Way, way back in the dim and distant days
when provincial English guitar bands could
still stake a claim for pop-cultural dominance
(2005), Arctic Monkeys arrived as the last of
a dying breed: the saviours of rock ’n’ roll.
hey had the tunes — potent single “I Bet You
Look Good on the Dancefloor” went straight
to number one, back when going straight to
number one meant something — and they had
the look: market-bought anoraks, unbranded
polo shirts and borstal boy fag-holds. Or,
as Alex Turner’s lyric had it, “classic Reeboks,
or knackered Converse, or tracy botoms
tucked in socks.”
By the release of AM, their fith and best
studio album, in 2013, they’d moved on. he
music now embraced hip-hop beats and
Seventies rock. he look was swagering,
sneering Link Wray twangers in leather
jackets and flamboyant Gram Parsons shirts.
hey had quifs and Cuban heels and legy
girlfriends. hey looked like the real deal.
hey were the real deal.
Now, here they are in 2018, launching the
oddly titled Tranquiliy Base Hotel & Casino.
Not so much Arctic Monkeys any more as
Turner, Helders, Cook, O’Malley and Partners.
Not so much a rock ’n’ roll band as a louchely
atired bunch of corporate finance hotshots,
Euro hedge funders caught between a three-
Martini dinner at Sexy Fish and a night of
Champagne carousing at Loulou’s.
Here in the real world, we may still be
in the grip of economic austeriy but the
Arctics are all gussied up for boom time: four
Le Rosey-schooled art dealer Wasps from
Manhatan whose age, tonsure and tailoring
might provide cougar supermodel Heidi Klum
with fresh quarry for the coming summer.
But the Monkeys aren’t the first band to
choose business over pleasure when it comes
to clobber. Like Turner & Co, Heaven 17 come
from Sheield. With two members once part
of the Human League, a collective of slide
show operators and synth-twiddlers who —
in their early days at least — were properly
odd and genuinely countercultural, in 1981
Heaven 17 chose to move on from lopsided
Bet they’d look good on the trading floor^
Arctic Monkeys hope you like their new sartorial
direction. By Simon Mills
haircuts and songs about alienation, swapping South
Yorkshire post-industrial dystopia for images of hatcherite
entrepreneurialism and go-geters with ponytails.
heir debut album, Penthouse and Pavement, was
illustrated with paintings of the band members doing deals,
taking phone calls and looking at sales graphs, in a brave
new world of glass and steel syscrapers. hey dressed like
yuppies in Paul Smith suits and butoned-up shirts. “Play
to Win”, was one song title. If you were a teenager and had
less than a tenner to your name, all this was most confusing.
Four years later, in 1985, an even more dramatic
luxury rebrand took place, when Dexys Midnight Runners,
previously best known for a Romany/ragamuin look of
dungarees and neckerchiefs, launched their Don’t Stand Me
Down album dressed as sharp-suited Wall Street traders,
in Brooks Brothers pinstripes, with proper shoes and even
socks. And suspiciously clean hair. he album, somewhat
ironically, proved to be a disastrous commercial flop.
But then the Eighties was the era of power dressing,
when pop musicians as diferent as ex-hippie Eric Clapton,
gender-bending Seventies shapeshiter David Bowie and
once purist neo-mod Paul Weller, in his new Syle Council
guise, all succumbed, at least temporarily, to the allure of
the smart business suit.
Will Arctic Monkeys’ decision to go from Sheield
scallywags to Square Mile accountants appeal to the
market? And, indeed, “the markets”?
he smart money says yes.Monkey businessmen: the
made-over Turner & Co,
top, follow suit ater Heaven
17 and Dexys Midnight
Runners, belowStyle 57