The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

“I’m pleased to hear from yer, man. Stool Pigeon! I’ve been in Denmark. I don’t think I could stand another Denmark. Heh heh heh! Have I met you before?”

It’s the beginning of my interview with Alex Turner, and I’m immediately lost. What was initially a face-to-face chat with Turner and his fellow Last Shadow Puppet Miles Kane has become a phone interview after Kane was taken ill, prompting a bunch of cancelled press opportunities. So Turner’s thick Sheffield burr and penchant for mumbling asides and vaguely surreal conversational gambits take a bit of adjusting to.

I haven’t met Turner before, as it goes. But it feels like we all have, now doesn’t it? Since his group Arctic Monkeys shot from obscurity to ubiquity over the closing few months of 2005, Alex Turner has been everywhere, despite often looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. In every conversation about modern music or quintessentially British pop groups; in every cocky, skinny new English singer with a mod-casual look and a band that play itchy-scratchy guitars; in every observational, sneery, slice-of-life song lyric by an ambitious new British artist; in every discourse that begins on the subject of how samey/drab/formulaic/boring English guitar rock has become, but ends “…except for the Arctic Monkeys, of course”. And when we big up the Arctic Monkeys, we’re really just bigging up the small, wiry, boyishly handsome, somewhat aloof but somehow still loveable lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of Arctic Monkeys, who is, after all, the only member of the Arctic Monkeys that anyone can name.

Usually, the 21st Century overnight celeb is loathed and worshipped in at least equal measure, and provokes as much envy and cynicism as admiration. Yet I’ve still not overheard a single person utter the words “I hate Alex Turner”. It’s like this 22-year-old son of two Sheffield teachers went straight from Hot New Thing to National Treasure, while missing out on all the messy bits in the middle.

All of which means that Alex Turner’s first side project has been publicised like the new album by a major artist. The Last Shadow Puppets are Turner and Liverpudlian Miles Kane, who like Turner, is a 22-year-old leader of a young band, in this case The Rascals, whose own debut album is due out this Summer. The pair, who met in 2004 when the Arctic Monkeys toured with Kane’s previous band The Little Flames, have made a 12-track debut album called The Age Of Understatement, on which the producer and drummer is Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford, and which also features The London Metropolitan Orchestra arranged and conducted by Owen Pallett, who has worked with Arcade Fire. It’s an orchestral pop record, heavily influenced by the much admired and imitated sixties work of Scott Walker.

But is it any cop? Well… yeah, it’s okay. Ambitious, tuneful, intelligent and made more interesting by the fact that you can barely tell the duetting Kane and Turner apart. But initial reports that it’s the equal of Walker, John Barry, Burt Bacharach and David Axelrod are a tad exaggerated. Think The Coral, or My Life Story, or the second, underrated Funboy 3 album Waiting, and your expectations will be more realistic. The album’s ‘deadlier than the male’ theme is something we’ve heard since Scott Walker, too… but we’ll come back to that later. And at times, the lyrics come on a little like two precocious kids battling to top each other’s most pretentious line. Critics are queuing up to praise the likes of this, for example, from ‘Separate And Ever Deadly’ - ‘Save me from the secateurs / I’ll pretend I didn’t hear / Can’t you see I’m a ghost in the wrong coat / Biting butter and crumbs’ - but wisely stay well away from explaining what the bloody hell it actually means.

But The Age Of The Understatement is entertaining and tries a hell of a lot harder than the average rock star vanity project. And it’s obvious that Kane is there for reasons other than being Turner’s bezzie mucker. So it’s fitting that it’s Kane we get to talk to first. He seems like a jaunty sort of fella, with a sing-song Scouse accent and a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Kane and Turner began writing the songs together early last year. “It was just as I was leaving my first band The Little Flames and wanted to start The Rascals,” Kane recalls. “We had ‘Standing Next To Me’, ‘Only The Truth’ and ‘In My Room’, and it was just an idea to go and record these tunes as a bit of a release thing. We’ve become best mates now and we’ve known each other for three-and-a-half years… way before we did any tunes. It just became apparent that we’d do something together. The rest of The Rascals and the Monkeys just assumed we would. But each little step along the way… we just didn’t expect it. It seems to be quite a big thing now.”

GM: What was it like recording with an orchestra? Was that your first experience of something like that?
Kane: “Yeah. It was bloody mind-blowing is what it was! The first tune we did was ‘Meeting Place’ in this studio in France. We didn’t know how to do it. It was all drums but dead cheesy, like - pure pop but dead shit. When the chorus came in it was like, ‘Here’s the chorus!’ One of them. So we stripped it down, took out all the drums, put in the strings. And it made it… brought it to life. That was dead emotional, being down there for those couple of days while they were doing it. Shivers down the spine.”

GM: You got Owen Pallett to arrange the strings. Weren’t you and Alex tempted to do it yourselves?
Kane: “I can’t see me and Al conducting an orchestra, can you? Be a good sight, though. ‘Give me the stick! Give me the stick!’ We did map out where we wanted strings on a cheap string synth. We gave that to Owen and he built on that.”

GM: Why the Russian imagery on video for the ‘The Age Of Understatement’ single?
Kane: “To be fair, it was this French guy we got in to do it called Romain Gavras. It was his idea. When he heard the tune he just said that the first thing that came into his head was, like, Moscow. He wanted to make it surreal: [adopts dodgy French accent] ‘Let’s have an ice-skater. And tanks.’ I was like, ‘Bloody hell, I don’t want it to be like a Green Day video or summat. I’ve got no message about war!’ But he was cool, so we trusted him. We went over for two days and did it. But there was no big crew. It was all filmed on two cameras. Even though it looks grand it was just him, two other fellas, and a girl.”

GM: How did you get permission to use real Russian soldiers and tanks?
Kane: “Well, that was another thing. I don’t know how he did it. I think there was a lot of… backhanders, to be honest. Vodka, ciggies, and money dropped behind a tank. All the fellas in Russia looked like Bond baddies. But we didn’t get much time to explore the centre of Moscow. A very mad, different city.”

GM: Were you and Alex aware, beforehand, of just how much you sound and look like each other? There’s a twins-type thing going on with you two…
Kane: “We probably weren’t. But now people have said it, we probably are. What can you do? We are. We’re best mates.’

The interview with Miles Kane is short and sweet. Pity. He seems nice. But on to Alex Turner and the rest of that surprisingly warm telephone greeting. “We were supposed to meet, weren’t we? But we start rehearsing today ’cos we’ve got to do Jools Holland in a couple of weeks.”

Alex Turner finishes off the semi-apology with something utterly incomprehensible. He has a strong Yorkshire accent anyway, but finishes the majority of his answers, asides, and stray thoughts with a mumble that swiftly staggers to a whisper. If one of these under-the-breath growls actually contains The Meaning Of Life, then apologies in advance. My mini-disc and normal human ears just couldn’t make sense of it.

GM: Are you surprised by how positive the initial reviews of The Age Of… have been?
Turner: “It has been well received, hasn’t it? There was one guy in Germany who seemed a bit funny about it.”

GM: Why… what did he say?
Turner: “I dunno… it’s not what he said. It was written all over his face, d’you know what I mean? [quite good German accent] ‘So, you make big record. Humph!’ But… it has gone down well. Though I’m wondering what they’ll really say when it actually comes out.”

GM: The Mojo review implied that it was better than Arctic Monkeys.
Turner: “Did they? Well. Well, well, well. Maybe it’s just more Dad Mag. Ha! I hope not. It wasn’t the intention. They don’t know what is and what isn’t, do they? They’re confused, the Dads.”

GM: How serious was The Last Shadow Puppets at the outset?
Turner: “We had an idea that we wanted to make an album. But it were just like, ‘see what happens’. We did some tunes and demo’ed them a year ago in James Ford’s practise room, and then we got excited. These tunes are good. We wondered what would happen if we did ’em with strings… dead big. But we were in the dark about how to go about that. All well and good, but, how do you that? So it was a voyage of discovery through the whole thing, even when it came down to doing the orchestra. Fuck, how’s this gonna turn out? The whole thing was dipped in… uncertainty, I suppose.”

GM: Apart from Scott Walker, what were the other prime influences?
Turner: “David Axelrod, especially that tune ‘The Fly’. When we were first writing there was a bit of Bowie - tunes off Ziggy Stardust - and Miles really likes Aladdin Sane. Bacharach, Matt Monro… and Billy Fury. We were always playing Billy Fury’s ‘Jealousy’. The whole tango rhythm… this tune that was gonna be a B-side but ended up on the album called ‘Separate And Ever Deadly’ - that has a rhythm off that ‘Jealousy’.”

GM: You’re a fan of The Coral, aren’t you?
Turner: “We both are.”

GM: A lot of this album is reminiscent of The Coral’s ‘Don’t Think You’re The First.’
Turner: “Yeah, I love that tune. But James and Ian [Skelly] are Miles’s cousins. And they’ve got him into a couple of tunes, and he’s got me into a lot of tunes. We’ve toured together and they’d always be playing you tunes that they love. They’ve got a lot of knowledge. They’re a band we’re very fond of.”

GM: I know they’re not a cool name to drop, but your album also reminds me of Britpop-era band Space…
Turner: “What? From Liverpool? Heh heh heh! That’s bad!”

GM: Well, they did have that ‘Female Of The Species’ hit…
Turner: “That lyric. Yeah, I s’pose. They were quite, like, jokey, weren’t they? That’s interesting. That’s funny, that!”

(Alex Turner breaks into a genuine, infectious giggle. It’s the most charming, unforced, good-sport response to a sly insult I’ve ever encountered.)

GM: The Last Shadow Puppets’ lyrics are interesting, though. The theme is pretty much, ‘women - they’re evil’.
Turner: “I don’t think it’s saying that women are evil. It’s in a fun way, even though there’s this dominant female character that runs all way through it. It seems quite funny.’

GM: The track ‘Black Plant’ evens features a gender role-reversal; it’s the male character in the song who wants tender, gentle lovemaking, while the girl wants dirty wham-bam fun.
Turner: “Yeah. Definitely! And that came from a lass telling me that, how she’d chucked this lad over… got bored. So I suppose there’s a bit of reality in that.”

GM: Isn’t this kind of orchestral pop something you could have done with Arctic Monkeys?
Turner: “No. It’s completely a product of the three of us doing it all together. The way we writ it was different. With a band you’ve got to work it out together. It often all comes from the drums or some little part. With this, we writ it in a traditional way, I suppose… chords, lyrics and melody. Then we put everything else on top. Me and Miles have been doing little acoustic shows over the last couple of weeks… one in New York and one in Madrid. You can do that with this stuff. With something like - and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing - but with something like the Monkeys, one of the things we’ve never really been able to do is those things at radio stations when you sort of try and… there’s only a few songs we can do with just acoustic guitars, because the strong points are, like, the band. The four of us. The drums. That was a long way of saying that, but I finally said what I were trying to say five minutes ago.”

GM: You’ve been through this ‘intense interest around new album’ experience twice before. This is all new to Miles. Are you having to guide him through it?
Turner: “Nah, he’s not nervous. Huh… it’s probably the other way round. Ha! He’s just very excited. He’s got his Rascals album coming out… that’s the thing, really. If The Rascals album had come out before he probably would’ve been more in people’s perception or more like an even keel. People go towards the recognisable thing. But that is a bit of a struggle ’cos it is completely together and equal. And I think it’s obvious when you hear it that it is. But we got this done and I’ve never understood the point of sitting on things for ages. You need to get it out pretty quickly.”

GM: The Last Shadow Puppets might be an equal partnership, but the cover-lines on the mags and papers still say ‘Alex Turner’.
Turner: “It does my fucking head in. Sorry for swearing. Obviously they’re not gonna put Last Shadow Puppets ’cos no-one knows who the fuck that is and they wanna sell magazines at the end of the day. But the only thing I object to is that they could at least put both names. It’s just lazy, rather than malicious.”

GM: You said in a recent NME interview that one of the reasons you made this album is that “somebody needs to do proper pop”. What is “proper pop”, then?
Turner: “I bet I never said that. HA! But I think with this album it seemed like… if we didn’t make it, either no one else would or someone else would. And both of them seemed, like, sad, because we wanted to make this… does that make sense? Because this is poppy… you can hear it on radio an’ that. But it’s also interesting. I don’t think I did say that about ‘proper pop’, but there’s few bands that unashamedly do pop. It’s like that traditional thing that I was talking about before - the way it was written, song first. But then we gave it all a lot of thought and consideration. The Beatles, I know it’s an obvious thing to say, but that’s proper pop.”

GM: It’s been over two years since your overnight success. How are you coping with fame? Any regrets?
Turner: “I dunno… alright, I hope. It’s difficult to… I just try and keep me head down, I think. But I’m happy with where I’m at. It’s sunny outside. I’ve got band practise in a minute. It’s a good day. There’s nothing to worry about.”