'Malley, another childhood friend, who played in a local band called the Dodgems and learned the songs over a weekend by playing along to the records. On the twentieth of June it was announced that Andy was no longer in the band. Alex later said they wanted to move forward. Years afterwards Andy described the meeting where he was told as soul destroying. He said he had contemplated suicide in the dark years that followed, and that he cried alone at home watching his old band headline Glastonbury in 2007. Time healed it, and the others came to his wedding.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nick's first single with the band, Leave Before the Lights Come On, came out in August 2006. It reached number four, their first single not to top the chart. That September the debut album won the Mercury Prize. Collecting the award, Alex said the win was down to good tunes and no tricks. Then he joked that someone should call nine nine nine, because fellow nominee Richard Hawley had been robbed. Andy Nicholson was not with them at the ceremony. By then Alex was already telling interviewers that songs about Sheffield nightlife were a closed book, and the band were turning down television shows they thought were cheesy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Faster, louder, further

The second album arrived just fifteen months after the first. Favourite Worst Nightmare was recorded mostly at Miloco Studios in London with the producers James Ford and Mike Crossey, and came out on the twenty third of April 2007. It sold about eighty five thousand copies on its first day and two hundred and twenty seven thousand, nine hundred and ninety three in its first week, and every one of its twelve tracks entered the top two hundred of the singles chart. The title came from a line in the song D Is for Dangerous. The band said they had also considered calling it Lesbian Wednesdays, Gordon Brown or Gary Barlow. Critics heard a faster, heavier band, and James Ford would work on every album that followed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The lead single, Brianstorm, peaked at number two, held off only by Beyonce and Shakira's Beautiful Liar. It was named after a smooth stranger with a business card whom the band met backstage in Japan, and then brainstormed about afterwards. On the twenty second of June 2007 Arctic Monkeys headlined Glastonbury for the first time, covering Shirley Bassey's Diamonds Are Forever and bringing out Dizzee Rascal. A month later they played two sold out nights at Old Trafford cricket ground in Manchester, with Amy Winehouse among the support acts. The tour ended at the Manchester Apollo in December, filmed by their friend Richard Ayoade for the concert film At the Apollo, with Richard Hawley joining them on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fluorescent Adolescent reached number five. Its lyrics began as a word game between Alex and his girlfriend Johanna Bennett on a quiet holiday, and she received a co writing credit. Richard Ayoade directed the video, a violent brawl between gangs of clowns loosely inspired by a John Cooper Clarke poem, and the band played the song on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross dressed as clowns. The album's last track, 505, was one of Alex's first real love songs, with guitar from his new friend Miles Kane. It stalled at number seventy four at the time, but its story was far from over. At the 2008 Brit Awards they won best album and best group again, and their rambling speech was cut short on air.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Alex had met Miles Kane in 2005, when Kane's Liverpool band the Little Flames supported Arctic Monkeys on tour. The two bonded over Scott Walker and David Bowie, and in August 2007 they recorded an album in France with James Ford producing and playing drums and Owen Pallett writing the string arrangements. As the Last Shadow Puppets, they released The Age of the Understatement in April 2008. It went to number one and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. The same period changed Alex's private life. In July 2007 he began dating the model and television presenter Alexa Chung, and in March 2008 he left Sheffield to live with her in London.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Into the desert

For the third album the band wanted a new direction. They played their demos to Laurence Bell at Domino and asked for guidance, and he suggested Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, a name they had half jokingly mentioned before. Homme agreed. Most of Humbug was recorded with him at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree and in Los Angeles, and the rest in New York with James Ford. Homme said the band came to him asking to be taken to the weird and the strange. Humbug came out in August 2009 with heavy, spooky guitars, a slower crooning voice from Alex and a guest vocal from Alison Mosshart of the Kills. It went to number one, but split fans more than anything before it.[1] [2] [3]

By then Alex had moved to Brooklyn with Alexa Chung. There he wrote six gentle acoustic songs for Submarine, the first feature film directed by his friend Richard Ayoade. Ayoade had first imagined cover versions, the way the film The Graduate used existing songs. Instead Alex recorded original songs in London with James Ford in 2010, and they came out in March 2011 as his first solo release. Back in Britain, in November 2009, he joined Richard Hawley at a charity show in London and played a short acoustic set, with Jamie Cook joining him on two Humbug songs. Hawley said there was no need to go through managers to arrange it. It was just mates.[1] [2] [3]

Suck It and See was written mostly on an acoustic guitar in Alex's Brooklyn home and recorded over five weeks at Sound City in Los Angeles in early 2011, largely played live in the room. The title is an old British phrase meaning give it a try, but some big American stores covered it with a sticker because they thought it was rude. According to NME, the band had also toyed with titles like The Thunder Suckle Fuzz Canyon. Matt Helders sang lead on the teaser track Brick by Brick. Released in June 2011, it gave them a fourth straight number one album. That August, most of the stock of the single The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala was destroyed by fire during the London riots.[1] [2]

Alex and Alexa Chung split in July 2011, and around the same time his stage self changed. He grew a rockabilly quiff, put his guitar down more often, and started strutting and flirting with the crowd. The band had moved to Los Angeles, where Alex and Matt shared a house, and in early 2012 they spent a North American arena tour opening for the Black Keys, the only time they have toured as a support act. They released R U Mine? for the occasion, built on a riff Nick O'Malley wrote. On the twenty seventh of July 2012 they played I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and the Beatles' Come Together at the London Olympics opening ceremony, as cyclists with glowing wings circled the stadium.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

AM

The fifth album was made in Los Angeles and back at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, with James Ford producing and Ross Orton co producing. This time the band built the songs from bass and drums up, chasing a groove. Alex told NME it sounded like a Dr. Dre beat given an Ike Turner bowl cut and sent galloping across the desert on a Stratocaster, and he named Outkast, Aaliyah and Black Sabbath among the influences. The title, he admitted, was stolen from the Velvet Underground compilation VU, and the record nearly took the name of a little black amp they recorded through, known as The New Black. Josh Homme returned a favour for Alex's guest spot on a Queens of the Stone Age record and sang on two songs.[1] [2] [3]

AM closes with I Wanna Be Yours, built on a love poem by John Cooper Clarke that Alex first heard read aloud by a teacher at school. Clarke said he preferred the band's version to his own. The song was never a single, yet it became the band's most streamed track on Spotify, with billions of plays. Released on the ninth of September 2013, AM sold more than a hundred and fifty seven thousand copies in its first week in Britain. That made Arctic Monkeys the first independent label band to debut at number one with each of their first five albums. It also became one of the best selling vinyl albums of the decade, and it won the Brit Award for British album of the year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They headlined Glastonbury for a second time in June 2013, and that autumn they sold more than thirteen thousand six hundred tickets for a show at Sheffield Arena, breaking the venue record held by Pulp. In America something finally clicked. Do I Wanna Know? became their first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and their first number one on the American alternative chart. A booked appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live was scrapped in October 2013 when Kanye West's interview overran, so they came back and played a week later. In February 2014 they sold out Madison Square Garden in New York, their first American arena sell out, and covered the Beatles' All My Loving close to the fiftieth anniversary of the Ed Sullivan Show.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

At the Brit Awards in February 2014, AM won British album of the year and the band won British group, making them the first band to win both on the same night three times. Alex's acceptance speech became famous for its lazy drawl, as he told the room that rock and roll might seem to be fading away but would never die. Years later he acknowledged that he performs through personas, a different performer for each album. In May 2014 they played two nights at Finsbury Park in London to around eighty thousand people. The AM Tour ran to more than a hundred and fifty dates and ended in Rio de Janeiro on the fifteenth of November 2014. Then the band announced a break.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That year also brought an embarrassing story. It emerged that all four members had been involved in a tax avoidance scheme called Liberty between 2005 and 2009, sheltering sums reported at between five hundred and fifty seven thousand pounds and one point one million pounds. Alex later said they had been given poor advice, that he had made a poor decision and pulled out, and that he always paid his taxes in full and on time. During the break, Matt drummed on Iggy Pop's album Post Pop Depression, made with Josh Homme, and toured with them. In 2016 Alex and Miles Kane returned as the Last Shadow Puppets with a second number one, Everything You've Come to Expect.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A hotel on the moon

After AM, Alex struggled with writer's block. For his thirtieth birthday in 2016, the band's manager Ian McAndrew gave him a Steinway Vertegrand piano. He had never written on piano, and the chords his fingers fell into reminded him of the music his father used to play. Inspired partly by Federico Fellini's film Eight and a Half, he began writing in a spare room of his Los Angeles home that he called the Lunar Surface, recording demos on an old eight track machine. When he played them to Jamie Cook in February 2017, Jamie was blown away but unsure what the band would do with them. The two even discussed a solo album before deciding it would be Arctic Monkeys.[1] [2] [3]

Recording began in September 2017 at Vox Studios in Hollywood and at La Frette outside Paris, with Alex and James Ford producing. The result, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, was a concept album about a luxury resort on the moon, told through a lounge singer and other odd characters, and full of references to science fiction, technology and politics. One lyric compares the leader of the free world to a wrestler in tight golden trunks. Alex even built the cover himself, a cardboard model of the hotel, spending about two months buying board at art shops and cutting shapes late at night. He began by drawing a hexagon, because it was the band's sixth album, and borrowed ideas from the architects Eero Saarinen and John Lautner.[1] [2]

The album came out on the eleventh of May 2018 with no singles released in advance. It still debuted at number one, their sixth in a row, and its twenty four thousand five hundred vinyl sales made it the fastest selling vinyl record in Britain in twenty five years. Reviews were mostly warm, and Q magazine named it the album of the year, but many fans hoping for the riffs of AM were baffled. In Sheffield someone painted a coffin on a gate at Hunter's Bar, the area named in Fake Tales of San Francisco, with the words Hey Alex, how's California? The record still earned the band a fourth Mercury nomination and two Grammy nominations.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour ran from May 2018 to April 2019. Freed from his guitar for much of the night, Alex played the part of a smooth lounge lizard, and critics noticed a more playful frontman. At one of the band's Sheffield arena shows that year, they invited John Cooper Clarke to perform his reading of I Wanna Be Yours. A concert at the Royal Albert Hall on the seventh of June 2018 was released as a live album in December 2020, with all the proceeds going to the children's charity War Child. In his private life, Alex's relationship with the American model Taylor Bagley ended in 2018, and he began dating the French singer then known as Louise Verneuil.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Car and after

Alex set out to write louder songs for the next record, but the music would not go there. Early sessions at La Frette in late 2019 were mostly thrown away, and during the pandemic he went back to his home studio to write, half on guitar and half on piano. In the summer of 2021 the band moved into Butley Priory, an old monastic building in Suffolk, turned it into a studio and lived there while recording. The secret leaked when the priory's cook posted a photo with them on Instagram. Strings were added at RAK Studios in London. The cover was a photo Matt Helders took from his old Los Angeles window, of a lone white Toyota on a rooftop car park.[1]

The Car was released on the twenty first of October 2022. It sold more than a hundred and nineteen thousand chart units in its first week in Britain, enough to top the chart in most weeks, but it landed on the same day as Taylor Swift's Midnights and entered at number two. It was the first Arctic Monkeys album not to reach number one. Critics praised its lush strings and cinematic lyrics, and it earned a fifth Mercury nomination, tying Radiohead for the most ever, along with several Grammy nominations. Meanwhile the old album track 505 had gone viral on TikTok, and by the end of 2022 it was the biggest indie song in Britain, fifteen years after its release.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Car tour took the band into stadiums and, for the first time, to Asia. In June 2023 they played three nights at the Emirates Stadium in London, with Miles Kane joining them for 505. Days later Alex was struck down with acute laryngitis, and the band cancelled a show in Dublin, raising doubts about their Glastonbury headline slot. It went ahead that Friday night, the twenty third of June 2023, their third time topping the bill at the festival, and the Guardian found Alex in remarkably good voice. In September 2023, during the American leg, Matt Helders married the rapper Amanda Blank. The tour finally ended with make up shows in Ireland, closing in Dublin in October 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then the band went quiet. Their next new music arrived in January 2026, when they released Opening Night for Help 2, a War Child charity album and sequel to the famous Help album of 1995. James Ford, who produced the whole project, had asked them to take part. The song grew from an unfinished demo Alex had written during the AM sessions in Joshua Tree about a decade earlier. The band finished it at Abbey Road Studios in November 2025, their first time working together since 2022, while children filmed the sessions for the director Jonathan Glazer. The BBC described it as a sparse, sinister ballad about political sloganeering. Help 2 followed on the sixth of March 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Legacy

Arctic Monkeys are often described as one of the first bands to break through thanks to the internet, although they always said the fans did that part. Mike Smith, who signed them to EMI Publishing, later argued that their rise created the model for how people find music now, by clicking on songs rather than waiting for radio. Their label boss Laurence Bell compared their career to the Who and the Rolling Stones, with early hit singles followed by an imperial phase. John Cooper Clarke called them the nearest thing to the Beatles, and Damon Albarn called them the last great guitar band. Artists from Fontaines D.C. and Sam Fender to the 1975 and Yungblud have named them as an influence.[1] [2] [3]

The numbers are large. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, their sales in the United States alone stand at over thirty million units. They have won seven Brit Awards, including British group and British album three times each, plus the Mercury Prize, an Ivor Novello Award and twenty NME Awards, and they have been nominated for nine Grammys. Their debut and AM both appear on NME and Rolling Stone lists of the greatest albums ever made. AM became the first album by a band to pass fifteen billion streams on Spotify, and by 2022 it had spent only one week outside the British top one hundred since it was released in 2013.[1] [2] [3]

Through all the changes, the core has barely moved. Alex, Matt and Jamie have played together since 2002, and Nick since 2006. James Ford has produced or co produced every album since the second. Alex's lyrics went from taxi ranks and bouncers to lunar hotels and film sets, and his accent softened after years in New York and Los Angeles, but the band's roots stay in Sheffield. Matt has been known to put the city's dialling code, zero one one four, on the front of his drum kit. The debut album turned twenty in January 2026, the same week Opening Night came out. As of 2026 that song is their latest release, and no new album has been announced.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Arctic Monkeys

Alex Turner and Matt Helders. Neighbours in High Green from the age of five, they went through primary school, secondary school and college together, and mimed to Oasis at their primary school leaving ceremony. Matt was the one who pushed Alex to write the words. Later they shared a house in Los Angeles. Matt's own photograph of a lone car on a rooftop became the cover and title song of The Car.[1] [2] [3]

Alex Turner and Andy Nicholson. They met at secondary school and bonded over hip hop, and Alex suggested Andy learn the bass. After Andy was replaced in 2006, the two did not speak for about two years. They repaired the friendship, the band came to Andy's wedding, and in 2025 Alex helped brainstorm titles for Andy's book of photographs of the early band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alex Turner and Miles Kane. They met in 2005 when Kane's band the Little Flames supported Arctic Monkeys, and formed the Last Shadow Puppets in 2007. The press called their friendship a bromance. They are both only children, and joked that their mothers own the same kettle and toaster. Alex co wrote half of Kane's first solo album, and Kane still joins Arctic Monkeys on stage for 505.[1] [2] [3]

Arctic Monkeys and James Ford. The Staffordshire born producer first recorded an early version of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, then produced Favourite Worst Nightmare and has worked on every Arctic Monkeys album since. He is also the drummer and producer in the Last Shadow Puppets. In 2025 he produced the War Child album Help 2, and the band joined at his request.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Arctic Monkeys and Josh Homme. The Queens of the Stone Age leader produced most of Humbug in 2008 and 2009, sang backing vocals on Suck It and See and added vocals to two songs on AM. Alex returned the favour on Queens of the Stone Age's album Like Clockwork, and Matt drummed on Homme's project with Iggy Pop. Homme called AM a sexy after midnight record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alex Turner and Alexa Chung. The model and presenter dated Alex from July 2007 to July 2011. He left Sheffield to live with her in London in 2008, and they later moved to Brooklyn. She found the photograph used on the first Last Shadow Puppets cover and appeared in a Last Shadow Puppets video. In 2013 she said he was still her best friend.[1] [2] [3]

Alex Turner and Johanna Bennett. The English musician was Alex's girlfriend from 2005 until January 2007. Fluorescent Adolescent began as a word game the couple played on holiday, and Alex said he could not have avoided crediting her. She is widely believed to be the subject of 505, though that has never been confirmed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alex Turner and John Cooper Clarke. Alex first heard the punk poet's work at school and saw him perform while working the bar at the Boardwalk. Clarke's poems were printed in a Fluorescent Adolescent single, inspired its video, and his I Wanna Be Yours became the closing song on AM. Clarke said he preferred their version, and in 2018 the band brought him on stage in Sheffield.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Arctic Monkeys and Richard Ayoade. The comedian and director became one of the band's closest creative allies. He directed the videos for Fluorescent Adolescent and Crying Lightning, the concert film At the Apollo and two Last Shadow Puppets videos. Alex wrote the soundtrack for Ayoade's film Submarine, and later composed music for the audiobooks of two of Ayoade's books.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. The Sheffield singer met Alex over the bar at the Boardwalk. When the band beat him to the 2006 Mercury Prize, Alex joked that Hawley had been robbed. Hawley sang on the B sides Bad Woman and You and I, performed with the band at the Manchester Apollo, and called them top lads.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alex Turner and Jon McClure. The future Reverend and the Makers singer met Alex on a bus in 2003 and brought him into the funk band Judan Suki. The two later shared a Sheffield flat, and Alex co wrote songs on McClure's debut album. McClure once told the BBC they used to be his band, then corrected himself. His brother Chris is the face on the cover of the Arctic Monkeys debut.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Alex Turner and Taylor Bagley. Alex dated the American model from 2015 to 2018 and lived with her in Los Angeles. The Last Shadow Puppets song Sweet Dreams, TN was written for her, and she persuaded him to keep it on the album. She supported his late night cardboard model building for the Tranquility Base cover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Arctic Monkeys

• According to the BBC, Arctic Monkeys earned twenty seven pounds in ticket money from their very first gig in 2003. The gig was at the Grapes pub in Sheffield on Friday the thirteenth of June 2003. The band played mostly cover versions that night.[1] [2]
• Jamie Cook was an apprentice bathroom tiler until May 2005. Even after a sold out tour, he went back to finish tiling a friend's bathroom because he had promised to. Years later he helped Alex tile his own bathroom.[1] [2] [3]
• Jamie once vowed to throw his tiling trowel into a local pond the day the band got a record deal. Alex told the poet Simon Armitage about the promise in 2009. The friends called the pond near their homes the Ocha.[1]
• Matt Helders has put Sheffield's dialling code, zero one one four, on the front of his drum kit. It is a tribute to his home city, which he says still feeds the band's songs despite years of touring the world.[1]
• Matt Helders plays drums in jogging bottoms rather than jeans. He explained that sweating in jeans and wearing them the next day was not rock and roll, just unhygienic.[1] [2]
• Alex Turner had piano lessons until he was eight. His teacher said he had a good ear. He gave up, but decades later the piano shaped Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino.[1] [2]
• The novelist Alan Sillitoe wrote to the band to say he liked their debut album. The album's title came from his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Matt said the author felt privileged they had used it.[1] [2]
• The man on the debut album cover was not paid for the photo. Chris McClure said it was a nice thing to tell his grandchildren. The band had given him seventy pounds for the night out.[1] [2]
• Still Take You Home is the only song on the debut credited to anyone besides Alex, with Jamie Cook helping on the lyrics. NME noted the debut is also the only Arctic Monkeys album James Ford did not produce, though he played keyboards on Riot Van.[1]
• A B side of their first single was nominated for a Grammy. Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick, an instrumental on the I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor single, was nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 2007.[1] [2]
• The girl on the I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor sleeve was a sixteen year old in a fake supermarket uniform. Jessie May Cuffe was photographed working the till at a Spar in Liverpool, and real customers mistook her for staff.[1]
• Tom Jones covered I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor at the Concert for Diana in 2007. He sang it at Wembley with Joe Perry of Aerosmith. The reviews were so bad that Jones said they decided not to release it.[1]
• The Sugababes covered I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor as a B side. It was the song that had knocked their own Push the Button off number one in October 2005.[1] [2]
• Andy Nicholson's nose bled from sheer emotion during the band's 2005 Astoria show. The Independent reported it happened as twelve hundred fans crowd surfed and sang every word at the London gig.[1]
• The band considered calling their second album Lesbian Wednesdays, Gordon Brown or Gary Barlow. They settled on Favourite Worst Nightmare, a line from the song D Is for Dangerous.[1] [2]
• For their Village People spoof at the 2007 Brits, the band's manager hired a real builder. The costumes from the Village People and Wizard of Oz acceptance videos were later auctioned.[1] [2]
• The band's secret alias, the Death Ramps, is named after a spot near home where they rode their bikes. They used it for a limited vinyl release and for collaborations with Richard Hawley and Miles Kane.[1] [2] [3] [4]
• Brianstorm played during a three way brawl between Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart on American television in 2008. It happened on Late Night with Conan O'Brien during the writers' strike, and helped the song's notoriety in the United States.[1]
• The Last Shadow Puppets rejected the name Turner and Kane because it sounded like a bad cop film. They chose Shadow Puppets because it sounded like a sixties girl group, adding The Last because the name was taken.[1]
• Matt Helders said Miley Cyrus sang bits of Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High that he wished the band had done. Cyrus covered it on MTV Unplugged in 2014. Matt named it his favourite cover of an Arctic Monkeys song.[1]
• The R U Mine? video shows the band lip syncing in a car while Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols plays it on air. Matt came up with the idea. Jones was then a DJ on the Los Angeles station KROQ.[1]
• AM was nearly named The New Black, after a little knobless amp the band recorded through. The final title was borrowed from the Velvet Underground compilation VU, which Alex openly admitted.[1]
• The Press Association reported that Alex Turner has John Cooper Clarke's name tattooed on his arm. Alex said that without seeing Clarke perform, he would not have started writing the way he does.[1]
• A lyric on Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino was suggested by Alex Turner's grandfather. The line about a trainer's explanation being accepted by the steward, on American Sports, comes from horse racing.[1]
• Alex Turner named the room where he wrote Tranquility Base the Lunar Surface. He was amused by the conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, and owned Apollo branded cups printed with Tranquility Base.[1]
• The moon taqueria in Four Out of Five got its name partly from Matt Helders' backing vocals. Alex liked how Information Action Ratio sounded. The phrase comes from the media critic Neil Postman.[1]
• Alex Turner's father played saxophone at a Last Shadow Puppets show in Berlin in 2016. David Turner, a former music teacher, had played in big bands, and his jazz tastes seeped into his son's later records.[1]
• Alex Turner got his full motorcycle licence in 2011. He has owned a customised Yamaha XS 650 and a Kawasaki W800, and practises Muay Thai.[1]
• Arctic Monkeys once broke the ticket record at Sheffield Arena. They sold over thirteen thousand six hundred tickets for a November 2013 date, beating a record held by fellow Sheffield band Pulp.[1]
• The Car cover was shot on a Leica M6 while Matt Helders was testing a newly bought old lens. He photographed the view from his old apartment window, inspired by William Eggleston, and Alex wrote a song about the picture.[1] [2]
• The recording of The Car was revealed by a cook's Instagram post. The cook at Butley Priory posted a photo with the band in August 2021, and the venue then confirmed they had recorded there.[1]
• Matt Helders once sold his own clothing line, giving a pound from each sale to a hospice. The 2007 range came with a CD featuring his Arctic Monkeys remix, with money going to the Arthur Rank Hospice.[1]
• When record labels courted them over dinner, Jamie Cook insisted on paying his share of the bill. The Guardian described it as part of his deep distrust of showbusiness trappings.[1]
• The video for Opening Night was directed by the Bafta winning filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. It shows a child running along a beach in slow motion. Glazer also had children film the Help 2 sessions.[1] [2] [3]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.