Dokładnie dziś mija 9 lat od premiery debiutanckiego albumu Arctic Monkeys. Pierwszy longplay czwórki z High Green zatytułowany "Whatever Poeple Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" ukazał się 23 stycznia 2006 roku. Pierwotnie premierę zaplanowano na 30 stycznia 2006 roku, ostatecznie album ujrzał światło dzienne tydzień wcześniej z obawy przed wyciekiem materiału do sieci. Krążek błyskawicznie zdobył tytuł najszybciej sprzedającego się debiutanckiego albumu w historii brytyjskiego rynku muzycznego. Stała się rzecz niesłychana jak na tamte czasy, gdyż do tej pory żadnemu artyście z niezależnej wytwórni nie udało się zajść tak wysoko. Prestiżowa nagroda Mercury Prize oraz statuetki BRIT Awards dla najlepszego zespołu brytyjskiego i za najlepszy brytyjski album 2007 roku były już tylko czystą formalnością.

"Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not" to fragment zdania z brytyjskiego filmu "Saturday Night And Sunday Morning" z Albertem Finneym w roli głównej. Obraz, który miał premierę w 1960 roku opowiada historię robotnika romansującego z żoną kolegi z pracy. Całość wypowiedzi, z której Arctic Monkeys zaczerpnęli tytuł swego debiutu przedstawia się następująco: "Whatever people say I am, that's what I am not. Because they don't know a bloody thing about me. God knows what I am".

This is one of the last songs written for the album. There’s nothing clever, it’s just about anticipating the evening, finding comfort in familiarity and the fact that you know you’re bound to send a daft message or something before the sun comes up. I think I’ve stopped doing that now.

I get the impression a lot of people imagine an evening scene when they hear this song but it conjures up daytime images for me. ‘Lustful’ is perhaps a good word to describe it. It’s far from our finest work but I’m not going to bang on about that.

We first played this song in 2004 as the summer came to a close. At this time we’d just started playing what then seemed like a lot of gigs – sometimes we’d go mad and play two a week – and so we were rubbing shoulders with a lot of other bands at a similar stage to us. The gigs were usually four bands or sometimes more, no-one in the crowd except a few of their mates or girlfriends who all left as soon as they could. The bands rarely had anything in common, musical or otherwise, and right beside the angry 13-year-olds playing Green Day or whatever you would find the cool bastards that provided the topic for the lyrics of ‘Fake Tales…’. “If it’s a Tuesday night in Sheffield that’s fine, why pretend it’s anything else? I think the easiest way to describe this song is as the sound of us getting annoyed at people pretending. Another way to put it would be it’s the sound of us when given something to whinge about – depends how profound you want it to sound.

Sometimes it's tough to get through one of the old ones live. You know, you don't feel like that any more.
When you tell the same joke 600 times, you won’t hear what it is anymore, but then sometimes like the 601st time you might see something in it you didn’t before.

It’s the oldest song on there. It’s about people always looking to pull when they go out however much they mask it.

I’m into the arrangement on this because there’s no chorus as such and it doesn’t do the same thing more than once. It’s our love song I suppose. It’s about a girl we knew who was in a band.

A while ago, before all this madness, pin-up Jamie Cook and I were sat in a club in town one evening. A conversation was struck up about the clientele of this particular establishment and this little chat and other events that night led to this tune. I remember a dark-haired girl in a green dress was a particular inspiration.

It’s about hovercrafts, obviously. We recorded the album in the order it’s presented and did a song a day pretty much. We used a funny microphone called a bullet or something on ‘Riot Van’ and left it up when we went onto ‘Red Light…’ so I could do a guide vocal when we did the take. It turned out the guide sounded great so we didn’t bother doing another in the end. There was a few more verses written for this, but it was all too much and it never got past practice because the same riff was just going round and round with all this verbal on top. Everyone got bored so we cut some stuff out.

About this time last year we’d played outside Sheffield a little and were in the process of just trying to play in new places a little more. You got expenses covered most of the time but that was all – you never made a profit or anything like that. We didn’t really care, we were getting to play and having a laugh and not a great deal of people outside Sheffield had really heard of us so we didn’t expect anything in return. When you talked to people about it however, it was somewhat frowned upon and perhaps sniggered at that we were playing for free. Everyone’s an expert about this band lark and it seemed like a bit of a joke to a lot of people – while they’d wish us all the best I think behind our backs they were really convinced we were just wasting our time.

We used to have a practice room in an old industrial sort of area just outside town. Loads of bands practice round there and we still do as well. There are sandwich shops and some other businesses that are run there by day. At night, as well as studios and practice rooms there is perhaps some less celebrated activity. When we moved into our room the man next door actually really said, ‘It changes around here when the sun goes down,’ and you would get asked for business [by prostitutes] out in the street sometimes, or it would be the middle of the night and there would be a bloke with a carrier bag just walking about as we left. It sounds like there’s a bit of a humorous tone but it’s really pretty sad. It’s strange how these different worlds exist in the same space.

The bouncer thing is really just me having a bit of a dig. I still get asked for ID now when I go to clubs so when I wasn’t actually old enough it was a nightmare trying to get in anywhere at all. I actually had one of the best nights ever after getting turned away once though so it’s not always a bad thing. I remember one night walking from my mate’s house in Hillsborough to get the bus back to ours one Sunday and the second verse and the ‘last night what we talked about’ bit was dreamed up during that journey. We always try to show the same attention to the rhythm and the way the parts work together as we do to the words or any of that stuff. I think this is a good example of when we’ve had a really good crack at both.

All our other tunes are quite specific to a certain incident or series of incidents. This one is more reflective and a bit of an attempt at summing up perhaps. This is definitely a special one for us and it could only ever have been the conclusion to the first record. ‘Nobheads don’t dress in a certain way’ is an important theme in there I suppose – at least they don’t where we come from.