Arctic Monkeys #62 - Danken iTunes (voor deze ene keer)!

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Op vrijdag 15 juli 2011 03:33 schreef _-_ratjetoe_-_ het volgende:
Dont sit down cause i moved your chair werd net in een kroeg in groningen gedraaid

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Op vrijdag 15 juli 2011 13:19 schreef hallo-daar het volgende:

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Warhol?

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Op zondag 17 juli 2011 05:50 schreef hallo-daar het volgende:
"505" is ook gespeeld. Het opkomstnummer was "Miracles". Ik weet niet van welke artiest die is. "Don't Sit Down" werd in het Spaans aangekondigd maar werd niet zo gezongen. Mijn vriendin was er ook bij .

Arctic Monkeys - The View from The Afternoon live @ Don Valley Bowl / Sheffield - 10 june 2011

Arctic Monkeys - The View From The Afternoon live @ Don Valley Bowl / Sheffield - 11 june 2011

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 04:06 schreef Nober het volgende:
daar volgen drie singles op met 2 (soms 3) nieuwe nummers

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 04:10 schreef Nober het volgende:

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Wat zeg ik niet goed?

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 02:11 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Ging niet zo lekker vanavond...

Arctic Monkeys - She's Thunderstorms live @ GurtenFestival ( Bern / Switzerland )

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 02:11 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Ging niet zo lekker vanavond...

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 07:50 schreef Xrenity het volgende:

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Haha, Alex is echt boos he?

Arctic Monkeys - 505 (live@FourviÃĻre 2011)

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 17:46 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:

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Zal niet zonder reden zijn, gezien de totaal andere instrumentatie van de bandleden en het ontbreken van Matt's normale drumkit... Er was iets goed mis. Benieuwd waar de schuld lag, gezien het feit dat Alex elk nummer op z'n Les Paul lijkt te spelen? Lijkt vervloekt vanaf het begin, de versie van "Library Pictures" is gewoon komisch. Misschien heeft de drum-kit het optreden in Lyon niet overleefd . (Zie 'The Anger Beast' op 04:34.)

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 18:15 schreef Xrenity het volgende:

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Wow, waar is Nick mee bezig op Library Pictures?

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 19:35 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Wow, het tournament, ik durf geen analysatie te doen deze keer .

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 20:21 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Komt natuurlijk ook vooral door de eerlijk genoemde selectie. Veel middenmoters van het tweede album door, terwijl de klassiekers van het debuut tegen over elkaar stonden. Je moet érgens keuzes maken .

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Op zondag 17 juli 2011 05:50 schreef hallo-daar het volgende:
"505" is ook gespeeld. Het opkomstnummer was "Miracles". Ik weet niet van welke artiest die is. "Don't Sit Down" werd in het Spaans aangekondigd maar werd niet zo gezongen. Mijn vriendin was er ook bij .

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 20:01 schreef Jacobuspower het volgende:

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Denk wel dat je een compleet andere uitkomst krijgt als je iedereen een top 10 laat maken

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 21:42 schreef Pomegranate het volgende:

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Met pisbekers en al, wat een genot om daar te zijn! Het Engelse publiek was wel echt heel erg en die security op FIB is ook niet alles. Dat daargelaten, was het wel heel erg tof, ookal vloeide de alcohol rijkelijk. Maar dat krijg je als de headliner pas om half 1 ofzo begint. Matt had trouwens hetzelfde shirt aan als in Paradiso, Alex had z´n blauwe hippe leren jack aan en Alexa heb ik niet gespot in de coulissen, ookal bleek ze naar verluid er wel te zijn (ik ben wel een meisje dus dit soort informatie blijft mij bij). Benicassim blijft geplunderd achter, er liggen nog een stel te slapen in parkjes en de bier voorraad in de supermarkten is nog steeds gering, maar de rust is wedergekeerd.

Arctic Monkeys @ FIB 2011, Benicà ssim backstage

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 21:55 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:

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Mooi! Geen wonder dat ze het zo naar hun zin hebben gehad, gezien de temperatuur vergeleken met het thuisland. Als je zin hebt om je tenen te laten krommen, bekijk dit interview vanaf het festival:

Arctic Monkeys @ FIB 2011, Benicà ssim backstage

Als je het net zoals ik al na 30 seconden niet meer aankan, zap dan even door naar de vraag op 1:06, en lach om het antwoord van Matt, en de weinig verhullende reactie van Alex daarop.

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Op maandag 18 juli 2011 21:55 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:

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Mooi! Geen wonder dat ze het zo naar hun zin hebben gehad, gezien de temperatuur vergeleken met het thuisland. Als je zin hebt om je tenen te laten krommen, bekijk dit interview vanaf het festival:

Arctic Monkeys @ FIB 2011, Benicà ssim backstage

Als je het net zoals ik al na 30 seconden niet meer aankan, zap dan even door naar de vraag op 1:06, en lach om het antwoord van Matt, en de weinig verhullende reactie van Alex daarop.

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 13:02 schreef conobram het volgende:
"Submarine" wordt trouwens gescreend in de Lowlands-bios.

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 03:42 schreef Merkie het volgende:
Ik kom er zojuist pas achter dat Library Pictures niets met foto's van bibliotheken te maken heeft, maar dat het gewoon "archiefbeelden" betekent.

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 13:31 schreef Griebus het volgende:

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Wat bedoelen ze met de quickening canoe dan?
Ik denk steeds dat dit nummer gewoon gaat over het album zelf; trust some ellipses to chase you around the room, through curly straws and metaphores and goo...

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 14:01 schreef AMDB het volgende:
Als je op afbeeldingen googled, dan is Merkie's avatar eerste zoekresultaat. Quickening Canoe is dus Jack Bauer.

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 16:06 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Canal+-uitzending in _upscaled... HD, T In The Park-optreden in full HD, het zijn mooie tijden.

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 02:32 schreef Merkie het volgende:

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Voor het eerst dat ik echt moest lachen om de semi-grappige antwoorden in interviews .

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505 vs. Dance Little Liar

Brianstorm vs. Too Much To Ask

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 14:01 schreef AMDB het volgende:
Als je op afbeeldingen googled, dan is Merkie's avatar eerste zoekresultaat. Quickening Canoe is dus Jack Bauer.

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Op donderdag 21 juli 2011 18:13 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
Zaterdag staat 3FM's "That's Live" in het teken van Arctic Monkeys. Onder andere het interview wat Eric Corton met Matt en Jamie had voor hun Paradiso-optreden wordt uitgezonden.

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Op vrijdag 22 juli 2011 04:29 schreef Arn0 het volgende:

Arctic Monkeys interview with Absolute Radio at the Mojo Awards 2011

Alex die Ringo complimenteert. Mijn dag kan niet meer stuk.

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hey did you see that! there's 2 other members of the band there! anyway.. I'm tired of these questions. how 'bout we start asking fresh ones... like "hey turner, do you reckon it's alright to come out looking like that, when we all know we can't fuck you?"

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"And those lyrics — where, who, is Turner in them? The acute social observer of the early days, or the occupant of the new album’s vividly expressed hopes, doubts, fears and deflations? “I’ve written about actual situations in detail,” the singer parries, “and gone too far, to the point where I’ll play them now and think, ‘F***ing hell, I don’t really want to be still thinking about that now.’ Then again, on Humbug, it went the other way, so you end up with none of you in it, just a bunch of words you like; and I’ll listen back and think, ‘I don’t know about that, it’s a bit dodgy.’"

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Op zondag 24 juli 2011 20:45 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:

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Had niet gedacht dat dit moment al zo snel zou komen.

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Caught in the eye of the storm



by Dan Cairns

Stardom knocked Sheffield foursome Arctic Monkeys sideways and the burden of fame made them stagger. Has album four, Suck it and See, brought back their swagger?

Narrow though the shoulders on Alex Turner’s still boyish frame are, they have had to carry the weight — of expectations, criticism, speculation and, when stardom first hit, his own chips — for five years now. The last time I interviewed the Arctic Monkeys front man, in 2008, he and his best friend Miles Kane were preparing to release The Age of the Understatement, an album of Scott Walker-inspired 1960s musical melodramatics under the name the Last Shadow Puppets. Turner had seemed almost crushed by the burden: monosyllabic, surly, only very rarely allowing a smile to form on his pouting lips, or a pithy Steel City one-liner to emerge from them.

At that point, he was several months away from the first sessions for what would turn out to be the Arctics’ third album. To many fans, Humbug remains a baffling record, not only because of the songs and sounds — recorded with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme in the Californian desert — it contained, but because of what they felt it signified. Opaque, heavy, comparatively inaccessible, the album was seen by some as the moment “their” band — the four Sheffield lads who had released the fastest-selling debut album by a group in British chart history, the childhood friends whose early songs such as I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Still Take You Home and Dancing Shoes documented a sort of generic Saturday night of chaotic drinking, prowling, snogging and shagging that their teenage fan base could readily identify with — abandoned them.

Commercially, Humbug meant diminishing album-sale returns for the band, after the heady peaks of 2006’s Mercury-winning Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and its follow-up, Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Musically, however, it was an essential step. Perhaps not in terms of the album itself, but certainly in allowing them to make their new one, Suck It and See. As Turner himself puts it: “Humbug opened so many doors for us. It turned a light on in another room.”

We are talking in a sunlit garden that serves as the backstage area to the Roman amphitheatre in the French city of Lyons, where the band are due to perform later that day. In jeans, a nondescript grey T-shirt and vintage shades, swigging from a bottle of beer and cadging ciggies as unashamedly as ever, the 25-year-old comes across as someone who is revelling in the room for manoeuvre that he and his band mates have carved out for themselves. It is worth remembering that they have been together for nine years now, which probably helps explain how they were able to ride the early storms of success and scrutiny. Turner admits that he struggles with the absurdity of being forced constantly to confront a past that is, in terms of years, so recent. One review of the Suck It and See tour referred to the band emerging in 2006 “swaggering with confidence”.

The singer laughs when reminded of the remark. “There were certain times, especially in the early days, where I acted very strangely,” he concedes, “but any swagger that was there, that’s definitely not me. It’s tempting, in that sort of situation, to act like that; whenever we went to an awards thing and everyone is there, it’s a mechanism you use to survive it. It seems funny now, to think of myself being like that. But it isn’t me.”

An infamous example of this was the band’s appearance at the 2008 Brit awards dressed as hunting, shooting and fishing types, slurring onstage insults at the Brit School before being yanked off air. Yet, as Turner points out, the situation the group had found themselves in was not one many human beings are equipped to deal with.

“It’s that eye-of-the-storm thing,” he says, “and we were right in the middle of it. Luckily, we’ve always had each other throughout the nonsense. Even now, though, there’s kind of this endless thing of having to look back. And it’s not like it’s a long time. Maybe, as a result of that, it helps you get to a point where you are — I wouldn’t say comfortable, because that makes it sound really boring — but it’s like you sort of understand what that is, and why it is the case.” He hasn’t learnt to like it, he says, but he can at least accept it.

There were certain times, especially in the early days, where I acted very strangely. It seems funny now, to think of myself being like that

The band’s drummer, Matt Helders, believes that the notion of having a duty to your fans is as dangerous as it is noble. “Most bands do feel they have to give something back,” he says. “Early on we were pretty close to our fans. You’d know the front row at our first gigs, you’d hang around with them afterwards, and we still see them at our shows.” But that shouldn’t, he argues, be allowed to hamper or circumscribe an act’s development. “People say, ‘Do you feel under pressure with your next record?’, and obviously you do to a certain extent. It’s the same with gigs. Fans will go, ‘Why didn’t you play Mardy Bum?’ But you can’t let any of that dictate what you do.” And the swagger? “Those were songs,” he adds, fairly, “that were written long before you’re in that situation.” And whose lyrics were then refracted through the lens of fame and adulation? “Exactly.”

Helders takes the vocals on Brick by Brick, the Suck It and See track that was released online in advance of the album, and which was met with incomprehension by some fans. What, bloggers anguished, did this all mean? Was a song that consisted chiefly of the drummer bawling phrases such as “I wanna rock’n’roll” over a Stooges / Queens of the Stone Age-like sonic onslaught indicative of a new direction? A retread? It is this degree of scrutiny, of labouring under the illusion that Turner, Helders, the guitarist Jamie Cook and the bassist Nick O’Malley are sending out smoke signals — designed either to mislead or to intrigue — with everything they do, that surely lay behind the band’s decision to flee to the desert, and into the arms of Homme. For the alternative was — what? Endless rehashes of the first and second albums? “I don’t know what the hell that would sound like,” Turner laughs. “There was just this urge to do something else, and I’m kind of glad we did, because otherwise I might still be sitting here now — well, actually, not here [he looks across at the packed tiers of the amphitheatre] — trying to figure it out.”

Suck It and See could be seen as the logical next step on the journey that began with those first two albums, and took such an unexpected turn on Humbug. But “logical” is too arid a word to apply to a record teeming with such emotion, both musically and lyrically, and such freedom. Written for the most part last summer in New York, where Turner was then living with his girlfriend, the television presenter and model Alexa Chung, the lyrics both return to and develop some of his most characteristic themes: the icy derision of Fake Tales of San Francisco and Brianstorm; the bashful romantic and sexual longing of 505; the femmes fatales that stalk The Age of the Understatement. New songs such as the title track (“Your kiss it could put creases in the rain”); the jealousy-tormented new single, The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, on which Turner spits: “Did you ever get the feeling that these are things she’s done before? / Her steady hands may well have done the devil’s pedicure”; the vicious Black Treacle, where he lashes out at a cokehead: “Does it tune you in when you chew your chin?” — these are tracks that mark a further move away from the machine-gunning prolixity of old towards a rolled-round-the-tongue relish that is thrillingly audible in his vocals. Matching Turner’s development as a smoky-voiced crooner of real emotional heft is the textural inventiveness, beauty and complexity of the music going on around him. So, yes, Brick by Brick was a curve ball. Only not, Turner insists, a deliberate one.

“It’s just a good-time thing,” he pleads, with a chuckle, “a reaction, almost, to ourselves, and the rest of the songs being so full of all them lyrics.”

And those lyrics — where, who, is Turner in them? The acute social observer of the early days, or the occupant of the new album’s vividly expressed hopes, doubts, fears and deflations? “I’ve written about actual situations in detail,” the singer parries, “and gone too far, to the point where I’ll play them now and think, ‘F***ing hell, I don’t really want to be still thinking about that now.’ Then again, on Humbug, it went the other way, so you end up with none of you in it, just a bunch of words you like; and I’ll listen back and think, ‘I don’t know about that, it’s a bit dodgy.’ I think of it sometimes in terms of there being these two types of song, and with one it’s as if whoever is listening to it is leaning over my shoulder and I’m guiding them round this environment, this landscape. Then there are other songs where it feels like the listener is in front, and I’m peering over their shoulder, perhaps hinting at where to go, giving little pointers like, ‘Well, there’s this bit over there,’ or ‘Up there’s that, but you decide.’ ” And if they get it wrong? Turner takes another swig of beer, looks across the lawn towards the crowd that is now calling out his name, and shrugs — as if to say, “There’s not much I can do about that.” In any case, he says, he’s realised that control is overrated. “I go into the studio and think, ‘Right, I’m going to know exactly what’s going on at all times.’ Whereas, in actual fact, it’s probably better that you are losing that grip and going down these other roads.” And with that he is off. Shoulders back, unburdened. Does that freedom suit Arctic Monkeys? You decide.   

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Op zondag 24 juli 2011 21:21 schreef Arn0 het volgende:
Tof ja, vind dit soort artikels altijd leuker dan gewoon het klassieke "vraag & antwoord".

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Op zondag 24 juli 2011 21:06 schreef Aisumasen het volgende:
The Sunday Times, 24 juli 2011, voorpagina cultuur-bijlage.

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Op maandag 25 juli 2011 15:53 schreef Gitaarmat het volgende:
Wat vinden de eckten ervan?

Love Is a Laserquest // Suck It and See