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Monkey Business

It’s not often that I feel the need to write about the next new band or act to make music journalists wet themselves in Europe . The media is so obsessed with spotting the ‘The Next Franz Ferdinand’ that a bunch of boys with guitars can’t release a limited edition 7” single without getting hyped to such a degree that nothing they do will ever live up the huge expectations that have built up around them. It’s a kind of hype that can kill a band.

Most of this hype gets whipped up not on the basis of a first album, but a debut limited edition single. Take Mercury music prize nominated act ‘The Magic Numbers’. They managed to sell out London 's 2,000-capacity venue ‘The Forum’ after just one limited-edition, seven-inch single. It indicates the kind of hype that a band can attract in a short space of time, often before they might have time to hone down their act. Before jumping onboard with the rest of the music journalists, it’s usually better to take a more sceptical approach. Especially writing in Romania , when you know that the group’s debut LP might never be available in the country unless you download it illegally, you often wonder what point there is in chasing after ‘The Next Big Thing’.

Enter the Arctic Monkeys. They’ve only released one single though a tiny label, with 1,500 copies pressed. It was on the strength of this that they were signed to Domino records, the very same label that projected Franz Ferdinand into the stratosphere. Their second single, released this time on Domino, will be out in the middle of October, though you can already see their video on MTV2. Given that the band is made up of a bunch of teenagers from the industrial city of Sheffield ( Northern England ), it’s a lot of hype to live up to.

The exciting thing about the Arctic Monkeys is that they might just live up to it. They’re a band worth writing about, despite the fact that they’ve only actually released one single to date, and despite the fact that Romania won’t hear of them for another year at least - because the Arctic Monkeys are what everybody’s been waiting for.

The band has built up a solid fan-base of obsessed followers over the past three years. Their unreleased demo, ‘Beneath The Boardwalk’, has been circulating on the internet for some time, winning them even more fans. Given that it’s an unreleased demo, it’s one rare occasion when it’s perfectly acceptable to download it using software such as Soulseek (www.slsknet.org) whilst not breaking the law. I seriously recommend that you do.

Musically, there’s no escaping the most obvious comparison: they sound like The Libertines, but with Northern accents. While the Libertines imploded, with lead singer Pete Dougherty currently an A-List celebrity dating Kate Moss, taking far too many drugs and generally alienating all the people who loved the band because they were outsiders who didn’t do things like date supermodels, The Arctic Monkey’s have stepped up to take their place. ‘Beneath The Boardwalk’ is a showcase of exactly the same shambolic Rock and Roll that made the Libertines famous. And like The Libertines, lead singer Alex Turner has the same poetic gift for spinning beautiful narratives about the most unlikely of subjects. Getting in fights, picking up girls, getting thrown out of clubs: it’s all subject matter for the fresh-faced front-man, who barely looks old enough to be shaving, never mind fronting one of the most exciting new bands of the moment.

Again, like the Libertines, they’re quintessentially English, and don’t pretend they’re from anywhere else. They proudly sing in their Northern English accents and even use regional slang that probably wouldn’t be understood South of Birmingham: one of their tracks is entitled ‘Mardy Bum’, which roughly translates as ‘A Sulky Person’. At a time when bands all want to pretend that they’ve just stepped out of New York ’s CBGBs club, this kind of provincialism is all the more refreshing. The ‘Next Franz Ferdinand’? Just remember, you heard it here first.