Alex Turner for Rumore Magazine (September 2013)
Seventies Heads and Modern Loves or I Don't Know What I Want But I Surely Want You
Until he opens his mouth, Alex Turner looks like he stepped out of the Nevada desert. Leather loafers, a belt, slicked-back hair, sunglasses. But as soon as he starts talking, between “summat” instead of “something” and “me” instead of “my,” he transforms back into a boy from Sheffield who grew up on cocktails and DJ sets. The discrepancy between the way he looks and the way he speaks is strange: you would expect a cocky and arrogant rock star, but instead you have before you a relaxed and thoughtful boy who carefully measures his words, but does so with a smile and not a frown. The lyrics of AM, the fifth album of his band, mainly revolve around difficult and elusive women. There are many questions. “Do I want to know?” “Are you mine?” he says; “Why do you always call me when you’re high?” she says. There is no shortage of desires: “I want it all,” “I want to be yours.” Absent, however, are the answers. We tried to get a few out of him.
How was it to be back at Glastonbury as a headliner five years after the first time?
Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful, this time it was very natural. Everything was harder in 2007, we had done a lot less shows and had a lot less songs. Now we have learned to move better.
After the experience of Humbug, you collaborated again with Josh Homme.
Yes, Josh is on Knee Socks, towards the end of the piece. We gave him carte blanche and he decided to sing a sort of counter-melody that reminds me a lot of Bowie.
Are knee socks your favorite piece of underwear on a woman?
[Laughs] What do you think?
If she has the right legs.
Exactly, yes. The best is the garter. But then they would not be Parisian anymore, right? And then they are thicker than women's stockings. However they are not my favorite underwear, I go with the push-up.
In the lyrics of Arabella you talk a lot about the universe.
I wanted to use that linguistic palette to try to describe a woman. There are many songs that use those sorts of words… galaxy, interstellar, constellation, things like that, but usually they are used just for the sake of being used. Instead I wanted to make them an active part of a description, they are images that I find very interesting. In England, on the BBC, there is this program called Wonders of the Universe, with Professor Brian Cox. And it is one of my favorite programs [smiles, pleased].
Barbarella also pops up in the text.
Yes, although I haven't read practically any of her comics and I've only seen a small piece of the movie. I don't really like B movies. To know her, you just need to have seen a poster, that's all you need. I just used her to make a comparison with the costume she wears.
How does the suite you sing about in Fireside relate to room 505 in Favourite Worst Nightmare?
Yes, I’m talking about a suite in my heart… or in her heart? Well, in someone’s heart. Room 505, in my mind, is something very concrete. I wrote that song on a train between Philadelphia and New York, my girlfriend was in a hotel waiting for me and I just wrote about that [Turner’s voice becomes increasingly whispered as the sentence progresses]. In Fireside, however, it’s all figurative.
So how much of your real self is in your lyrics and how much is just imagination?
There's no rule, sometimes there's a lot of me in the lyrics when you least expect it. I put little secrets in them. What I try to avoid is that people who listen to one of my songs say, 'oh, he's talking about that girl'. You know when you read a novel and, somehow, in your mind you see its characters with the faces of some of your friends, or your favorite actors? That's where I want to get to with my music, I want it to be like being in front of a story, not the evidence of two people with a name and a surname who are kissing. It's up to the listener to give them both a face. When I write I pretty much always have someone or something in mind, but it doesn't really matter.
How did you come up with the idea of using John Cooper Clarke's words for I Wanna Be Yours?
We wrote most of the songs on this record on a four-track that I got for my birthday. I spent a while recording ideas on it, sometimes we'd loop a bass and drum melody for five minutes and the fact that it was on tape gave it an incredible color. Then I'd sit there with headphones and a microphone humming melodies, or making up silly lyrics to start coming up with ideas. One day, while I was jamming, the words I wanna be yours came out and I remembered that they were the title of one of his poems. I thought it would be cool to use someone else's words – and especially his, I'm a big fan of his. It's one of my favorite songs on the record, the lyrics alone make it different from anything we've done before. And then I love the juxtaposition of the slow, sexy, flirtatious music and his words.
The party you talk about in No. 1 Party Anthem seems a lot more laid back than the ones you’ve talked about in the past, like the house in This House Is A Circus.
That’s true, but the parties we go to are still pretty messy. They’re just twice as long.
Am I supposed to be imagining some sort of indie celebrity party?
Indie celebrity party? [Laughs.] No, no, no. The slow tempo of that song gives it a bit of a Los Angeles feel. It’s a city that I’m told is very similar to what we’re portraying on the new record, and I’m starting to think that might be true. Not that it sounds like the Eagles, you know.
It's like your sound is becoming more and more American.
Yeah, maybe. There's something special about that part of the world. Everything that came out of California owes something to '70s rock, the spontaneity of those rhythms also comes back in West Coast hip-hop. But then came the fucking '80s and… a lot of fucking bands that don't fit into that theory. I think there will always be something English in our sound, it's something we can never detach ourselves from.
How much does Sheffield still mean to what you do?
Well, you know… [he taps two fingers on a tattoo on the inside of his arm: the Yorkshire rose and underneath it the word “SHEFFIELD”].
There are three songs on AM whose titles are questions.
You don't notice things like that until you sit there and write the titles of the songs one after the other. I hadn't noticed until then, there are also a lot of wanna.
The protagonist of R U Mine? is wrapped up in a certain western imagery, you portray her as “a lone cowboy riding in an open space.” And in All My Own Stunts you talked about “watching cowboy movies on gloomy afternoons.”
I love the western style. The leather ties, the belts… Hey, look at this one I’m wearing! [He stands up and shows me his leather belt, turning his back: it has “TURNER” engraved on it, on either side of the horseshoes.] A friend gave it to me for my birthday, this year was really nice, between this and the four-track. I also love western movies, especially the ones about Butch Cassidy. I also love Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks, obviously.
How do you usually celebrate your birthdays?
They’re nothing too devastating. I have a birthday in early January, everyone is still recovering from Christmas and New Year’s, so the average response I get is usually “forget it.”
Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High? brings back the drunken text messages you mentioned in The View From the Afternoon.
We've all done that at least once, come on. Those lyrics might have come off the first record, but the music is fully invested in what we're doing now. I just wanted to write something simple.
While we're on the subject: when was the last time you got bounced at the entrance of a nightclub? It's not like From The Ritz To The Rubble anymore, is it?
Shit, that was like four weeks ago! [Laughs.] We were in Stockholm, we were trying to get into an area of the nightclub and there was no way we could get in.
What are those Mad Sounds you're talking about?
That song is about those moments when you put on a song and it's like it's talking about exactly how you feel. It's a song about those songs, and I hope it can become one of them. I get that feeling from some songs by Lou Reed, John Cale, or Harry Nilsson. It's like sometimes they really understand how I feel, and you're like, "What the fuck..." and you almost tell them to go fuck themselves.
The point where the song explodes is when you start singing a series of ooh-la-la-la. What is the la-la-la moment that sticks with you the most from the music you listen to?
Definitely the do-dodo-dodo-do-do-do-do from Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed.
By the way, who came up with the idea of calling a song The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala? What does that mean?
It came up one day when we were making up names for guitar pedals – sometimes they have crazy names. The Blond-o-Sonic Shimmer Trap would be perfect for a fuzz, for example. The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, however, comes from a bar we hung out in a lot while we were writing the previous record. The room was full of glitter and there were a lot of weird chicks all winking, like cougars.
The lyrics to Snap Out of It revolve around hypnosis. Do you think there's any real power behind it or is it just persuasion?
I've never been hypnotised, but it all seems pretty real when you watch hypnotists on telly. There's this show in the UK where this guy, Derren Brown, gets people to do all sorts of things. Crazy stuff like, "rob someone!" Nothing I'd want to be involved with.
In I Want It All you say, “Leave me listening to the Stones 2000 light years from home.”
I’m actually a Beatles guy, no doubt. But I like them both, I saw the Stones at Glastonbury and it was great.
Don't you think it's better for a band to go at the top of their game than to keep going and going and risk having nothing left to say?
What the Stones have managed to do is really extraordinary. I mean, they're seventy years old and they're still on stage. It's very difficult to have an opinion on something like this because I don't think I've reached that level yet. I'm very excited about the new album, we've reached the point of being a good live band and, speaking as an artist, I think I've reached a certain excellence this time. I want to build on that, explore new things. We still have a lot of places to go.
I think the main difference between AM and your previous albums is the small amount of guitars.
This time we didn't want to sound like four guys playing in the same room, while that's exactly what we wanted to sound like in Suck It And See. We immersed ourselves in a more minimalist idea. The guitars are perfect, sometimes they don't even sound like guitars from the way they're played, or from the effects we put on them. They sound a bit "spacey," they would be good for the stereo of a flying saucer. Then we came out with some bass and drum parts perfect to be played at full volume through the speakers of a car. We also worked much more with the vocal lines, especially with the choirs.
There are actually a lot of songs where you put backing vocals and backing vocals, especially One For The Road.
Matt, Nick and I do them. Jamie is the only one who doesn't want to have anything to do with them. It all started with R U Mine? , the part where we all start going: [hums the backing vocals]. As soon as we tried that part we realized how good it sounded, we especially liked the fact that it was something we hadn't done before. So we just went for it.
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