There's only music so that there's new ringtones

Arctic Monkeys - 'A Certain Romance' (Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - 2006)

It is July, so we are now in 2000s month on The Run Out Grooves…

I knew that The Arctic Monkeys would be huge; that was obvious from the rolling bandwagon of positive press (“Don’t believe the ‘ype”) and the strength of the songs. I knew they would go supernova when my then-teenage sister had the Beneath the Boardwalk demo CD-R in her car by the end of the summer of 2005.

Fast-forward nine months, the band has achieved a number-one single with their first proper release, and their debut album would go on to win the Mercury Prize. Until Susan Boyle’s 2009 album I Dreamed a Dream came out, it would be the largest-selling debut album in UK chart history with over 360k first-week sales. Plenty of material ties the demo album and the debut proper together. Still, one interesting stylistic choice that bookends the band’s early period is that the opening track of …Boardwalk is the closing track on Whatever People Think I Am, That’s What I’m Not. By choosing this track to close their debut album, The Arctic Monkeys paid homage to their roots while signalling their potential for growth

‘A Certain Romance’ struck a chord and deeply resonated with me, someone in my early twenties living in the UK. I found the whole album, but especially that final song, a genuine and almost raw portrayal of a Britain that was familiar and yet unfamiliar to me. I spent many hours listening to bands on MySpace - but I didn’t cultivate my own top eight tracks on my largely barren profile. I was the kind of person that would use the internet to seek out that 2nd wave of guitar bands responding to The Strokes and The White Stripes in the UK, but the band’s music was finding a way to people who needed something else after six months of playing The Killers’ Hot Fuss to death.

The song opens with the sound of Ewan Davis, a recording engineer asking if he should “keep rolling” This is one of those traits that artists can use to suggest the recording is a natural capture of them rather than a more structured studio environment. The producer Jim Abbiss is quoted as saying that ‘A Certain Romance’ was recorded all live in one take, as Turner wanted it to be special and wanted a warts-and-all version.

The line that has always given me the most to think about, especially coming from the pen of Alex Turner, a teenager himself, is the one in the header about new music only coming into existence so that more ringtones can be sold to Nokia 3210 owners¹.

Ding Ding

This is an on-the-nose commentary on the mid-2000s cultural landscape. At a time when mobile phones were owned by 80% of households, but no one had a smartphone, the incessant beeping and chiming of mobile phone adverts on any commercial station, especially the music channels, is only rivalled by the amount of betting adverts now seen during sports events. There is a stinging criticism of the idea that creating music and the artistic impression that goes into it is ultimately another commodity to re-issue, re-package, re-package for commercial potential.

Away from that one line, the song serves as a vignette of mid-2000s life in Sheffield for a suburban teenager. There is stark criticism of people and places, but ultimately, it is borne out of affection. This was in the era of peak chin-stroking; what does it all mean opinion pieces in the British press about chavs, and weren’t they awful with their ASBOs and fake Burberry.

Back in 2006, the NME referred to it as;

a strangely even-handed song, in which Alex Turner starts out scorning local townies and then appears to absolve them at the end of the song

By the end of the song, there is a recognition from Turner that the Venn Diagram of some of the people he is admonishing (though likely and wisely keeping it to himself) aren’t so different from the people who have grown up listening to the same bands as him, chiefly The Strokes and The Libertines, are coming to his band’s shows and are even potentially boys in their own bands.

It is easy to forget that while early 2006 doesn’t feel that long ago to some of us, this is a time when YouTube had barely started; by March of that year, users were uploading 20k new videos a day (all of which had a 10-minute limit), now that figure is 3.7m a day. Artists like Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Kate Nash and Calvin Harris used platforms like MySpace as an unprecedented way to share their music directly with fans, bypassing traditional industry gatekeepers.

It is also important to consider that bands like Arctic Monkeys were not just responding to the music of 2001 and 2002 after their formation in the latter of those years; their influences weren’t trapped in amber from that point; there was a lot of music that was responding to that first wave of garage rock revival that looked beyond what was being channelled through the first wave of New York millennials like The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. While Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’ spends fifty-odd seconds as a song that could fit on Is This It, it then explodes into something novel and more exciting with a disco-punk stomp that allows you to shake your hips and not just tap your foot and shake your head. It is the musical equivalent of discovering that your tea of beans on toast is actually beans with those little sausages in them. The Arctic Monkeys were one of those bands finding the small pork sausages amongst the baked beans.

One of the key points to remember in the rockism “wars” of that decade is that much of that cleaving between pop and rock didn’t exist in the UK to the same degree as in the US. It was typical for music fans on one side of the Atlantic to like guitar music and things like The Pet Shop Boys or Kylie Minogue and not consider acts making higher quality pop music as the enemy. That type of attitude saw The Arctic Monkeys doing something I couldn’t imagine The Strokes doing in that era and delivering a clever rendition of Girls Aloud's ‘Love Machine’ on BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge. It demonstrated their flair for melding pop sensibilities with indie rock's edgier aspects. This performance underscored their capacity to reinterpret a mainstream pop song with their distinctive style, symbolising the further blurring boundaries between pop and indie at that point.

While people are perfectly entitled to post pictures of Paul Shane and Vic Reeves as the club singer, he now has a Las Vegas crooner vibe. I felt one of the unwarranted critics of the band’s performance at Glastonbury last month was that the band weren’t playing enough old songs. I don’t think this has any merit or substance to back it up. The band released The Car in late 2022 and are still touring it this summer; they only played four songs from it, and 75% of the songs they played were over a decade old. What exactly were people expecting, a setlist from 2007?

Given the amount of material from 2013 and before, it felt like some critics were more taking an issue with the band they became with the release of AM ten years ago rather than an untrue accusation that they bored the crowd to tears by playing only new songs. This is a criticism that Radiohead received in 2017 from, frankly, armchair viewers who claimed that playing singles from their multi-million-selling and critically well-regarded albums was tantamount to spitting in people’s faces. Turner should take it as a compliment, I feel. There’s a time and place for doing a complete career retrospective on the Pyramid Stage, which isn’t when you are 38.

Despite NME proclaiming the song as one of the ten best of the 2000s, the band have only played it six times since their headlining performance at Glastonbury in 2013. - including at a homecoming performance in Sheffield in June 2023. So there is a sense that the song is a bookmark from a band that has been through several iterations since those days, and it is one they look back on fondly but don’t break out too often. It should be seen as growth and evolution rather than a band disregarding their roots.

1. Don’t order a polyphonic one for a Nokia 3210, though!