Britpop’s Shelf Life

Apes in repose: The Arctic Monkeys. From left, Jamie Cook (guitar), Alex Turner (vocals, guitar), Matt Helders (drums, vocals) and Andy Nicholson (bass). Courtesy Outside Music.

The hot British band of 2004, Franz Ferdinand, took their name from an assassinated Habsburg Archduke of Austria. Why shouldn’t the hot British band of 2006 call themselves something even more ridiculous? Bring on the Arctic Monkeys, the hottest band ever to come out of the UK… in the last two weeks. (At press time, anyway. Story is subject to change.)

The Monkeys’ history is easily told in numbers. They’re four lads from the suburbs of the northern city of Sheffield. One’s already hit 20, the rest are 19. They’ve shot two music videos. The latest, for When the Sun Goes Down, is a dark comment on curb-crawlers and prostitutes in their hometown. The first, I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor, features a live performance where the band skitters around a stage like students in a high school battle of the bands. The bassist, Andy Nicholson, still seems to jiggle with a layer of baby fat, while singer Alex Turner has his guitar winched up far enough to look like a bowtie.

Both of the band’s singles have gone to No. 1. They sit atop the iTunes download chart. Three days after their first No. 1, the Arctic Monkeys were featured on the cover of the New Musical Express (NME). Their album, Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, is peppered with wry observations about northern life and it’s struck a chord. Already the band has produced one great lyric, a statement on modern British culture: “There’s only music so there’s new ringtones,” sings Turner in A Certain Romance, with the world-weariness of a 21-year-old, at least.

Early on Jan. 23, two hundred fans lined up in Sheffield for the midnight sale of their debut. By the following Monday, the Arctic Monkeys had rung up 363,735 over-the-counter sales. The band with the worst name in recent history had become the hottest-selling rock debut in the U.K., besting the collection of manufactured pop put out by the band Hear'Say a few years ago. Downloads from online stores are likely to push the opening sales of Whatever You Say I Am beyond 400,000, sending it surging ahead of all other British debuts, from Oasis to Blur to modern composer Benjamin Britten. As they might say in British headlines, the Monkeys have truly come in from the cold.

“In terms of sheer impact,” noted a spokesperson for the music shop HMV, “where a band has come from virtual obscurity to achieve huge, overnight success, we haven't seen anything quite like this since the Beatles.” Or the Monkees? Not the common name necessarily, but the lack of authenticity?

The Arctic Monkeys come packaged with their own conspiracy theories, one of which points out the album’s lack of songwriting credits. How can this Turner kid, who comes across as such a “typical Yorkshire lad” in interviews, be the author of such biting observations? Is there someone else, perhaps, grinding the organ? Maybe it’s that other famous ex-Yorkshire lyrical marvel, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp. Alas, amid the Monkeys’ recent tidal wave of popularity, the manufactured band rumour seems to be have died down.

“There's such a slavering onslaught of goodwill towards the Arctic Monkeys right now,” wrote Sarah Boden in the Observer. “You'd think they had invented a cure for cancer and brokered world peace.” The apex of ludicrousness came when Germaine Greer, critic and author of The Female Eunuch, let the nation know on a national arts review program that the Monkeys’ drummer can really “lay down a beat I could listen to.”

What to make of it all? The Arctic Monkeys’ rise is indication of the most hackneyed cliché of the British musical press. No sooner does an issue of the NME appear than a new king of British rock is crowned. The NME is a weekly, and incrementally over the years, it has become a magazine with considerable taste-setting power. But its tone has become so histrionic that its entire scale of criticism has wobbled. It has become the music magazine that cried wolf.

I predict a backlash: The Kaiser Chiefs perform on stage in Somerset, England. (Getty Images/Louise Wilson)

You really have to pity its picks: their lifespan makes a fruit fly’s seem luxurious in comparison. The Kaiser Chiefs, the Bravery and Razorlight are just the latest in a line that winds back to Menswear, Hefner, Gomez and the tragic Gay Dad (a band led by a music writer named Cliff Jones, who should have known better). Gay Dad’s first singles? Brilliant. But the second album was “verging on the bollocks,” according to the NME. Last year, the Darkness resurrected the best bits of Poison and Def Leppard — cowbells and falsetto, in case you thought there was no “best bit” — and produced a Coney Island of a song, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, that was big, dumb fun. Their latest album has been greeted with little more than apathy, except for the occasional article speculating on singer Justin Hawkins’s hair loss.

To be fair, it is not just the NME but a unified assault from a national press desperate to fill its pages and declare the births and deaths of trends. In 2002, The Strokes’ Is This It was touted as “one of the best and most characterful debut albums of the last 20 years” by the NME. By the time the American band’s third album dropped in 2006, the same mag told its readers New York cool had “dissipated like smoke from a Manhattan manhole.”

There are even better examples of the life cycle. Back in ’96, saliva dripped for Kula Shaker, a group that boasted a hippy-dippy worldview and Hayley Mills’s son as lead singer. Their debut album, K, was — where have I heard this before? — the fastest-selling debut album since Oasis’s Definitely Maybe. The NME led the charge with its nine out of 10 review: “It’s a full-on rock frenzy freak-out. … The Verve gone ethno-berserk. … Kula Shaker have the guts, the gumption and the imagination.”

Just not, perhaps, the ability to make any other good music. Their follow-up, Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts, appeared in 1999 and was “an unrepentant and farcical return ... quite definitely the most ludicrous rock ’n’ roll record that you're going to hear all year. 6/10.” Three years later, the greatest-hits package clocked in at 1/10. “It’s shit,” wrote the NME. “But what did you honestly expect?” And thus the circle of life spins again. It doesn’t bode well. What now for Razorlight? Whither Kaiser Chiefs?

“Because Britain is small it’s easy to be the Next Big Thing in the whole country,” says Vanessa Cotton, whose company, Triad, publicizes a roster of up-and-coming indie bands. “To tour the U.S., you take six months. You can do a week tour of the whole U.K. and everyone feels they’re involved. People in Glasgow and Cornwall get the same national newspapers. It’s unified. It’s easier to build a band up.”

Despite its questionable approach and tendency to stone to death last week’s favorite, the British music press can occasionally be a force of good. It can become a tool for resuscitation, as was witnessed with American bands like Mercury Rev and Lambchop.

For outsiders, it is a strange, idiosyncratic machine intent on eating its young while elevating the even younger. The Arctic Monkeys will inevitably feel some sting even before they enter the studio for LP No. 2. Too much fame and lost credibility are easy targets. How will the Monkeys walk the streets of Sheffield and jot down searing observations on Little British life when they’re pop superstars? This kind of speculation works well for the British music writers. They are, in a way, already rehearsing their reviews for the next album.

“But [the Arctic Monkeys] will be fine,” says Cotton. “If they make a brilliant second album.” If.

It was reported that at one recent gig, the Monkeys played a new song to a tepid crowd response. “What did you think?” Turner asked the audience. The response was underwhelming. “No? Well at least this album’s all right.” What happens with the next one? England awaits.

Craig Taylor is a feature writer for the Guardian in London, England.

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