The first — and last — rock stars of the internet age are back with a new album. Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner talks to Krissi Murison in our exclusive interview

Alex Turner — Arctic Monkeys’ frontman — opens his front door and offers me a tea. He is wearing double denim and an army-surplus jacket embossed with his surname. The hair he usually Brylcreems into a quiff hangs lankly around a curiously awful goatee beard. I assume this must be his gone-to-seed, holiday look. Understandable — it has been five years since his band last released an album, and almost four years since either the hair or the chin were required on stage with them. But no, my mistake, the goatee is still very much present a few weeks later when the band announce details of their comeback with a series of moody new promo shots. Must be an LA thing, then.

Turner, 32, has lived in Los Angeles since 2012, though the house I’m at is the one he keeps in east London. It’s a pretty but modest two-up, two-down Victorian worker’s cottage he bought a decade ago during the first flushes of Arctic Monkeys’ success. Inside speaks of rarefied audiovisual obsessions and retro good taste: guitars and vintage tape machines, French new wave films and dystopian sci-fi novels. The bathroom is a groovy throwback of lemon-yellow walls and black tiles with a copy of Pocket Bowie Wisdom on the side of the tub. Do I need to use the facilities? Because if not his American model girlfriend, Taylor Bagley, would like a bath. I don’t. “Green light,” he calls through to her in the bedroom.

Back in the kitchen, Magic FM blasts incongruously and he dawdles over the tea.

“I just need to … I used the last of it on me Crunchy Nut cornflakes this morning,” he begins in his slow south Yorkshire drawl, the first of many sentences that aren’t really sentences at all, but abstractions vaguely pointing to a meaning. This one being that the milk’s run out.

Despite my protests, he puts on his coat and nips out, returning minutes later with the goods. The perfect host. If only the same could be said for his interview credentials.

Speaking to Turner is always a frustration. For a man rightly hailed as one of the great lyricists of his generation, he is surprisingly useless at verbal communication. Over the next couple of hours, his front room will become a sound lab of “umms”, “errs” and awkward, gaping silences. Even a simple question of what he likes to watch on telly brings a panicked five minutes of stop-start non-conversation in which I am eventually made privy to what he last saw on Netflix (“It might have been a Dave Chappelle special or something”).

Partly, I think it’s a conscious trick. Turner got very famous very young and learnt the hard way that every proclamation is a potential headline sent echoing around the world. But I first interviewed him when he was a largely unknown 19-year-old and he was just the same then. Perhaps he simply isn’t built for celebrity. His happy medium is his notepad, where he can endlessly perfect and revise, rather than the couch on The Graham Norton Show.

He is currently in London finishing the artwork for Arctic Monkeys’ new album. It is called Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino — an imagined place on the site of the 1969 moon landings and a neat vantage spot from which Turner can observe the world. It is also the follow-up to the band’s wildly successful fifth album, AM, which made them as big in America as their sparky indie-rock debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, made them here in 2006. AM went platinum in the US, though their new one is far too weird to compete. Written on a piano, it has a noirish, lounge-music feel, with Turner free-associating over the top about American politics, tech dependency and a culture driven by gentrification, good TV and social media likes. When it was released last week, the reaction was distinctly mixed, but lyrically it’s his most impressive yet. He started writing it a few days after Leonard Cohen’s death and the US election, and both loom large. “[Previously] I’d never wanted anything political to get into the music and that was because I didn’t know how to do it. It’s not as though these are protest songs necessarily, but I’m more confident about putting myself across.”

I last interviewed Turner seven years ago, shortly after the 2011 riots, when he refused to be drawn on any state-of-the-nation analysis. (“It ain’t me, babe,” he quipped, an ironic reference to the 1960s voice of a generation, Bob Dylan.)

He wasn’t alone in his reticence. Seven yeas ago it was near-impossible to find a young pop star brave enough to offer up an opinion on the crunchy issues of the day. Now with the age of activism upon us, celebrities are queuing up to sloganeer and shout their values. What has empowered them?

“Maybe they’re forced to be that way through the way it’s gone,” he says. “I seem to remember feeling like I hadn’t given sufficient consideration to these issues to be able to discuss them, which I’m not sure is necessarily a bad attitude towards it. They often are complex. It can go too far the other way, where people feel forced to talk about it, but they haven’t given it too much thought. There is a pressure on you now to think about stuff, which is not unhealthy.”

Not that I get any great political insight from him today. The closest we come is a discussion of Trump’s decision to use the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want as his walk-on music at rallies and how artists have no veto over their songs being used for political ends.

“Don’t ya?” he asks, incredulous. “Like your song being on EastEnders, is it like that?” he laughs, referring to the BBC’s blanket music license. “What Monkeys tune would Trump walk on to?” he wonders aloud. He settles on Fluorescent Adolescent and begins comedy parping the opening notes to his 2007 hit about a spice-less long-term relationship. (Lyrics: “You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress/ Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis”) “Imagine him waddling out to that!” he guffaws.

When Arctic Monkeys first became extraordinarily popular in the mid-2000s, it was impossible to talk about them without mentioning two things. First, they were one of the earliest bands to grow an audience almost entirely via the internet. Against conventional wisdom that music shouldn’t be given away free, they posted their homemade early demos and live recordings online. Word spread fast. I remember sneaking through the back door of one of their sold-out first gigs in London in 2005 as Turner was carried around the room on a sea of hands, the audience screaming every word of every song — despite the fact Arctic Monkeys had yet to sign a record deal. It was a phenomenon.

The second debate revolved around Turner’s lyrics — beautiful social observations that crackled with bar-fly wit and worldly smarts. Still in his teens and barely coherent in person, Turner was dogged by suggestions he must have had help from an older, more erudite hand. But there was no mysterious impresario.

Arctic Monkeys’ drummer, Matt Helders, has known Turner since they were both five years old and went to primary school together in High Green on the outskirts of Sheffield. “Quite early on I knew he had a thing for words,” he recalls down the phone from Los Angeles, where he now lives about a mile from Turner. “When we very first started playing music, he wasn’t necessarily going to be the singer, we hadn’t figured that bit out yet. I think he was quite apprehensive about it, but he was always good at English at school, so it didn’t seem like a big leap for him to try and do that.”

The son of two teachers, Turner remembers anxiously keeping his notepad scribbles under lock and key lest his fellow pupils discover his uncool hobby. “I was quite shy, I suppose. I definitely didn’t want people to find out I was writing.” The first time he showed them to his then girlfriend, he sat on the other side of his bedroom with “beads of sweat” while she read them.

“I can relate to that in terms of where we’re from and the school we went to,” says Helders. “You’re not necessarily encouraged to follow a creative path.” As such, playing in a band was only supposed to be a bit of fun, never a career. “A lot of friends, for example, just went into trades and worked their way up in whatever their first job was. I probably just saw myself doing that.”

After the initial internet frenzy, Arctic Monkeys went mainstream. In late 2005 their debut single, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, went to No 1. The following year, their first album became what was then the fastest-selling British debut of all time and they became so famous, even Gordon Brown felt he ought to declare himself a fan — though he failed to be able to name a single one of their songs in a follow-up question. The incident haunted Brown throughout the rest of his political career (it even cropped up in his autobiography, released last year), though for Turner it barely warranted a footnote in those early whirlwind years. “I think it passed me by. It’s the sort of thing I can imagine going home and my granddad telling me about,” he says.



Back at Turner’s house, his girlfriend, Taylor, briefly appears downstairs, freshly washed. She has a mad, alien beauty: tall, skinny and limby, with hair dyed luminous tangerine, a nose ring, black leather trousers and extraordinary ice-blue eyes. Goodness knows how he ever gets any work done.

She coos over my three-month-old baby, who has just woken up hungry, mentions her impending broodiness more than once, and skips off to lunch.

Blimey, she is beautiful, I stammer like an idiot after she’s gone.

“Agreed,” he smiles. “I won’t resist you on that.”

Before arriving, I had fallen for idle chatter claiming that Turner was back with Alexa Chung, the gamine British fashion darling whom he dated between 2007 and 2011 — their romance still occupies a special place in the hearts of many latter-day indie-rock fans (they were a sort of scruffily aspirational Posh’n’Becks). Late last year, gossip columns reported that they had been seen canoodling at a fireworks party. Fake news! It was her birthday drinks, he’d gone along, they’d been spotted having a chat. There were no fireworks, metaphorical or otherwise.

He and Taylor, he explains, have been together for nearly three years, having met through mutual friends in LA. They now live together.

Has he settled down for good?

He laughs. “How am I supposed to answer that? Yeah,” he decides. “Mmm.”

Like Chung, Bagley has been known to post a lot of pictures of herself looking impossibly attractive on Instagram. There she is posing with her dog, posing naked in the bath … but never, as far as I can tell, posing with Turner. Is that because he’d rather not be there?

“I don’t recall submitting that request, but I’m not sorry about it if I’m not on there.”

Does he have to take all those pictures of her, though? I always imagine that behind every perfect Insta-girl is a bored boyfriend chained to the photo-filter app on their iPhone.

“No, I’m not much of a photographer.”

Alongside Arctic Monkeys, Turner has a long-term side-project called The Last Shadow Puppets with his best friend, the Birkenhead singer-songwriter Miles Kane. During the promotion for their last album, the two did an interview with a female journalist from the music webzine Spin. Turner was being his usual unforthcoming self, so Kane attempted to break the ice with some groan-inducing banter. This included inviting the journalist up to his hotel room when she asked what he was doing after the interview, which, in hindsight, was pretty stupid (he realised as much the next day and emailed her to say sorry). The result, though, was a lengthy op-ed calling out Kane’s unprofessionalism and the misogyny of the music industry at large. Personally, I found some of her complaints against him a tad flimsy — holding eye contact for too long, high-fiving her, “yanking” her in “for a not entirely consensual kiss on the cheek” as she said goodbye, and not least the idea that interviewing a rock star is ever supposed to be an exercise in professionalism.

What did Turner make of it all?

He sighs. “I think he made a joke he shouldn’t have made and realised he had misjudged the situation.”

I thought it was a bit OTT, I tell him.

“Yeah, I’m not sure it was deserving of that response honestly, but you just can’t make a joke like that.”

Not any more. I attempt to draw him on the #MeToo movement. Undoubtedly there was a time before Turner was romantically settled when he enjoyed the spoils of being young, successful, ravishingly eligible and single while on tour. But does the current atmosphere mean men in the public eye like him feel vulnerable that any encounter could now come back to bite them?

“Well, I don’t know, I suppose it depends on how you behave.”

Well, yes. So …

“Do I worry about how I’ve behaved in the past?” Twenty agonising seconds of silence pass as Turner mentally checks through every drunken come-on and backstage fumble of his career. “No” is his final decision.

While we’re on the subject of personal responsibility, then … A few years ago, the Arctic Monkeys were named and shamed for having invested in Liberty, the £1.2bn high-profile tax-avoidance scheme, alongside other celebrities including Gary Barlow, George Michael, Michael Caine and Ant and Dec. The four current members were reported to have paid fees of between £38,000 and £84,000 to protect sums ranging from £557,000 to £1.1m between 2005 and 2009.

“We were given some poor advice and I made a poor decision,” he says now. “But I always paid my taxes in full, on time,” he adds, echoing a statement the band put out at the time.

But the scheme allowed him to pay less tax, I suggest. Does he understand why people were upset by it?

“Absolutely, yeah. But we didn’t get to pay less, though.”

Why were you in it, then?

“Because there was a potential that we would, that’s the important point.”

So you pulled yourself out of it before that point when you realised it wasn’t the right thing to do?

“Mmm-hmm.”

Regardless of how much tax he has paid, he is still worth millions. What does he spend his money on? There is a pause so long I think his batteries might have run out. Doesn’t he have a motorbike, I eventually prompt him.

“Yes! But it’s just one bike, it’s not like I’m Jay Leno [the American comedian, who has a vast motorcycle collection]. We all learnt to ride together. We’re going to be rehearsing next month, so maybe we’ll all be on the bikes going to rehearsals,” he says.



These days they are dispersed across the world: Turner and Helders in LA, the guitarist Jamie Cook in east London and the bass player Nick O’Malley in Sheffield. They have all had children, apart from Turner. Does he feel broody?

“Not just yet, I don’t think.”

Helders, who has a two-year-old daughter with his wife, Breana McDow — a model and actress whom he met on the set of an Arctic Monkeys music video — has been taking advice from his rock-star-dad friends, such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, on the best way to tour with a family. “There are two ways of doing it: either you take everyone with you or you go home more often — two weeks on, two weeks off, that kind of thing.”

Which will they opt for? “Probably a bit more of the latter. My wife, she works as well, so she can’t just drop everything to come out on tour. She’s got things going on.” The news that her career is given equal weight makes me want to punch the air.

“I’m a modern man,” he continues. “Neither of us have got family nearby, so it’s not as easy as when we were kids, when my mum would just drop me off with a family member and go to work. So all the time I’ve been off [tour] we’ve been taking advantage of that so she’d be at work more and I’d be at home. I’ve been very hands-on.”

Helders says he likes California for the weather and because “I get to ride my motorbike without any obstacles”. For Turner, it’s the “anonymity” that LA grants him — “I suppose being less recognisable” — but he doesn’t know if living there “will be for ever”.

What does he miss most about home? “Newsnight.”

Turner voted Remain in the Brexit referendum. His home city of Sheffield voted to leave. Does he have sympathy with friends back home who wanted out?

“I mean, you’re assuming that I’ve got friends who wanted to leave. I don’t think I do.”

It has been 12 years since Arctic Monkeys emerged and there hasn’t been another British rock band as good or as successful as them since. They weren’t just the first great band of the internet age, they were also the last. Why hasn’t anyone else come along to resonate in the same way?

“I don’t know what’s necessarily missing from music that we had. We were fortunate at the time, we were the last opportunity before downloading or streaming or whatever became the thing,” says Helders. “I don’t know if that’s ruined music by any means. It just seems like there’s more of it now and it’s harder to stand out. It’s up to [the individual] to put it out, not waiting on a record deal or the radio to play your song, which is great for the artist, but it also means there’s lots more competition.”

Of course, it’s not that there aren’t any new artists having huge success right now, it’s just that they’re predominantly solo artists — think Adele, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran. What happened to the gang mentality of the Beatles, the Clash and Oasis? Why don’t teenagers aspire to form bands any more?

“Maybe [making music] is too easy, maybe everyone thinks they’re good enough to do it on their own and that they don’t need the band. Maybe if it was like this 10 years ago, I’d have thought, f*** it, I’m doing it on my own,” Helders laughs. “Nah, I definitely wouldn’t have done that. Music now can be in a studio on your own, on a computer on your own, in your bedroom. There are a lot of talented people who can play every instrument on their own record and it sounds great.”

Talented people such as Turner, who writes all the songs and could easily go it alone. What keeps him in Arctic Monkeys when bands are so cumbersome, expensive to tour and unfashionable?

For once he finds the words immediately. “I enjoy their company. So, for instance, on this project I was really unsure about what I was doing and lost with it completely. Then, when Jamie came out to LA to join me and we worked on stuff together, through his encouragement suddenly I felt completely different. Him getting excited about it, like the way I remember him getting excited about some idea in his bedroom in his mum’s house when we were 16 … I still get that buzz out of his reaction.”

I just wish he could be less enthusiastic about the goatee.

Arctic Monkeys’ new album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, is out now on Domino