When Arctic Monkeys sprang into the charts 16 years ago, they did so with a hurtling energy and an album name borrowed from Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At the time, the band’s lead singer, Alex Turner, explained their reasoning: the record’s stories were similarly drawn from the threshold of the weekend – one foot in the hopeful glamour of the previous night, the other in the plain reality of the morning after. In the years since, it’s been hard not to also regard the title of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not as a statement of creative intent: a desire to buck musical expectation, to not repeat whatever came before. Across six albums the band have moved wilfully from indie to rock to funk to, on their last outing – 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a collection of songs that married Serge Gainsbourg and the Beach Boys.
