Exclusive footage of Arctic Monkeys on the road in eastern Europe on the opening weekend on their Humbug world tour. guardian.co.uk

I'm waiting in the lounge area of a swanky photography studio in north London. The walk here from the tube station wasn't too promising; light industry, mixed housing, sleeping policemen, a couple of goods yards with barbed wire coiled along the top of the gate, and a man in a pair of custard yellow nylon underpants looking for enlightenment in the bottom of a sherry bottle. Inside, though, it's exclusive and plush. There are three types of biscuit on a big plate, none of them lower in the luxury snack hierarchy than a chocolate HobNob, and even though it's mid-morning on the sunniest day of the year so far, the curtains are drawn. And I'm inclined to describe the contrast between the world out there and the world in here, since the band I'm about to interview would seem to have a foot in both camps. If their songs are to be taken at face value, they might be perceived as dirt-poor scrotes, goading the coppers, swigging and smoking their way through the days till the inevitable scuffle in the taxi queue and a ride home to some godforsaken housing estate on the top of a rain-lashed moor. And if the papers are to be believed, they're now millionaire rock stars with trophy girlfriends and celeb music biz chums.

So I'm waiting for Arctic Monkeys. Which sounds like an anachronistic euphemism, like waiting for hell to freeze over or watching for flying pigs. But on the stroke of 11am, they duly arrive, in my opinion the most compelling and convincing thing to have happened to guitar music in the past five years. I wipe biscuit crumbs on the tail of my shirt before shaking the slender, almost weightless hand of Alex Turner. Then comes the more muscular squeeze of drummer Matt Helders, the gentlemanly shake of guitarist Jamie Cook and the firm grip of bassist Nick O'Malley. We swap greetings, their unselfconscious Sheffield accents trumping my more modified West Yorkshire vowels, then they're ushered towards the dressing-up box in the corner. Prompt, polite, happy, clean - my immediate impression is how, er, nice they seem, with something approaching a boyband sheen around them. Their manager, Geoff Barradale, is wearing a polo shirt and trainers, and taken in combination with the white back wall of the studio, they could easily be four lads who have just arrived with someone's dad for a game of squash.

The legend of Arctic Monkeys runs something like this. Four mates from High Green in Sheffield get musical instruments for Christmas and start rehearsing in a garage. Next minute they're a phenomenon; they release two consecutive No 1 singles and a barnstorming first album; according to a confused Menzies Campbell at the Lib Dem conference, they sell more records than the Beatles and are even name checked by kiss-of-death incarnate himself, Gordon Brown. Despite which, they continued to flourish, headlining Glastonbury, winning a clutch of awards, and releasing an "acclaimed" second album. Somewhere along the line, they're also credited with rewriting the music business rulebook, having forgone airplay and marketing, snubbed major labels, given their music away at gigs and manifested themselves virally and subversively through MySpace and file-sharing.

"Er, not really," says Helders, once the snaps are taken and we've convened around the empty biscuit plate. "We didn't really know nothing about all that stuff. It weren't like a plan. It just happened." Take it or leave it nonchalance among the successful is often a hindsight re-branding of desperation, but in the case of Arctic Monkeys, I'm tempted to believe them. On the surface at least, they appear casual to the point of naivety, a point borne out by Helders's own position in the band, only becoming the drummer because the other lads had bagsied the guitars. Helders fascinates me because he's so implausible. In his trademark BMX-rider-in-the-precinct leisurewear, he might just about pass muster as a kind of northern Mike Skinner, but the powerhouse drummer of a noisy indie guitar band? His closely shorn hair distinguishes him as the most boyish of the four, Turner and O'Malley having let their manes "mature" of late and Cook having only recently recovered from a beard. Helders also appears to have assumed the role of class clown, and is nominated funniest person in the band when I poll them. This doesn't come as such a surprise given his recent postings on their official website, which range from a bizarre monologue in a southern hemisphere laundry on the benefits of jogging trousers ("You don't want to sweat in your jeans and wear them again the next day; some people might call that rock'n'roll, I just call it unhygienic ... so I'll be wearing these joggers tonight and all the way through the gig I'll be thinking, 'Fuck me, these smell fresh'") to surreal footage in the absurdly polished, mass-catering kitchen of P Diddy's mansion, being lavishly praised by Mr Combs himself while industrial quantities of French toast and bacon rashers are piled on to serving platters. When I ask which of the band is the hardest, Helders is again firmly in the frame. "Even though I've never taken a punch, except from me brother."

On the subject of their forthcoming album, the combined Arctic Monkeys seem quite giddy, even a little starstruck when talking about their experiences with new producer/guru Josh Homme, Queen of the Stone Age's queen bee, and are pleased to announce that after a lot of agonising, it is to be christened Humbug.

"You've got to suck it and see," says Turner, helpfully. There then ensues a lively debate on the nature of the aforementioned confectionery and the metaphorical ways in which it signals their new musical direction. Judging by their extensive knowledge, they've clearly invested a great many research hours at their local sweetie shop.

How old are you now? I ask them.

"Twenty three," they say with one voice.

Later, I go into the bar with Turner for what I hear him describe to the other band members as "a solo". I'm ready with the money but he pays for the beer out of his own pocket. For an occasionally cocky frontman with an occasional foul mouth and furious guitar, there's an ethereal, almost gravity-defying quality about the man himself, twisting in his chair, floating in his thoughts. Turner exhibits a sort of double jointed-ness of both body and mind, as if he might metamorphose into a puff of smoke or ring-tailed lemur should the notion occur to him. A kind of human slinky, he looks like he could turn around inside his Highly Evolved T-shirt without taking it off or even touching the sides, and with his long, wavy hair and big brown horse eyes, it would be churlish to deny that he is a creature of beauty.

Glancing at my list of questions, I remember my two lines of anthropological inquiry. First, most people spend most of their life chasing and failing to achieve a dream, so if those dreams are realised almost instantly, what does it mean for the future? And second, assuming that they weren't singled out by the hand of the Almighty for special treatment, what are the geographical and socio-economic conditions that combine to produce such rare songwriting talent.

"Dunno really," he says.

I meet Turner again a few days later and we wander past east London's Spitalfields Market towards a cafe he knows. If he was reticent before, today he's animated and effusive, at least by comparison; prompted by a question about his living arrangements, and the house he still owns in east London, it is the subject of DIY which ignites his enthusiasm.

"I 'aven't been there for a bit so last night there's this air lock in the pipes, and I'm on the phone to me dad in one hand asking him how to sort it and chasing this air lock with an 'ammer in the other."

Are you a handyman?

"I'm all right, but Cookie's your man. He helped me tile me bathroom. Me and him went out and bought all the gear and loaded it into the Mini. Couldn't have done it myself. He did tiling at college. There's this pond near where we live, and we call it the Ocha - don't know how to spell it, might have an aitch in it - and it's where we used to mess around. And he's like, 'Tell me as soon as we get signed to a label, 'cause when we do I'm going straight down the Ocha and I'm going to chuck me trowel in.'"

I can't help thinking of the anecdote as a working-class version of the Excalibur story, a trowel instead of a sword being returned to the water, and maybe a Fender Stratocaster being offered by the Lady of the Lake in return. I also envisage a scenario, once this anecdote becomes public, in which several Japanese Arctic Monkeys obsessives are found in scuba diving masks and flippers one night, dredging the Ocha for Cook's trowel.

In the cafe we find what Turner describes as a "superior table" and again he shames me by paying for the tea.

Were there a lot of books in the house when you grew up?

"Me mum reads. She's a linguist. Teaches German. Me dad's a music teacher, but he likes his science fiction."

Did he train you as a musician?

"No, but I had piano lessons till I was eight. Teacher said I had a good ear. I gave it up, but at least when I came to pick up a guitar I wasn't starting from scratch."

Do you think of yourself as a boy or a man?

"I still feel ... actually ... since I grew me hair, most people think I'm a girl. A 70s teenage girl. I don't mind it. Went into this Italian restaurant with a couple of women and the waiter said [clapping his hands]: 'Ah, three beauties.' I look about 15, don't I?"

We talk about recent musical influences, and he sings me a line from Bowie's Five Years, remembering that at one time he wouldn't have listened to Bowie because his mum was a fan. We talk about Dylan, the Doors, Love, Queens of the Stone Age, the Strokes.

Does this album have one eye on America?

"Not really. We're aware of it. Them upstairs probably think it's important, but we just ... have a desire for people to listen to our music."

Then we get on to what I believe to be the true core construct of the Arctic Monkeys: their lyrics. I've asked Turner to bring along his notebooks and, happily, he's obliged. He flops one out on the wooden table, a sort of policeman's pocketbook with the spine at the top, into which a bobby on the beat would have taken down the particulars of a bicycle theft in a black and white film from the 50s. It's filled from front to back with blue ink, most of the contents being divided into blocks of lines, with arrows and vectors redirecting choruses and verses to other parts of the pages. As he flicks through, I see flashes of titles from the new album - Crying Lightning, My Propeller - as well as lines from old songs. I notice the word Sketchhead, which, being an Arctic Monkeys nerd, I recognise from the run-out track on the 10-inch single of Fluorescent Adolescent. Turner writes in a kind of kidnapper's capital letters, and tells me his handwriting gets neater as he begins to trust the lyrics. I ask about the number of late 70s/early 80s allusions in the songs: considering Arctic Monkeys weren't even born when Frank Spencer was pratfalling into our living rooms and the Police were imploring Roxanne not to put on the red light, those references have bamboozled listeners, even to the point of questioning their provenance. So are you glued to UK Gold all day? I ask.

Turner says, "It's just humour. I tried to get two Duran Duran references into every second song at one point, but couldn't manage it in the end." And whether he appreciates it or not, humour is one of the things that elevates him above most of his contemporaries. Like all the estimable British lyricists, be it Noël Coward or Morrissey, Turner has always been willing to risk a delicious irony or witty turn of phrase, even in a sad song, when most of his contemporaries are content to juggle cliches or trot out vacuous abstractions. Humour, and also details. The noun objects. The Mecca dobbers and betting pencils of everyday life.

Why don't you publish the lyrics with the albums?

"Didn't have the bottle before. Didn't think they were up to it. But I will do next time."

Embarrassment is a subject to which he returns several times in conversation, as if being a regular kid from High Green and a singer-songwriter in a band were completely incongruous. Maybe it's only since moving to Brooklyn that he finally feels comfortable with who and what he is. Pushing a bit harder, I ask him if he worries that he's now living thousands of miles away from all the things that have characterised his songwriting so far, including his dialect and his friends. Or that setting up a love nest with his glamorous girlfriend Alexa Chung is a long way from the Topshop princesses and the kitchen-sink romances of Still Take You Home and Mardy Bum. This, after all, was the guy who wagged his finger and tut-tutted: "You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham." But he simply shrugs his shoulders, saying, "There's other things to write about." Then he points at a line in his notebook which reads, A tramp with a trampoline under his arm. "I actually saw that the other day. On Ecclesall Road [in Sheffield], and I thought, 'Thank you.'"

It's raining in Sheffield. Earlier in the week the river Don exceeded its acceptable limits and spewed forth, and the streets I'm driving along are still littered with flotsam and jetsam, mainly in the form of odd socks. For those not familiar with the geography, there is a part of this magnificent city that once glowed at night with the fires of the furnace and shone in daylight with the sparkle of sunlight on stainless steel. Then came the death of manufacturing, turning these postcodes into a mysterious post-industrial cemetery, haunting and haunted, deserted at night except for the sound of crawling cars and high heels, and inhabited during the day by scrap metal merchants. It's an area which also nestles in the foothills of the superbly contradictory Sheffield Ski Village. More recently, the developers have moved in, re-designating the deserted factories as studio spaces, work units and loft-style apartments, but the vulture of recession is circling again, and there's no telling what the future might hold for Neepsend and its environs.

One thing it does hold, for now, are the offices of Arctic Monkeys management, and for some reason I find that very pleasing. It's like one of those offices put together in a morning for the purpose of a high-class con and completely disassembled by the time the coppers turn up. Jamie Cook arrives through the deluge in a sensible hatchback, having broken off from his home improvement regime for the day, and Nick O'Malley comes in like a drowned rat, having walked from his house just a few streets away. Because they're good sports, and because I didn't want to sit in a Sheffield cafe staring at the Formica, they've agreed to a sort of Arctic Monkeys guided tour, with me at the wheel and the pair of them pointing out significant locations of their youth.

Arctic Monkeys are all Sheffield Wednesday fans, and as we drive past the ground O'Malley tells me that he has vague memories of the Hillsborough disaster, even though he was only a toddler at the time. Then it's up the big hill towards High Green, with the two of them cautioning me about the location of speed cameras along the A61.

"It's not even Sheffield, really. Just one specific part. In fact, just a few streets," Cook had told me a couple of weeks ago, and as we turn right off the main road and enter a suburban housing estate of detached and semi-detached houses, I begin to see what he means.

"That's Helders's house," says O'Malley. Then a few yards along the road: "And that's where Al grew up, where we used to practise. Actually, can you just pull up here 'cause I need to collect some post from me mam's." While O'Malley nips into his mother's for an Amazon-packaged Bob Dylan DVD and a bundle of redirected letters, Cook tells me that he's moved out of the estate, but only a few miles up the road, and I think I impress him by knowing that The Death Ramps (an Arctic Monkeys B-side) is a place nearby where they used to ride their bikes.

We drive around a bit more. Past the Pheasant pub, where Arctic Monkeys once supported O'Malley's previous band, the Dodgems. Past a bus shelter, which was the local gathering place for drinkers and smokers. Past the nearest chippy on a council estate across the road.

Would you say you're working class or middle class?

After a lot of debate and a bit of hand-wringing, the consensus seems to be that they're somewhere in the middle. O'Malley then remembers walking back along one of these streets carrying his first guitar, when a bunch of lads went past in a car, wound the window down and shouted, "Oi, you fuckin' goth."

Finally we arrive at a dead end, beyond which is a field with a wood at the bottom.

"It were a good place to grow up," says Cook from the back seat, talking like some octogenarian harping back to his childhood. "Lots of open spaces, where you could run about."

Were the Death Ramps down there?

"Just a bit further off. It's houses now," he says, as if contemplating man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

And what about the Ocha?

"Yeah, that's down there. That's the Ocha. That's where it is."

I don't ask if the trowel story is true, because I don't want him to say it isn't. And even though I've got a camera in my pocket, we don't get out of the car because it's slashing down.

I already adore Humbug. They might easily have called it The Ascent of Man, because Arctic Monkeys are evolving into Homo sapiens, and this album is going to let you know. However, as Turner once famously pointed out, love is not only blind but deaf, and I can imagine that less besotted listeners might find it a more challenging proposition. There are no anthems as such, the kind of thing that the Monkey massive like to punch out with their fists from the moshpit, and no obvious chart-toppers.

"We recorded about 25 songs and these are the 10 that hung together," says Turner. "There's more guitar solos. Josh Homme - he'd send us outside the studio with a little amp to try stuff out." The studio he's talking about, where the lion's share of the album was recorded, is in the middle of the Mojave desert and, with its pranging guitars and reverberating bass lines, there are several moments on Humbug which conjure an image of tumbleweed blowing past the saloon door and a coyote or two lolloping across the horizon. And there's more of that giddy-up, giddy-up, country and spaghetti western sound that first came to light on the Last Shadow Puppets album, making me wonder if Turner is not only cracking the whip but holds the reins as well now, steering the band in his own favoured direction.

So as far as Humbug is concerned, we will indeed have to suck it and see. But for Arctic Monkeys themselves, as a species, no such quality control test seems necessary. In fact, four more likeable and well-adjusted young men than Turner, Helders, Cook and O'Malley you are unlikely to meet. I might even throw the word modest in their direction and, in Turner's case, shy. In an industry that prides itself on excess and promotes itself through legends of indulgence, perhaps this isn't something that Monkey management or even the band themselves want to hear, but I speak as I find. However meteoric their rise, they appear to have their feet planted well and truly on planet earth (my Duran Duran moment, thank you), even if that collective stance does somehow manage to straddle the suburbs of north Sheffield and the brownstone apartments of Brooklyn. If next year finds them lying in a gutter in Camden Town with track marks in their arms and pills in their pockets, then I'll hold my hand up and say I was wrong, but somehow I doubt it. There's a determination here which is born of an inescapable work ethic, and maybe that's inevitable, given that Arctic Monkeys hail from a city that is a living monument to the concept of industriousness.

They've been locked in a rehearsal studio in Bath for a week or so, preparing to road-test the new songs around eastern Europe this summer. Then it's the big one at Leeds and Reading, the day after Humbug is officially unwrapped, giving their devotees just 24 hours to learn the words. Back in the Spitalfields cafe, Turner had talked about the buzz of being on stage, standing there in front of the adoring and expectant masses. "We'd lost the spark a bit, at the end of last year, with the live stuff. But we're ready for it again. I'm ready to look people in the eye," he'd said, staring at me just long enough for me to see my reflection in the black pits of his pupils.

And then he looked away.

• Humbug is released on Domino on 24 August

When the Monkeys met Shane Meadows

Given that Arctic Monkeys took the title of their debut album from a line of dialogue in Albert Finney's 1960 Brit-grit landmark Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, it's only fitting that they should have forged an early bond with film director Shane Meadows - shaven-headed custodian of a proud heritage of East Midlands kitchen-sink realism.

"Before the first record even came out their manager had brought them round to sit in my garden on a summer's evening," Meadows's producer Mark Herbert remembers fondly. "They saw Dead Man's Shoes and loved it. Paddy Considine did a video with them, and then they all came to the This is England premiere".

This mutual affinity has now born very funny fruit in Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee - a hip-hop-flavoured update of the Comic Strip's Bad News Tour. Made in just five days and set for release later this year, this shoestring comedy follows Considine's mercurial roadie/svengali Le Donk in his bid to get well-upholstered rapper Scor-zay-zee on to the Arctic Monkeys bill at Old Trafford cricket ground, while coping with the realisation that Peep Show's Olivia Colman is about to have his baby.

The loose-limbed Le Donk exhibits a marked spiritual affinity with Steve Coogan's rock lore-immersed East Midlander, Tommy Saxondale, but actually pre-dates him. "Paddy has been doing this character for about 15 years," Meadows says, calming fears of a turf war in Nottingham, "and Steve Coogan has seen his short films and said he liked them."

As well as reconnecting Meadows with his guerrilla film-making roots, Le Donk ... also offers Monkeys fans the chance to see the band backstage, listening attentively, while Considine describes a plan to blackmail supermarkets with photos of his haemorrhoids.

Ben Thompson