Arctic monkeys nail it at last

By Hazel Sheffield

The first time they headlined Glastonbury, in 2007, Arctic Monkeys struggled to win over the Pyramid Stage crowd, but this year there was no doubt that they nailed it. A large part of their success was down to Alex Turner’s slow transformation into a rock’n’roll star. At first, he was a cocky, spotty Sheffield teenager with a genius for lyrics, shooting his mouth off and sipping lager from a can. By the time of “Humbug” in 2009, he returned from recording in the Mojave desert sporting long hair and a leather jacket, for a tour on which his insouciance soured into sullenness. So the Turner that emerged at Glastonbury—with a quiff, a suit, even an American drawl—marked a fresh start.

Their fifth album, “AM”, is an equally slick and improbably glam affair. It weaves together the disparate strands of Arctic Monkeys’ DNA: Spaghetti Western touches on “Do I Wanna Know”; their mentor Josh Homme’s hacksaw guitars on “R U Mine?”; Richard Hawley’s northern crooning on “No. 1 Party Anthem”; their own early playfulness with falsetto choruses and piano stabs on “Snap Out of It”—a song so impeccably arranged, it could have been written by Elton John. This is the sound of a band who are no longer afraid to run the show. ~ Hazel Sheffield