Taking off to the Mojave Desert to work with Queens of the Stone Age guru Josh Homme was just the move Arctic Monkeys needed to make to find their new sound, they tell JIM CARROLL
NATURALLY, there is no mention of the difficult third album syndrome. This is the Arctic Monkeys we’re talking about. They don’t find it “difficult” to write and record an album. That’s a problem for other bands, lesser mortals, the B-listers, the imitators, the fakers. Remember, this is a band who delivered two blockbuster albums in 15 months without any discernible dip in quality.
And if that wasn’t enough, lead singer Alex Turner and a pal started a side project for a laugh which lead to another album, another tour and more accolades. No, a third album was not going to be a difficult task.
But a third album with a twist, a third album which sees them moving outside their collective comfort zone? Ah, now we have something to talk about on a sunny summer's morning on the roof of a swish private members' club high above east London. Indeed, there's a lot of sand in the air as the four Monkeys talk about how new album Humbugfound its feet in a makeshift studio in the middle of the Mojave Desert in southern California.
It was Josh Homme who brought them to that spot, many miles from home. “We weren’t really thinking about what producer to use for the record,” recalls guitarist Jamie Cook. “We just wanted to work with Josh as an experiment. We had time to go out there, spend two weeks with him and if it didn’t work out, we could go off and do the album elsewhere.”
“It’s your third album so it was time to try something a bit mad,” says Turner. “We could have gone away and done the whole introspective thing, but then Josh and the desert came calling and that seemed to be more us.”
The band and Queens of the Stone Age leader had long been fans of each other’s work. “We’d met a few times at festivals and played a gig with him once, and he seemed like a good guy,” says drummer Matt Helders. “We gave him a demo and we talked to his people. We don’t have people, so we got Laurence from Domino to do the talking – Laurence is good at that. Josh was interested and he said we had to come to the desert.”
What they found in the desert just outside the little town of Joshua Tree was Rancho de la Luna. "It's a bungalow where they did all those Desert Sessionsalbums over the years," explains bassist Nick O'Malley. "It's not a proper studio, far from it. There's a mixing desk in the living room, loads of amps in the toilet and keyboards in the bedroom. "
It's clear from listening to the band – and listening to Humbug– that they found a new energy in the desert and from working with Homme. "We didn't want to repeat what we'd done with the first and second albums," says Helders. "They were recorded very quickly and the music was put down very quickly. This time, we wanted to lay the basics down and build on that and make the songs more musical rather than just repeat the whole quick two guitars, drums and bass sound."
“We weren’t scared this time to have more layers and textures on the songs,” chips in Turner. “We limited ourselves in the past with this idea that we wanted to play the song live almost immediately – record the song on a Monday and play it on Tuesday night.
“I feel really satisfied with this album in a way I don’t remember feeling about the other two. That’s a product of it being more considered and us taking a bit more time and care with it.”
They also wanted a challenge. “I suppose we had a bit of a cocky attitude going into it,” says Cook. “People kept going on about Josh and this studio in the desert and we were like, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll give it a go.’ But when we got there and started working, we knew it would provide a lot more possibilities than we ever imagined.
“It really does provoke you to do better when you have a producer of that standard because you’re pushed to play better. You think something is good, but Josh goes, ‘you can do better’, so you go away and try to do that.”
The Humbugstory doesn't end there. After recording in the desert and Los Angeles late last year, they did some sessions earlier this year with James Ford, the Simian Mobile Disco guy who produced both their previous albums and Turner's side project with The Last Shadow Puppets.
Did Ford feel a bit jilted hearing them raving about the desert? “James was quite noble about us going to the desert,” says Turner. “He knew we had to do something else and go to someone like Josh to help us get to that point. He’s a good head to have around, a good sounding board, a good pal, it would be strange not to work with him.”
“As a producer, even though he didn’t say this, I’m sure he found it interesting to work on an album where someone else had done a lot of work,” says Helders. “He had to put his mark on it, but still make it sound consistent. A lot of people might not be able to sense who did what, which is quite an amazing thing when you consider how different Josh and James are.”
Humbugis a thumping good listen, the sound of a band performing out of their skins and flashing far more muscle. Darker than previous turns and certainly not played at the same full-throttle pace as before, it has both shadowy, mysterious mood-swingers such as The Jeweller's Handsand Cornerstoneand throwbacks of a kind to the band of old ( My Propellor, Pretty Visitors).
Moreover, Humbugshows yet another side to Turner the lyricist. After proving his skills as an astute and sharp observer on albums one and two, there are plenty of signs here of a writer prepared to up his own game and try new ways of working.
“There’s been a definite development in how I write,” he explains. “People tend to forget that the first album was written in a very short period of time and the songs all came from the same point of view and the same environment. Now, everything about me has changed, including how and what I write about.
“The early songs on the new album come from a period when I just couldn’t sleep and was walking around the house at 4am. It wasn’t because I was anxious or nervous about stuff, just that I just couldn’t sleep. It turned out that those lyrics were rudderless and random compared to earlier lyrics, which were far more meticulous and detailed. I used to have to be so organised, but the desire to be like that drifted away a little on the second album and more so now.
“Before, I wanted every line to be crystal-clear – now, I wanted to be a bit more obscure with the songs. Everything doesn’t have to be under the microscope all the time. Because the lyrics have become more masked and oblique, they’ve become more personal.”
He has grown to increasingly admire how people such as Nick Cave work. "I've got more into him over the past few years. He blows my mind with how he writes. There's a song of his called Little Empty Boatand the lyrics on that just f**king kill me because of how he sketches out the song.
“I really admire, too, how he has his office where he goes off to sit at a desk every day and write. As he says himself, he’s not one of those dicks who writes his lyrics on the back of a cigarette box. Too right Nick!”
Turner toyed with the notion of introducing characters and narratives to his songs.
“I did think about introducing themes and groups of people and write a few things about those characters, but it turned out that my little pretend world for those characters didn’t fit with where the songs were going.
“Unless you have decided from the beginning that this is the setting for the record, it just doesn’t work. I suppose the first album was like that with Sheffield on a Saturday night as its backdrop.”
Three of the four Monkeys still live in Sheffield – “I don’t really know where I live these days,” quips the Brooklyn-residing Turner – which they view as a good thing.
“It helps that the friends we had before the band took off are still the friends we have now and they keep you grounded,” says Helders.
In many ways, they’re still the same young fellas who popped up on the radar four years ago. “We did a load of interviews a few days ago with Japanese journalists,” says O’Malley, “and it’s surreal to think that all these people flew all the way from Japan just to talk to us. Things like that remind you that what we’re doing is weird. At least it is weird – it’s when stuff like that stops being weird that the problems begin.”
But unlike many other acts kicking off, the Arctic Monkeys were sharp enough to realise that there are times when a band is better off saying “no” rather than “yes” to offers. You get the feeling, too, that this manifesto is still very much something they hold true.
“We’d see things with bands who were around when we were kids and tried to stay clear of that,” says Turner. “These would be bands who were on the front of every magazine, whose songs were on every radio show, who were in your face all the time.
“You’d eventually get sick of them and not want to listen to them. We’ve always been careful not to be one of those bands and not get on people’s nerves.”
“A lot of that is out of a band’s control,” notes Helders. “We knew that a magazine can put you on the cover without doing an interview, for instance, so as much as we could control, we did. We blagged it at the start, but we were fast learners.”
** Humbug is released on August 21st on Domino.
