High Green doesn't look like the birthplace of anything. It's a quiet suburb clinging to the northern edge of Sheffield, all pebble-dashed semis and neat front gardens, the kind of place where weekends revolve around football, cider and not very much else. Matt Helders once described it perfectly: "There's not much more humble than High Green. We all lived within one road of each other, basically on the same estate."
It was here, in the summer of 2002, that three 16-year-olds decided to start a band. Alex Turner, whose dad was a music teacher but who had barely picked up a guitar himself. Helders, his next-door neighbour and close friend since primary school, on drums. Andy Nicholson, who they knew from Stocksbridge High School, fumbling through bass guitar until his fingers worked out what they were doing. A fourth friend, Jamie Cook, joined as second guitarist shortly after. None of them had any formal musical training. None of them expected it to go anywhere. Turner later told an interviewer, "We never thought we would make a living out of it. We just thought it would be nice to play our own stuff."
They needed a name. Helders' dad had played in a band during the 1970s called the Arctic Monkeys, and the name had apparently been floating around the family ever since. Turner said Helders had passed it down "like a recipe." It stuck.
There was one problem. Nobody wanted to sing. Two other friends had already turned down vocal duties when Turner, by default rather than ambition, stepped up. He had, according to Helders, "a thing for words." That turned out to be a considerable understatement.
The Garage, the Pub, and the Producer Who Told Him Off
For their first year, the band rehearsed at Yellow Arch Studios in Neepsend, an industrial corner of Sheffield that felt a long way from the leafy suburban streets where they'd grown up. They worked hard. The studio owner was impressed enough to lend them touring equipment. By mid-2003, they had a setlist of original songs and enough confidence to book their first gig.
On 13 June 2003, Arctic Monkeys played The Grapes, a pub on Trippet Lane in Sheffield city centre. They were paid £27 for a 25-minute set that included two originals ("Ravey Ravey Ravey Club" and "Curtains Closed") alongside covers of the White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba", the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" and songs by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. The room upstairs has since been converted into a living room. The band were 16 years old.
That same summer, Turner was moonlighting as a rhythm guitarist for a funk band called Judan Suki, having met their singer Jon McClure on a bus. While recording a Judan Suki demo at Sheffield's 2fly Studios, Turner asked the in-house producer Alan Smyth if he'd be willing to record an Arctic Monkeys demo. Smyth agreed. He thought they had something special going on, but he did have one note: he told Turner off for singing in an American accent.
It was the kind of correction that changes a career. Turner started singing in his own voice, a sharp Sheffield drawl, and suddenly the lyrics about taxi ranks and nightclub queues and chip shops sounded like they belonged to someone who'd actually been there. Which, of course, he had. Smyth introduced the band to management (Geoff Barradale and Ian McAndrew) and between 2003 and 2004, the team paid for Smyth and Arctic Monkeys to record a series of three-song demos.
Burnt CDs and the Internet They Never Asked For
Eighteen demo songs were recorded in total. The band burned them onto CDs and gave them away at gigs, a completely normal thing for unsigned bands to do, except that what happened next was anything but normal. Fans started uploading the tracks to the internet. They shared them on forums, on blogs, and on MySpace pages. The collection became known as Beneath the Boardwalk (named by a fan after The Boardwalk, the Sheffield music venue where Turner had taken a part-time bar job after finishing college).
Here's the detail that most people miss: Arctic Monkeys never had a MySpace account. The fans did all of it themselves. The band's attitude was relaxed. "We never made those demos to make money or anything," they said. They just wanted people to hear the songs. By late 2004, their gigs were packed with audiences singing every word back at them, all from tracks that had never been officially released.
The timing was extraordinary. File-sharing was in its excitable infancy. Music blogs were becoming tastemakers. And here was a band from Sheffield whose songs were spreading city to city, country to country, entirely through word of mouth and a few hundred burnt CDs. Commentators would later call Arctic Monkeys the first band to break through via the internet. The band themselves found the label slightly annoying. They'd broken through by writing great songs and playing chaotic gigs. The internet was just the delivery mechanism.
Fifteen Days in Lincolnshire
By early 2005, the buzz was deafening. Labels were circling. A bidding war broke out. The Daily Star reported that the band had signed a £1 million publishing deal with EMI and a £725,000 contract with Epic Records. Arctic Monkeys denied it on their website, dubbing the paper "The Daily Stir." In June 2005, they signed with Domino Recording Company, an independent label run by Laurence Bell. The band said they were attracted to Bell's approach: he ran the label from his flat and only signed bands he personally liked. In a world of corporate A&R departments, that felt right.
Their debut single, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor", was released on 17 October 2005 and went straight to number one on the UK Singles Chart. Their second single, "When the Sun Goes Down" (previously known by its working title "Scummy"), did exactly the same thing. Two singles, two number ones. They hadn't even released an album yet.
The album sessions took place at Chapel Studios, a Victorian building in rural Lincolnshire, produced by Jim Abbiss (who had previously worked with Kasabian and Editors). Abbiss chose the location deliberately. It was isolated enough to keep the band away from the media circus building around them in London and Sheffield, and comfortable enough to let a group of teenagers relax into the work. "They were incredibly young and they'd arrived at a studio with people they didn't know," Abbiss later recalled. "They were like a little gang."
The entire album was recorded in 15 days. One day for setup, one song per day for 13 days, one day at the end for odds and ends. Most tracks were recorded live in the room, with the guitar amps placed in booths and the bass amp in a corridor for separation. Turner typically needed only two or three vocal takes. Cook, the guitarist, shut down an early suggestion from Abbiss to add an organ part. "I really don't think we should over-complicate things," he said. It never made the record.
The final track, "A Certain Romance", was recorded completely live, vocals and all, in a single take. Abbiss later described witnessing it as incredible.
The Man on the Cover
The album needed artwork. The band's original concept was called A Weekend With, built around photographs of a young man's Friday night through to Sunday morning. They recruited Chris McClure, a friend from Sheffield's music scene and the brother of Jon McClure from Reverend and The Makers (a band who were part of the same thriving mid-2000s Sheffield indie community). McClure was a student at Manchester Metropolitan University at the time.
An initial photo session in Sheffield produced a portrait of McClure smoking a cigarette. Andy Nicholson, a keen photographer who was documenting the band's rise from the inside, showed it to the group. They liked it, but wanted something more authentic. Nicholson called McClure and made him an offer: the band would pay for him and three friends to have a proper night out, on the condition that they didn't come back to the bar until every penny was spent.
The accounts of exactly how much money was involved vary with every retelling (somewhere between £70 and £700, depending on who's talking), but the outcome was the same. McClure and his friends had a colossal night in Liverpool. One of them woke up in Manchester. Another woke up in Sheffield. Their car was in Liverpool, the driver was in Sheffield. It was, by all accounts, absolute carnage. McClure returned to the Korova bar after midnight, sat on a stool, and photographer Alexandra Wolkowicz took the shot. He threw up halfway through the session.
The resulting photograph, black-and-white, bleary-eyed, cigarette in hand, became one of the most recognisable album covers of the 2000s. NHS Scotland criticised it for glamorising smoking. The band's product manager pointed out that the man in the photograph did not look like smoking was doing him the world of good. The album title, borrowed from Alan Sillitoe's 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, replaced A Weekend With and gave the cover a confrontational edge that matched the music perfectly.
(McClure, incidentally, has since become a viral sensation on TikTok as "Steve Bracknall," the fictional assistant manager of a fake Sunday League football team called Royal Oak FC. He confirmed the connection in late 2024.)
363,735
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was released on 23 January 2006. It sold 118,501 copies on its first day, more than the rest of the Top 20 albums combined. By the end of the week, it had shifted 363,735 copies, making it the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history. The previous record was held by Hear'Say, the group assembled on ITV's Popstars, which makes the comparison even more satisfying. A reality TV act versus four lads from High Green who got there by handing out CDs at pub gigs.
Turner was 19 years old. He'd been working behind the bar at The Boardwalk less than two years earlier. Now he was being called a master of observation, a generational voice, the most exciting lyricist in British rock since Morrissey. And his band celebrated their first number one by going to KFC.
NME declared Arctic Monkeys "Our Generation's Most Important Band." Time magazine named the album the best of 2006. It won the Mercury Prize, the BRIT Award for Best British Album, and was nominated for a Grammy. The record has since been certified 8x platinum in the UK.
But the speed of it all had consequences. Andy Nicholson, the bassist who'd been there from the very beginning, who'd taken the original photo that inspired the album cover and helped build the band from a school project into a phenomenon, couldn't cope with the pace. He sat out the band's first North American tour, officially due to fatigue. He later confirmed the decision to leave wasn't his. In 2019, he described the moment the band broke the news to him at their management's office as "one of the few soul-destroying moments of my life."
Nick O'Malley, formerly of a Sheffield band called the Dodgems, stepped in as temporary replacement and never left.
The Second Album and Beyond
Second album syndrome didn't apply. Favourite Worst Nightmare arrived in April 2007, went straight to number one, and won Best British Album at the 2008 BRITs. The band turned up to the ceremony dressed as Yorkshire farmers. "Fluorescent Adolescent," co-written by Turner and his then-girlfriend Johanna Bennett (who was also a musician, fronting a band called Totalizer), became one of the defining indie anthems of the decade. It was reportedly written as a word game in a hotel room on holiday.
The band kept moving. Humbug (2009) was recorded partly at Rancho De La Luna in the Californian desert with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age, the influential rock musician who'd built the studio as a creative retreat. The sound grew darker, heavier, more psychedelic. "Crying Lightning" and "Cornerstone" showed a band deliberately shedding its skin, and Turner's lyrics turned from Sheffield nightlife to something stranger and more surreal.
Suck It and See (2011) brought melody back to the foreground. Produced by James Ford (who would go on to produce every subsequent Arctic Monkeys album), it was sunnier and more direct than Humbug, with "Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair" rattling along like a garage band who'd accidentally learned how to write pop hooks. Neither album sold like the debut, but both confirmed that Turner had no interest in repeating himself.
Then came the Olympics. On 27 July 2012, Danny Boyle (the director behind Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire) chose Arctic Monkeys to perform at the opening ceremony of the London Games. They played "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" while fireworks exploded above the stadium, then covered the Beatles' "Come Together" while 75 cyclists circled the track with illuminated dove wings. They performed the Beatles in front of Paul McCartney, who closed the ceremony with "Hey Jude." NBC, broadcasting to the American audience, cut the "Dancefloor" performance and replaced it with an advert. This tells you everything you need to know about network television.
AM and Global Domination
AM, released in September 2013, changed everything again. The fuzzy, R&B-inflected riffs of "Do I Wanna Know?" and "R U Mine?" drew on Black Sabbath, Dr. Dre and 1960s girl groups in roughly equal measure. It was, on paper, a bizarre combination. In practice, it was irresistible. "Do I Wanna Know?" became a global hit, and "I Wanna Be Yours" (built around a poem by John Cooper Clarke, the Salford punk poet Turner had met while working at The Boardwalk years earlier) has since amassed over 3.6 billion streams on Spotify.
AM topped four Billboard charts, was certified 4x platinum in the US, and won Best British Album at the BRITs for a third time. Arctic Monkeys became the first band to win both Best British Group and Best British Album three times. A decade on from High Green, they were one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.
What followed was the kind of move that separates interesting bands from great ones. Rather than making AM 2, Turner wrote the next album entirely on a Steinway Vertegrand piano he'd received as a 30th birthday gift from the band's manager. He'd been experiencing writer's block after years of non-stop touring, and a friend had suggested he stop writing love songs for a while. After watching Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½, a story about a director struggling with creative paralysis, Turner started writing songs about a fictional hotel on the moon.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018) divided fans and critics almost exactly down the middle. It was loungey, strange, funny, and deliberately uncommercial. Turner designed the artwork himself using cardboard cut-outs and a tape recorder. It still debuted at number one.
The Car (2022) continued in a similar orchestral direction, picked up an Ivor Novello Award nomination and another Mercury Prize nod, and confirmed that Turner has absolutely no interest in giving people what they expect.
The Vinyl
Arctic Monkeys are one of the best-selling vinyl artists in the UK, and their catalogue rewards collecting. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not is certified 8x platinum in Britain and sounds exactly as it should on record: raw, immediate, like a band playing in a room two feet in front of you. The original Domino pressing is clean and punchy. AM is their most widely available vinyl, with multiple coloured variants and reissues that have kept it in UK vinyl charts years after release. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is arguably the one that benefits most from the format. It's a headphones-and-a-dark-room album, and the wider dynamic range of vinyl suits its spacious, late-night production perfectly.
All seven studio albums are currently in print. You can compare prices across UK retailers on their artist page.
From High Green to Everywhere
Twenty-four years after four teenagers from a Sheffield suburb started a band because their mates were doing it, Arctic Monkeys have sold over 46 million equivalent album units worldwide. They've won seven BRIT Awards, a Mercury Prize, an Ivor Novello, and 20 NME Awards. They've headlined Glastonbury, played the Olympics opening ceremony, and became the first independent-label band to debut at number one in the UK with their first five consecutive albums. Not even Oasis managed that.
Turner, the kid who was too shy to sing and too self-conscious to share his writing, is now widely considered one of the finest lyricists of his generation. And somewhere in Sheffield, The Grapes still stands on Trippet Lane, even if the room upstairs where it all started is now somebody's living room. The band got £27 for that first gig. They probably spent it at KFC.