Alexander David Turner (born 6 January 1986) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is best known as the frontman and principal songwriter of the rock band Arctic Monkeys, with whom he has released six albums. Turner has also recorded with his side-project The Last Shadow Puppets and as a solo artist.
Raised in High Green, a suburb of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Turner is the only child of two teachers. When he was sixteen, he and three friends formed Arctic Monkeys. Their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006), became the fastest-selling debut album in British history and is considered by Rolling Stone to be one of the greatest debut albums of all time. The band's subsequent studio albums, Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), Humbug (2009), Suck It and See (2011), AM (2013) and Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018), have experimented with desert rock, indie pop, and R&B. Arctic Monkeys headlined Glastonbury Festival in both 2007 and 2013, and performed during the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony.
Turner and Miles Kane have released two orchestral pop albums - The Age Of The Understatement (2008) and Everything You've Come To Expect (2016) - as the co-frontmen of The Last Shadow Puppets. Turner provided an acoustic soundtrack for the feature film Submarine (2010). He co-wrote and co-produced Alexandra Savior's debut album, Belladonna of Sadness (2017).
Turner's lyricism, ranging from kitchen sink realism to surrealist wordplay, has been widely praised. Each of his eight studio albums have reached number one on the UK Album Chart. He has won seven Brit Awards, an Ivor Novello Award, and has been nominated for the Mercury Prize five times, winning once.
Video Alex Turner
Biography
Early life
Turner grew up in High Green, a suburb of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He is an only child. His parents, Penny and David Turner, both worked at local secondary schools; his mother was a German teacher while his father taught physics and music. Turner took piano lessons until he was eight years old. During car journeys with his mother, he listened to music by Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, The Carpenters, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys. His father was a fan of swing music, particularly Frank Sinatra. He played the saxophone, trumpet and piano, and had been a member of big bands.
At the age of seven, Turner became friends with his neighbour and classmate Matt Helders. They met Andy Nicholson at secondary school and the three friends bonded over their shared enjoyment of rap artists such as Dr. Dre, Wu-Tang Clan, Outkast, Cypress Hill and Roots Manuva. They spent their weekends "making crap hip-hop" beats using Turner's father's Cubase system. Turner and his friends became interested in guitar bands following the breakthrough of The Strokes in 2001. That Christmas, when he was fifteen, Turner's parents bought him a guitar. The first band he saw live, accompanied by Helders and Nick O'Malley, was The Vines in Manchester. He later travelled to London with Helders and Nicholson to watch The Strokes play at Alexandra Palace.
Turner was educated at Stocksbridge High School (1997-2002). He did not read regularly and was too self-conscious to share his writing with others. Nonetheless, he enjoyed English lessons. His teacher, Simon Baker, later remembered him as a clever pupil who was "quite reserved ... a little bit different." He noted that Turner had an "incredibly laid-back" approach to school work, which worried his mother. He then spent two years at Barnsley College (2002-2004), where he studied for A-levels in music technology and media studies, and AS-levels in English, photography and psychology.
2002-2004: Formation of Arctic Monkeys
After watching friends perform in local bands, Turner, Helders, Nicholson and another friend, Jamie Cook, decided to form Arctic Monkeys in mid-2002. In the early days of the band, Helders has recalled that Turner "wasn't necessarily going to be the singer" but was the obvious candidate for lyricist: "I knew he had a thing for words." Before playing a live show, the band rehearsed for a year in both Turner and Helders' garages and, later, at an unused warehouse in Wath. Turner gradually began to share lyrics with his bandmates. According to Helders' mother, who drove the teenagers to and from their rehearsal space three times a week: "If they knew you were there, they would just stop so we had to sneak in." Their first gig was on Friday, 13 June 2003, supporting The Sound at a local pub called The Grapes. The set, which was partly recorded, comprised both original songs and cover versions of songs by The Beatles, The White Stripes, The Undertones, Fatboy Slim, and The Datsuns.
In the summer of 2003, Turner played seven gigs in York and Liverpool as part of the funk band Judan Suki, after meeting the lead singer Jon McClure on a bus. That August, while recording a demo with Judan Suki at Sheffield's 2fly Studios, Turner asked Alan Smyth if he would produce an Arctic Monkeys demo. Smyth obliged and "thought they definitely had something special going on. I told Alex off for singing in an American voice at that first session." An introduction by Smyth led to the band acquiring a management team, Geoff Barradale and Ian McAndrew. They paid for the band to record numerous three-song demos in 2003 and 2004. Barradale drove the band around venues in Scotland, the Midlands, and the north of England to establish their reputation as a live band. They handed out copies of the demo CDs after each show and fans began sharing the unofficial Beneath the Boardwalk demo compilation online. By the end of 2004, audiences knew the words to the songs and the demo of "I Bet You Look Good on The Dancefloor was played on BBC Radio 1 by Zane Lowe.
After finishing college in mid-2004, Turner deferred plans to attend university in Manchester and began working part-time as a bartender at the Sheffield music venue The Boardwalk. There, he met well-known musicians including Richard Hawley. On 2 December 2004, Turner was working when John Cooper Clarke appeared on stage as the opening act for The Fall. The performance made a big impression on the eighteen-year-old: "He's talking 100 miles an hour, and he's really funny ... It just blew my mind." After the show, Turner and his bandmates met the poet, who advised them to keep their unusual name and recalled in 2011 that they were "shy kids ... really sweet, sweet kids." The early Arctic Monkeys song "From the Ritz to the Rubble" was Turner's homage to Clarke's style ("my best shot at it, at least"). Later in his career, Turner would publish a Clarke poem as part of a single's artwork and would use another as the lyrical basis for a song.
2005-2007: Rise to fame
By 2005, Arctic Monkeys were coming to national attention. They received their first mention in a national newspaper in April, with a Daily Star reporter describing them as "the most exciting band to emerge this year". They self-released an EP, featuring the single "Fake Tales of San Francisco", in May and commenced their first nationwide tour soon afterwards. Turner began dating London-based student Johanna Bennett around this time. In June, in the midst of a bidding war, Arctic Monkeys signed to the independent label Domino Records and began recording an album with producer Jim Abbiss. In October, the single "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart.
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, Arctic Monkeys' debut album, was released in January 2006. Turner's lyrics, chronicling teenage nightlife in Sheffield, were widely praised and, initially, there was even media speculation that the 20-year-old frontman, "inarticulate in interviews", had help from an anonymous co-writer. Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times remarked: "Mr. Turner's lyrics are worth waiting for and often worth memorizing, too ... He has an uncanny way of evoking Northern English youth culture while neither romanticizing it nor sneering at it." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian said he was "equipped with a brave, unflinching eye for detail [and] a spring-loaded wit." Musically, he noted that the album was influenced by guitar bands "from the past five years ... Thrillingly, their music doesn't sound apologetic for not knowing the intricacies of rock history."
It was the fastest-selling debut album in British music history and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Turner was resistent to the hype, telling an interviewer that people were getting "carried away": "For where we're at [as a band], it is too much." Less than two months after the album's release, he declared that Sheffield-inspired songwriting was now "a closed book" for him: "We're moving on and thinking about different things." The band turned down many promotional opportunities and quickly released new material - a five-track EP Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? in April, and a stand-alone single, "Leave Before the Lights Come On", in August. That summer, the band made the decision to permanently replace Nicholson, who had taken a touring break due to "fatigue", with Nick O'Malley, another childhood friend. As of 2015, Turner and Nicholson remain "close friends".
Arctic Monkeys' second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, was released in April 2007. Lyrically, it touches on fame, love, and heartache. Turner and Bennett had ended their two-year relationship in January; she was credited as a co-writer on "Fluorescent Adolescent". Marc Hogan of Pitchfork said the album displayed Turner's "usual gift for vivid imagery" and explored "new emotional depth". Petridis of The Guardian found the album's references to fame "wearying" but was won over by the thoughtfulness, "tenderness and warmth" of the songs depicting relationships. Musically, he said the band were "pushing gently but confidently at the boundaries of their sound", with hints of "woozy psychedelia" and "piledriving metal". As part of their tour in support of the album, Arctic Monkeys headlined Glastonbury Festival and organised a mini-festival at Old Trafford Cricket Ground for 50,000 fans; support came from Amy Winehouse, Supergrass and The Coral.
Turner began to collaborate with other artists in 2007. He worked with rapper Dizzee Rascal on the song "Temptation", an Arctic Monkeys B-side which also featured on Rascal's album Maths and English. He co-wrote three songs on the Reverend and the Makers' debut album The State Of Things, after briefly sharing a Sheffield flat with the frontman Jon McClure. Another Sheffield singer, Richard Hawley, featured on the Arctic Monkeys' B-side "Bad Woman" and performed with the band at the Manchester Apollo, as part of a concert film directed by Richard Ayoade. Turner also announced plans to form a side-project band, The Last Shadow Puppets, with Miles Kane, whom he had befriended in mid-2005, and James Ford.
2008-2011: Musical experimentation
The Last Shadow Puppets' debut album, The Age of the Understatement, was released in April 2008, shortly after Turner had moved from Sheffield to east London. The orchestral pop record was inspired by Scott Walker and featured string arrangements by Owen Pallett. Alexa Chung, dating Turner since mid-2007, featured in the Ayoade-directed music video for "My Mistakes Were Made For You". Hogan of Pitchfork said the album "finds Turner moving from his anthropologically detailed Arctics brushstrokes to bold, cinematic gestures." Petridis of The Guardian noted that "the lyrics move away from his usual witty-but-prosaic observations into more opaque invention, without sacrificing sharpness." The Last Shadow Puppets toured the album with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Turner recorded a spoken word track "A Choice of Three" for his bandmate's compilation album Late Night Tales: Matt Helders.
Turner has described Arctic Monkeys' third album, Humbug, released in August 2009, as "a massive turning point" in the band's career. They travelled to Joshua Tree, California to work with producer Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, and explored a heavier sound. While Petridis of The Guardian found some lyrics "too oblique to connect", he was impressed by the band's "desire to progress". He described "Cornerstone" as a "dazzling display of what Turner can do: a fabulously witty, poignant evocation of lost love." Joe Tangari of Pitchfork felt the album was a "legitimate expansion of the band's songwriting arsenal" and described "Cornerstone", with "clever turns of phrase and his usual flair with detail", as the highlight: "The song is beyond lovelorn, with Turner delivering a swooning, dreamy vocal."
Turner and Chung moved from London to Brooklyn in the spring of 2009. While there, he began working on an acoustic soundtrack for the coming-of-age feature film Submarine (2010). His friend, director Richard Ayoade, initially approached him to record cover versions for the project. Instead, he recorded six original acoustic songs with James Ford and Bill Ryder-Jones. The Submarine EP was released in early 2011. Paul Thompson of Pitchfork said "Turner's keen wit and eye for detail coalesces into a tender portrayal of that resolute adolescent uncertainty." Turner also co-wrote six songs on Miles Kane's first solo album Colour of the Trap (2011) and co-wrote his standalone single "First of My Kind" (2012).
Arctic Monkeys' fourth album, Suck It and See, was recorded in Los Angeles and released in June 2011. Marc Hogan of Pitchfork enjoyed the album's "chiming indie pop balladry" and "muscular glam-rock". Lyrically, he noted that, while Turner was keeping his cards "close to the chest", "hardly a verse goes by without an instant quotable or two." Petridis of The Guardian remarked that Turner's new lyrical style of "dense, Dylanesque wordplay is tough to get right. More often than not, he pulls it off. There are beautifully turned phrases and piercing observation." Richard Hawley featured on a B-side, "You and I". That summer, while Turner ended his four-year relationship with Chung,
2012-2017: International success
With Turner now based in Los Angeles, Arctic Monkeys toured the USA as the support act for The Black Keys in early 2012. While they had previously opened for Oasis and Queens of the Stone Age at one-off shows, it was the band's first time to tour as a supporting act. They released "R U Mine?" as a standalone single in preparation for the tour, with Turner's new girlfriend, Arielle Vandenberg, appearing in the music video. Faced with winning over indifferent audiences, Turner, now sporting a "rockabilly-inspired quiff", began to develop a new stage persona. Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone noted of his "newfound showmanship": "He puts his guitar down to strut and dance, drops to his knees for solos when he does play, flirts shamelessly with the female fans." Later that year, Arctic Monkeys performed "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" and a cover of "Come Together" by The Beatles at the Danny Boyle-directed 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony. In early 2013, Turner provided backing vocals for the song "If I Had a Tail" from Queens of the Stone Age's ...Like Clockwork album and played bass guitar on "Get Right", a Miles Kane B-side, followed by Arctic Monkeys' second headlining appearance at Glastonbury in June.
AM was released in September 2013. Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork said that the album, dealing with "desperate 3 a.m. thoughts", managed to modernise "T. Rex bop, Bee Gees backup vocals, Rolling Stones R&B, and Black Sabbath monster riffage". Phil Mongredien of The Guardian described it as "their most coherent, most satisfying album since their debut": "Turner proves he has not lost his knack for an insightful lyric." Arctic Monkeys promoted the album heavily in the USA, in contrast to previous album campaigns where, according to Helders, they had refused to do radio promotion: "We couldn't even have told you why at the time. Just stubborn teenage thinking." Turner briefly reunited with Chung in the summer of 2014, having ended his two-year relationship with Vandenberg earlier that year. He spent much of 2014 touring AM and began dating American model Taylor Bagley in early 2015.
The Last Shadow Puppets released their second album, Everything You've Come to Expect, in April 2016. Turner, Kane and Ford were joined by Zach Dawes of Mini Mansions, with whom Turner had collaborated on the song "Vertigo" in 2015. Laura Snapes of Pitchfork detected an air of "misanthropy" in the album. However, she acknowledged that Turner was "no less a gifted lyricist than ever" and described some songs as "totally gorgeous ... the structures fluid and surprising". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian enjoyed Turner's "characteristically sparkling use of language" and "melodic skill". However, he felt the pair's "in-joking" during interviews and Kane's "leery" encounter with a female Spin journalist cast "an uncomfortable pall" over the album. From March until August 2016, they toured in Europe and North America. In December 2016, they released The Dream Synopsis, an EP which included covers of "Les Cactus" by Jacques Dutronc and "Is This What You Wanted" by Leonard Cohen.
Alexandra Savior's debut album, Belladonna of Sadness, co-written and co-produced by Turner, was released in April 2017. Columbia Records approached Turner about working with the then-unknown artist in 2014, and they wrote the album over an eighteen-month period in between Turner's touring commitments. Turner and James Ford co-produced the album in 2015, before work began on Everything You've Come to Expect. Savior described the process as "pretty collaborative": "Alex has a really good work ethic ... He's much more organised [than me]." In reviewing the album, Hilary Hughes of Pitchfork remarked: "Turner's musical ticks are so distinct that they're instantly recognizable when someone else tries to dress them up as their own." Turner made a one-off stage appearance with Savior in 2016 and she supported The Last Shadow Puppets on their US tour. Savior later said the press attention surrounding Turner's involvement was overwhelming: "I'm so grateful for him, but I'm also like, 'Alright, alright!'"
2018 onward: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Arctic Monkeys' sixth album, was released in May 2018. After receiving a Steinway Vertegrand piano as a 30th birthday present from his manager, Turner wrote the space-themed album from the perspective of "a lounge-y character". Having written "the most straight-up love letters" of his career on Everything You've Come to Expect, he felt ready to explore wider themes. He recorded demos at home, and shared them with Cook in early 2017. Cook was initially taken-aback by the change in direction: "It took a few listens to even begin to, like... But I don't think any of us wanted to make an AM, Part Two, so I were very, very excited by what he'd come up with." By mid-2017, the whole band was recording the project, produced by Turner and James Ford, in both Los Angeles and France. They were joined by a number other musicians.
Upon release, Jonah Weiner of Rolling Stone characterised Tranquility Base as "a captivatingly bizarre album about the role of entertainment - the desire to escape into it, and the desire to create it - during periods of societal upheaval and crisis." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian found it "quietly impressive" that the band chose to release the "thrilling, smug, clever and oddly cold album" rather than more crowd-pleasing fare. Jazz Monroe of Pitchfork declared it "a delirious and artful satire directed at the foundations of modern society." The album became the eighth chart-topping album of Turner's career in the UK. The band announced plans to tour the album from May to October 2018.
Maps Alex Turner
Discography
Solo
- 2011 - Submarine
Arctic Monkeys
- 2006 - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
- 2007 - Favourite Worst Nightmare
- 2009 - Humbug
- 2011 - Suck It and See
- 2013 - AM
- 2018 - Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
The Last Shadow Puppets
- 2008 - The Age Of The Understatement
- 2016 - Everything You've Come To Expect
Collaborations
- 2007 - Reverend and The Makers - The State of Things (writer and vocalist on "The Machine", co-writer of "He Said He Loved Me" and "Armchair Detective")
- 2007 - Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English ("Temptation")
- 2008 - Matt Helders - Late Night Tales: Matt Helders ("A Choice of Three")
- 2011 - Miles Kane - Colour of the Trap (co-writer of "Rearrange", "Counting Down the Days", "Happenstance", "Telepathy", "Better Left Invisible" and "Colour of the Trap")
- 2012 - Miles Kane - First of My Kind EP (co-writer of "First of My Kind")
- 2013 - Miles Kane - Don't Forget Who You Are (co-writer and bassist on B-side "Get Right")
- 2013 - Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork (guest vocalist on "If I Had a Tail")
- 2015 - Mini Mansions - The Great Pretenders (co-writer and guest vocalist on "Vertigo", co-writer on "Valet")
- 2015 - Alexandra Savior - True Detective season 2 original soundtrack (co-composed song "Risk" on guitar, keyboard, drums)
- 2017 - Alexandra Savior - Belladonna of Sadness (co-writer, co-producer, bass, guitar, keyboards, and synthesizers)
References
External links
- Arcticmonkeys.com
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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