#Alex Turner in interviews

[mizgnomer]

Behind the Scenes of Rivals - with David Tennant & friends

Excerpt from Caitlin Moran's The Time Magazine article (Sept 2024)

David Tennant — wearing a lavish, gold, silken man-blouse and sucking on a cigar — is furious. He is savaging a roomful of party people, all looking stricken — and all, incongruously, wearing swimwear. “How the f*** has this happened?” Tennant screams, as all the tits and legs fidget, gaudy piña coladas abandoned. “Get the f*** out there and sort this out! And why are you all wearing bikinis?” Tennant storms from the room, apoplectic with rage — and then sees me. “Oh, hello, darling,” he says, all sweetness and light. “CUT!” the director calls. Today, David Tennant isn’t, of course, David Tennant. He’s Tony Baddingham, the infamous, nominative-determinist baddie of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. “So, is this fun?” I ask him. The last time I saw him on set, he was being the Doctor in Doctor Who, in a floor-length coat, trying to save the world from being exploded. Again. In the rain. In Wales. At 1am. “Oh yes,” Tennant says. “I mean, look at my blouse. It’s like my aunt’s! Actually, I think it might be hers — it closes right to left. Don’t men’s buttons close left to right? Am I wearing,” he asks the room at large, “a woman’s blouse?” “We need to go again, David,” the director says. “Back in a tick,” Tennant says, running back on set, sucking on his cigar. Getting ready to be really evil, and Eighties, again.

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

Arctic Monkeys on Absolute Radio, 2011 ☆

[daddy-long-legssss]

arctic monkeys on later ... with jools holland 2022

[bellesaisonn]

he's so girlfriend

[cluedoenthusiast]

The little alien in Al's body fighting to escape + I spilt me beer on the radio (it looks like a little island) [X]

[musicandotherstuff]

"He is, self-evidently, a genius" Richard Ayoade about Alex Turner

🎥: tortoise

[should-know-better]

The interview that goes with that GQ fashion shoot!

[sophaeros]

arctic monkeys for nme, 26 august 2006

From the Rubble to Reading

A year since Carling Weekend: Reading And Leeds Festivals made them massive, Arctic Monkeys return with a new member and a message for anyone who reckons they're over

By Mark Beaumont

Photos: Dean Chalkley

Crack! Swipe! Stab! Ten minutes to stage time at Gothenburg's Accelerator festival, the Arctic Monkeys come within inches of actual inter-band slaughter. As the band sit in a backstage patio area, somewhat dour-faced, necking lager, without warning drummer Matt Helders grabs a glass beer bottle from the bucket, bashes it open on a wooden bench and, brandishing it like a rapier blade, lunges at Alex Turner's throat.

We know there've been ructions in the Monkeys camp, but is it all to end in murderous Pils-based bloodshed on a patch of car park in Sweden?

Well, no, it's just a little warm-up horseplay brought on by the nerve-wracking tedium of The Road. But it's the reaction that jars — the bottle stops inches from his jugular but Alex doesn't flinch; he simply lifts a lip in his trademark withering sneer and returns to glumly glugging his lager.

The thunderous sound of nobody laughing would speak volumes to the gossip-mongers and back-biters. See, word is the Arctic Monkeys are over.

They've stiffed, crumbled, cracked under pressure, flashed in the pan. Debut album 'Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not', after record-breaking, rock-rejuvenating first-week sales (already declared the best-selling album of 2006, in its first week it sold 363,000 copies making it the fastest-selling debut in the UK and, in the process, earning a Nationwide Mercury Prize nomination) has slipped out of the Top 40 only six months since its release in an era when the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fi are racking up a year in the charts. Their rocketing rise has spluttered, its momentum snuffed by the wilful self-hobbling of releasing the non-chart eligible Who The Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys?' EP in April. They've already lost one member — bassist Andy Nicholson, who was replaced by Nick O'Malley after refusing to tour the US this spring pleading "fatigue" — proof if any were needed that it was all too much, too soon. They were forced to run in the big sheds before they could walk in the theatres and what's more, Muse are going to stomp their grumpy Yorkshire mugs into Carling Weekend: Reading And Leeds Festival dust with their gigantic robot alien metaboots.

Monkeymania is dead, that's what they say. And all because they wouldn't play the game.

“If we’d been a bit older it probably would all have been more of a headfuck” Alex

"What do you want us to do?" guitarist Jamie Cook shrugs, utterly un-bovvered. "Milk it like every other band does? We coulda really milked it but we didn't and no matter if you love us or you hate us you can never say a bad thing about how we've gone about pushing our music. We kept ourselves to ourselves. We coulda carried on, released every song off the fuckin' album.."

"If we were a bit older it probably would all have been more of a headfuck," adds Alex Turner, quietly. "We were just young, worked for a bit but then we ended up in this, so I didn't take it that seriously or think it were the end of the world if it all ended. If we were a few years older, with a few more responsibilities and that, we woulda thought, 'We've got to make this right' and that woulda ultimately destroyed us because we'd have ended up putting our singles back out and doing all the bollocks that everybody does, but we weren't obligated to do all that stuff because we had nowt to lose."

How do you respond to the argument that you're a flash in the pan compared to the likes of the Kaisers?

Jamie: "What, because they keep putting advertisements out? I'm not slagging them off, we've met the Kaiser Chiefs a few times and they are nice guys and they've done really well. We're ignorant little shits."

Alex: "You see other bands knocking about at festivals and the looks on their faces... In return for someone perceiving you as big I don't want my face to look like that, because I feel wonderful."

Are you disappointed the momentum hasn't continued?

"Nah!" Alex splutters. "What do you want, fuckin' Shea Stadium?"

"People keep going on about breaking America, says Jamie. "I'm like, 'What you on about?' We went out to America and played to 3,500 in Arizona in the middle of fuckin' nowhere with cactuses inside the venue. We went out there and played a sell-out tour. If we can do that every time then we've broke America for me."

Alex: "But then what? What is there? 'Are you gonna break the moon?'”

How are things in the Monkeys camp now?

Jamie grins broadly. "Wonderful."

"Well, I don't know." Alex drawls. tipping him a comedy Wink Of Death. "You're next."

“People might be like, ‘Write about nine to five again’...I’m sick of fuckin’ people singing songs about all that shit” Alex Turner

Contrary to popular tittle-tattle, i'sa talkative and relaxed Arctic Monkeys that settle on a bench by a river in Gothenburg's Tragarn Gardens — slightly older (Nick celebrates his 21st birthday today, closely followed by Jamie in three days' time), hugely wiser, no longer the prickly young upstarts turning their noses up at the faintest whiff of a Dictaphone. Far from a band in crisis they seem relieved that the hype storm has passed. and that they weathered it with their egos still manageable, their sanity intact and their enthusiasm for their music undimmed. Aside from the change of personnel the Monkeys have only suffered a slight road weariness and sharpened their healthy edge of cynicism and suspicion about the industry workings — all except Nick that is, who's still somewhat wide-eyed about the whole thing Unsurprising; a few months ago he was a Sheffield student stacking shelves part-time in Asda, today he's the bassist in the biggest and best new band on the planet.

Nick grins wide. "It's a bit of an improvement career-wise."

Matt: "He's like Cinderella."

The former bassist with Sheffield grit rockers The Dodgems and a long-term mucker of the Monkeys — he went to college with Alex and they all live within "a hundred-metre radius" of each other in High Green — Nick was the obvious call to make when Andy Nicholson (reportedly the most fame-shy Monkey) announced that he didn't want to play on this year's US tour. Why did he back out?

“We’ve had probably two weeks off in in 18 months," Jamie explains. You get to go home for two days every six weeks. I love touring but you're gonna miss home and until you've done it you can't explain. You're living on a bus with 12 other blokes and when you're driving through the desert for a day..."

What did you think when you got the call, Nick?

"I was a bit scared," Nick remembers, "because I had two days to learn everything and I'd just had a cast on my hand took off [Nick broke his hand being 'playfully' thrown over a wall by a Dodgems roadie just weeks before the tour kicked off] so I weren't really sure how it would go. At first I said no, but then Al rang me up again and went, 'Can you hold a plectrum?' I kinda thought, 'Well, even if I do play shit I'll still have a right good time, go to America and just enjoy it'."

Alex: "It's not as if we've just had to bring in a session guy, it's someone we've known for a long time. We're the last band in the world who can just pluck someone out of nowhere."

Jamie: "I don't think we'd have gone if it were a session guy. I think we'd have had to probably cancel the tour."

"Everyone might say we shit on Andy, but they don't know. We know, Andy knows and that's all that matters" Jamie Cook

Over his month in America, Nick turned out to be a Mani-in-the-Primals style shot in the arm for the Monkeys and, bouts of alcohol poisoning permitting ("I wasn't used to free alcohol," Nick sniggers. "I learnt my lesson"), they unexpectedly found themselves in a more exciting, harmonious and well-oiled jag-pop juggernaut. Hence, within weeks of getting home, Nick received one of those rare and legendary Do you fancy being a rock star?' Golden Phone Calls.

"Those were my exact words," says Alex. "Were you there?"

We have a tap on all your phones.

Nick: "It were, 'Have you got a sequinned vest? If not, get one'."

Matt: "You're coming to Disneyland!""

How did the meeting go when you told Andy he was out?

Alex shakes his head. "It were a really dark page."

"You can imagine, can't yer?" says Jamie. "I don't think it's nice to really talk about it. I don't think anyone will understand. Andy understands and Andy's family probably understands and we understand and everyone that needs to understand understands."

Alex: "But everyone else will probably never get it because they weren't in the band. It's difficult to explain, it's not like a day in a normal job. Five weeks or whatever it were, three weeks, four weeks... time's not the same as it is elsewhere so things happen, you have to make decisions sometimes. Everyone will always fucking speculate about it "

Jamie: "Everyone might say we're wankers and we shit on him, but they don't know. We know, Andy knows and that's all that really matters."

Alex: "It weren't like us wanting to carry on like this as punishment for him wanting to opt out. We sorta found ourselves in a situation where we wanted to move forward."

Three days and two birthday lashes later at Ireland's Oxegen Festival the band look back at a year that could only have been more celebrated if Alex had been made Poet Laureate and Matt had been awarded a Nobel Prize For Paradiddles.

"We celebrated the singles best," Jamie chuckles. "We were in our local and got hammered with a loads of mates."

"That were a special night," Matt nods, swigging cider in one of Oxegen's more salubrious dressing rooms (most bands get a glorified changing cubicle). "I kept saying, ‘I bet no-one who's walked down this road has been Number One, I bet no-one who's used this cash machine has been Number One?"

"We went for a KFC," Alex laughs, "and we were saying 'I wonder if anybody's been to KFC this soon after finding out they're Number One?""

The Carling Weekend: Reading And Leeds Festivals is set to be a landmark event for the Monkeys — it was here in 2005 that The Madness broke free, their mid-afternoon set drawing a headline-slot crowd and launching them into a year of whirlwind ascent set to be triumphantly capped on this year's Main Stage. And while they may have made a fair fist of making the best job in the world look like a bit of a pain in the arse ("I don't think we do though," Alex argues, "I've never given the impression I'm not grateful"), secretly Yorkshire's most famous grumpos have had the time of their lives. They've hung with Jay-Z in New York, bar-spotted actor Edward Norton in LA, gone speed boating in Sweden, trodden the pitch at Barcelona, become the first band that Morrissey has ever apologised to and been given the Liam Gallagher Eyebrow Of Approval ("He went, "That 'Riot Van' — tune!'"), all while selling more records than Pete's had hot heroin. What's more, they've managed to galvanise an indie generation in a few short months. Freaky - how come no other bands want to slag you fellers off?

"It's 'cos we're the best!" Alex grins. "We've done it how we wanted to. The only things people say is daft things like Jeft Monkeys manager wrote all the songs and things like that. Someone will come though, I can't wait 'til they do."

Who do you fancy in the apocalyptic Kooks versus Razorlight rumble?

"Kooks and fuckin' Razorlight?" Alex laughs. "That'd be like a fight between two cyclists."

Has success made you paranoid about what people think of you?

Alex is suddenly serious. "I suppose it does, but my mind wobbles so much that it's one day sometimes you think that and then other times... I think I've learned not to care so much, not to listen, but it's hard not to."

So, sensing the vultures circling, it is with some trepidation and secrecy that the Arctic Monkeys are approaching their second album — 13 songs written to date, including a number they describe as "the bakery tune that goes ‘I wish you would have smiled in the bakery' which is like, you're anywhere in a crowded place and there's a laugh and a smile but you're never gonna be able to get to that person".

Plus, 'Brian Storm', a song about a Derren Brown-esque character they met at an Australian gig.

"People might be like, "Who the fuck is this Aussie guy? Write about fuckin' nine to five again," says Alex. "That's another thing that pisses me off, I'm sick of fuckin' hearing people sing songs about all that shit and I were before we even did our album. I never even wanted to do that, fuckin' write about work and shit like that. I think it's insulting."

But having connected with your audience by portraying a sardonic, yet somehow celebratory, vision of everyday life, surely there's a danger of alienating them with a second album griping about press interviews, long-haul flights and the difficulties of opening a decent Swiss bank account. We've already had the tongue-in-cheek Despair In The Departure Lounge' on the ‘Who The Fuck…’ EP — is the new album going to full of songs called 'Bored Of Bono', 'Catering In First Class Isn't What It Used To Be' or 'So Much Money (Need A Shovel To Get In My House)'?

Alex snorts. "Or 'I'm Not Old Enough To Drive Me Range Rover'. Nah, you still have emotions and you still get angry about things. A lot of our first album is about coming in contact or not coming in contact with girls I suppose, and they're still there. People go, 'You're not gonna write about getting kicked out of clubs again'. Well, no, but who'd fuckin' wanna hear that again?"

Of course, having so expertly captured the fear, excitement, danger, humiliation, anger, desperation and celebration of an uncertain modern youth, Alex Turner should just as artfully lay out the emotional minutiae of a successful young manhood. But first the Monkeys are closing the book on the 'Whatever People Say I Am…’ era with typical anti-industry aplomb by releasing the non-album track 'Leave Before The Lights Come On' (written during sessions for the album but deemed to sit uncomfortably in the tracklisting).

"We thought we'd start the next album with it," says Alex. "Then we thought we wanted to do something to close this off. It's like leaving."

The Monkeys are heading for Reading and Leeds with fire in their scrawny bellies on a mission to casually conquer without even trying.

Finally, have the past 12 months made men of the Arctic Monkeys?

"We've grown up a bit," Alex ponders, "but not enough to spoil anything."

Murder in the ranks? Oh no, these Monkeys are swinging…

The View From the Main Stage

A glorious year comes to a head at the carling Weekend: Reading And Leeds Festivals

Is this weekend going to be another Monkeys milestone? Jamie: "That's where we're gonna end it and go do the next record, we've always said that. It's good that we've got Leeds an' all, because it's only 20 minutes up the road from my house."

You're on before Muse, is that a worry? Alex: "It's probably good that it's different. Maybe the Muse fans will all wait at the top of the hill and our lot will be at the front." Nick: "Or the Muse fans might all stand down the front taking the piss."

Muse'll have a big stage show with balloons and glitter cannons. Alex: "Well, you wanna see ours!" Matt: "We'll have some hot air balloons. I parachute in." Nick: "I'm coming by underground drill."

Last year you changed some of your lyrics at Reading to have a go at "that sarky bloke from NME" — why? Alex: "I can't remember. We got a review or summat and read it and I went [Disgusted From Sheffield voice] ‘I can't believe this! Right! I'm gonna change this line!""

I wrote that review, actually. Alex: "Riiiight! Cunt! There was summat in it about The Zutons or summat." Jamie: "No-one ever used to write about us so when anyone did we used to get right wound up."

[lalaballa]

Elijah Hewson X

*thanks to @tbhclove on ig

[futuristicanoe]

...but I'm just a ... terrible poser, really.

Alex Turner on Motorcycling with Josh Homme

[vanillacoke25]

TSLP on the music they were listening to during the making of EYCTE x Star treatment

(sorry, i don’t know what interview this is from :(

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

The tale of Alex Turner's girlfriend's jumper, Josh Homme, and the making of Humbug

(Extracts from Mojo Magazine, September 2009)

The jumper sealed the deal: the cable-knit jumper, belonging to his girlfriend. Alex Turner just happened upon it early one evening in the different late summer of 2008, as he waited for the telephone to ring. It wasn't so much the fact of it being a girl's jumper. He could get away with wearing a size skinny, after all. And besides, it would be dark at the gig he planned to go to later on. No, it was the cable-knit which gave him pause. Was he, Alex wondered, really a cable-knit guy?

His reverie was interrupted by the call he'd been expecting. Alex had spoken to Josh Homme before: the Queens Of The Stone Age leader declared himself a fan by marching into the Arctic Monkeys dressing room at a Belgian festival the previous year; later in 2007 the Monkeys supported the Queens in Houston. Compliments were exchanged, though Alex did wonder about the precise mutuality of this appreciation. Maybe 70-30? Obviously, the Monkeys were big fans of QOTSA: the Queens' sensual dirt-rock had been a key benchmark for their album Favourite Worst Nightmare. And Josh Homme? He had at least heard of Alex's band, and that was good enough. But now here he was, on the phone, accepting the invitation to produce the next Arctic Monkeys album. Alex deferred taking the conversation down to brass tracks. Airily, he mentioned his knitwear dilemma.

Homme was firm on the matter.

"Go for it, man."

But I'm not sure. I mean, it belongs to me girlfriend, and it fits, and it looks all right, but...

"Just throw caution to the wind," said Homme, as if issuing an imperial edit. "Let go of those inhibitions you've got there and just wear your cable-knit."

Sound, said Alex. So, about this record...?

"I listened to the demo," said Homme. "I heard 30 seconds of it and thought, You're coming to the desert." Then, to himself, he added with relish. "And little do you know what's about to happen..."

That evening, Alex Turner wore his girlfriend's cable-knit jumper. A month or so later, he and his three bandmates were picked up from a Los Angeles hotel by Josh Homme and driven out to the small Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, where they began recording the new Arctic Monkeys album. One phone abut cable-knitwear later, Arctic Monkeys were off to southern California for a hot date.

....

Presiding throughout this transformative process [of recording Humbug], during the warm autumn days or late into the chilly desert nights, would be Alex Turner's girlfriend's cable-knit jumper.

"Josh likes to speak in analogies, in terms of how things should sound," says the Arctic Monkeys' songwriter with a chuckle, as he reflects upon the six-month gestation of his band's new album. "Cable-knits got mentioned a lot during recording. He was like, if you can wear a cable-knit you can put a glockenspiel on a tune. It became a metaphor: you can wear a cable-knit and then sonically we can try something different. We went off on a little adventure. Because we were conscious that if this were really going to work, we would have to open up a little more than we have in the past. Joshua Tree really feels far away. You felt..." He frowns, reaching for the right word. "Unpoliced."

Which all rather begs the question: does that six and a half foot ginger hunk of abiding rockness Josh Homme wear cable-knitwear? A small smile plays around the corners of Alex Turner's mouth.

"He assured me he did."

....

The previous evening Alex finally spoke to Josh Homme for the first time since Humbug's completion. After expressing his delight with the end results of their combat crawl through the Mojave badlands, Homme enquired whether Turner was going out later. Alex informed that he was. "Cable-knits?" asked Homme. "Cable-knits," said Alex, the Arctic Monkey, comfortable in the embrace of the strange.

....

[daddy-long-legssss]

i truly couldn't love him more if i tried.

[mrschwartz]

Alex Turner for Rumore Magazine (September 2013)

Seventies Heads and Modern Loves or I Don't Know What I Want But I Surely Want You

by Elia Alovisi

Until he opens his mouth, Alex Turner looks like he stepped out of the Nevada desert. Leather loafers, a belt, slicked-back hair, sunglasses. But as soon as he starts talking, between “summat” instead of “something” and “me” instead of “my,” he transforms back into a boy from Sheffield who grew up on cocktails and DJ sets. The discrepancy between the way he looks and the way he speaks is strange: you would expect a cocky and arrogant rock star, but instead you have before you a relaxed and thoughtful boy who carefully measures his words, but does so with a smile and not a frown. The lyrics of AM, the fifth album of his band, mainly revolve around difficult and elusive women. There are many questions. “Do I want to know?” “Are you mine?” he says; “Why do you always call me when you’re high?” she says. There is no shortage of desires: “I want it all,” “I want to be yours.” Absent, however, are the answers. We tried to get a few out of him.

How was it to be back at Glastonbury as a headliner five years after the first time?

Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful, this time it was very natural. Everything was harder in 2007, we had done a lot less shows and had a lot less songs. Now we have learned to move better.

After the experience of Humbug, you collaborated again with Josh Homme.

Yes, Josh is on Knee Socks, towards the end of the piece. We gave him carte blanche and he decided to sing a sort of counter-melody that reminds me a lot of Bowie.

Are knee socks your favorite piece of underwear on a woman?

[Laughs] What do you think?

If she has the right legs.

Exactly, yes. The best is the garter. But then they would not be Parisian anymore, right? And then they are thicker than women's stockings. However they are not my favorite underwear, I go with the push-up.

In the lyrics of Arabella you talk a lot about the universe.

I wanted to use that linguistic palette to try to describe a woman. There are many songs that use those sorts of words… galaxy, interstellar, constellation, things like that, but usually they are used just for the sake of being used. Instead I wanted to make them an active part of a description, they are images that I find very interesting. In England, on the BBC, there is this program called Wonders of the Universe, with Professor Brian Cox. And it is one of my favorite programs [smiles, pleased].

Barbarella also pops up in the text.

Yes, although I haven't read practically any of her comics and I've only seen a small piece of the movie. I don't really like B movies. To know her, you just need to have seen a poster, that's all you need. I just used her to make a comparison with the costume she wears.

How does the suite you sing about in Fireside relate to room 505 in Favourite Worst Nightmare?

Yes, I’m talking about a suite in my heart… or in her heart? Well, in someone’s heart. Room 505, in my mind, is something very concrete. I wrote that song on a train between Philadelphia and New York, my girlfriend was in a hotel waiting for me and I just wrote about that [Turner’s voice becomes increasingly whispered as the sentence progresses]. In Fireside, however, it’s all figurative.

So how much of your real self is in your lyrics and how much is just imagination?

There's no rule, sometimes there's a lot of me in the lyrics when you least expect it. I put little secrets in them. What I try to avoid is that people who listen to one of my songs say, 'oh, he's talking about that girl'. You know when you read a novel and, somehow, in your mind you see its characters with the faces of some of your friends, or your favorite actors? That's where I want to get to with my music, I want it to be like being in front of a story, not the evidence of two people with a name and a surname who are kissing. It's up to the listener to give them both a face. When I write I pretty much always have someone or something in mind, but it doesn't really matter.

How did you come up with the idea of ​​using John Cooper Clarke's words for I Wanna Be Yours?

We wrote most of the songs on this record on a four-track that I got for my birthday. I spent a while recording ideas on it, sometimes we'd loop a bass and drum melody for five minutes and the fact that it was on tape gave it an incredible color. Then I'd sit there with headphones and a microphone humming melodies, or making up silly lyrics to start coming up with ideas. One day, while I was jamming, the words I wanna be yours came out and I remembered that they were the title of one of his poems. I thought it would be cool to use someone else's words – and especially his, I'm a big fan of his. It's one of my favorite songs on the record, the lyrics alone make it different from anything we've done before. And then I love the juxtaposition of the slow, sexy, flirtatious music and his words.

The party you talk about in No. 1 Party Anthem seems a lot more laid back than the ones you’ve talked about in the past, like the house in This House Is A Circus.

That’s true, but the parties we go to are still pretty messy. They’re just twice as long.

Am I supposed to be imagining some sort of indie celebrity party?

Indie celebrity party? [Laughs.] No, no, no. The slow tempo of that song gives it a bit of a Los Angeles feel. It’s a city that I’m told is very similar to what we’re portraying on the new record, and I’m starting to think that might be true. Not that it sounds like the Eagles, you know.

It's like your sound is becoming more and more American.

Yeah, maybe. There's something special about that part of the world. Everything that came out of California owes something to '70s rock, the spontaneity of those rhythms also comes back in West Coast hip-hop. But then came the fucking '80s and… a lot of fucking bands that don't fit into that theory. I think there will always be something English in our sound, it's something we can never detach ourselves from.

How much does Sheffield still mean to what you do?

Well, you know… [he taps two fingers on a tattoo on the inside of his arm: the Yorkshire rose and underneath it the word “SHEFFIELD”].

There are three songs on AM��whose titles are questions.

You don't notice things like that until you sit there and write the titles of the songs one after the other. I hadn't noticed until then, there are also a lot of wanna.

The protagonist of R U Mine? is wrapped up in a certain western imagery, you portray her as “a lone cowboy riding in an open space.” And in All My Own Stunts you talked about “watching cowboy movies on gloomy afternoons.”

I love the western style. The leather ties, the belts… Hey, look at this one I’m wearing! [He stands up and shows me his leather belt, turning his back: it has “TURNER” engraved on it, on either side of the horseshoes.] A friend gave it to me for my birthday, this year was really nice, between this and the four-track. I also love western movies, especially the ones about Butch Cassidy. I also love Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks, obviously.

How do you usually celebrate your birthdays?

They’re nothing too devastating. I have a birthday in early January, everyone is still recovering from Christmas and New Year’s, so the average response I get is usually “forget it.”

Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High? brings back the drunken text messages you mentioned in The View From the Afternoon.

We've all done that at least once, come on. Those lyrics might have come off the first record, but the music is fully invested in what we're doing now. I just wanted to write something simple.

While we're on the subject: when was the last time you got bounced at the entrance of a nightclub? It's not like From The Ritz To The Rubble anymore, is it?

Shit, that was like four weeks ago! [Laughs.] We were in Stockholm, we were trying to get into an area of ​​the nightclub and there was no way we could get in.

What are those Mad Sounds you're talking about?

That song is about those moments when you put on a song and it's like it's talking about exactly how you feel. It's a song about those songs, and I hope it can become one of them. I get that feeling from some songs by Lou Reed, John Cale, or Harry Nilsson. It's like sometimes they really understand how I feel, and you're like, "What the fuck..." and you almost tell them to go fuck themselves.

The point where the song explodes is when you start singing a series of ooh-la-la-la. What is the la-la-la moment that sticks with you the most from the music you listen to?

Definitely the do-dodo-dodo-do-do-do-do from Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed.

By the way, who came up with the idea of ​​calling a song The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala? What does that mean?

It came up one day when we were making up names for guitar pedals – sometimes they have crazy names. The Blond-o-Sonic Shimmer Trap  would be perfect for a fuzz, for example. The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, however, comes from a bar we hung out in a lot while we were writing the previous record. The room was full of glitter and there were a lot of weird chicks all winking, like cougars.

The lyrics to Snap Out of It revolve around hypnosis. Do you think there's any real power behind it or is it just persuasion?

I've never been hypnotised, but it all seems pretty real when you watch hypnotists on telly. There's this show in the UK where this guy, Derren Brown, gets people to do all sorts of things. Crazy stuff like, "rob someone!" Nothing I'd want to be involved with.

In I Want It All you say, “Leave me listening to the Stones 2000 light years from home.”

I’m actually a Beatles guy, no doubt. But I like them both, I saw the Stones at Glastonbury and it was great.

Don't you think it's better for a band to go at the top of their game than to keep going and going and risk having nothing left to say?

What the Stones have managed to do is really extraordinary. I mean, they're seventy years old and they're still on stage. It's very difficult to have an opinion on something like this because I don't think I've reached that level yet. I'm very excited about the new album, we've reached the point of being a good live band and, speaking as an artist, I think I've reached a certain excellence this time. I want to build on that, explore new things. We still have a lot of places to go.

I think the main difference between AM and your previous albums is the small amount of guitars.

This time we didn't want to sound like four guys playing in the same room, while that's exactly what we wanted to sound like in Suck It And See. We immersed ourselves in a more minimalist idea. The guitars are perfect, sometimes they don't even sound like guitars from the way they're played, or from the effects we put on them. They sound a bit "spacey," they would be good for the stereo of a flying saucer. Then we came out with some bass and drum parts perfect to be played at full volume through the speakers of a car. We also worked much more with the vocal lines, especially with the choirs.

There are actually a lot of songs where you put backing vocals and backing vocals, especially One For The Road.

Matt, Nick and I do them. Jamie is the only one who doesn't want to have anything to do with them. It all started with R U Mine? , the part where we all start going: [hums the backing vocals]. As soon as we tried that part we realized how good it sounded, we especially liked the fact that it was something we hadn't done before. So we just went for it.

[cluedoenthusiast]

yeah... [X]

[musicandotherstuff]

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