Alex Turner’s interview about TBH&C with brazilian television channel Globo
After five years off, the Arctic Monkeys release a new album, which has the mark of the vocalist and singer Alex Turner. More than that, the british band also heard a cool and ‘mineiro’ sound to create it.
These are ‘Macacos do Ártico’ jumping in their underwear in the sea of Joatinga Beach, in Rio. Or rather, Arctic Monkeys, because they are british. That was a farewell after the show that marked the end of a tour that lasted a year and a half, 153 performances.
They chose Brazil to close this tour with a golden key, it was in 2014. And then, after that, they took a break. And now they have come back with a surprise: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is practically a solo album by vocalist Alex Turner.
“I got a piano and that really opened it up”. He had an empty room at home, where he put the piano and created a story for that little room. “There’s a conspiracy theory that says man never landed on the moon”. 1969, TV live-streamed the man stepping on the moon, but this conspiracy theory says that, in fact, it was all staged in a Hollywood studio and directed by director Stanley Kubrick, the one who made The Shining. “And then I started calling the little room in my house The Lunar Surface, as if I was filming the man landing on the moon inside that little room.”
It was in this lunar world that he composed the whole new album. And, from the past, they brought a brazilian album, from 1972. “I was listening to everything that reminded me of this sound that I wanted to make and Lô Borges appeared to me. I don’t know where I got it from, the sneaker album”. It is an experimental record of the musician from Minas Gerais (a brazilian state).
Lô Borges: “The sneaker album, I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it’s ahead of its time, I don’t know… The guy picking up a song of the sneaker album and using it as a reference for the composition of his new album, which is a spectacular album”.
Lô Borges also made the classic record, Clube da Esquina, with Milton Nascimento, but Alex didn’t know this one. At the end of the interview, he asked me to write ‘Clube da Esquina’ on a napkin.
This time, Arctic Monkeys did not release any separate songs on the internet, nor a single. “We came to a consensus that the album worked better as an LP, if you could hear it all at once.” He promises to come to Brazil soon to show if it works on stage, with the desire to celebrate again with a dive, like the last time.
