Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being my own boss means I'm a nine-to-five dad Monday to Friday, it's the best thing ever. It's the most difficult, insane, wonderful job you could ever do, but it's more important to hang out with your daughter.
There was a lack of inspiration in London. There were a lot of dregs of the Libertines' movement, and we didn't want to do that. We wanted big melodies and hooks, organic melodies that could fall apart at any moment.
Even things like Abba - I think it's always got a dark, subversive element to it. You've got these four blonde Swedish people singing about their relationships breaking up while they're all going out with each other.
My nan, God bless her, used to buy the NME, then go to the chip shop and be like 'ooh check out that' every week, she'd be saying, 'Oh have you heard the new single by Arctic Monkeys?' and it's like, I haven't even heard this!
After touring the first album, we went into the studio and started making music that was influenced by all the freaky folk music we'd been listening to. Lots of Canterbury scene stuff from the 1960s and '70s. Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong.
There's a time and a place for a bit of realism, and it's bands like Arctic Monkeys that do it amazingly well. But why do bands have to recycle something that's already been done very well? We wanted to make interesting pop music, and to drop in literary references.
Governments don't get elected saying, 'We're going to lower GDP next year,' governments get elected on saying, 'We're going to increase prosperity and the happiness and the wealth of our nations.' But that kind of capitalism will only lead to the destruction of our planet.
I'm less self-consumed, less narcissistic, I'm more selfless, more considerate. I've just grown up. It's a slow growth, because I was in a band for ten years. I was given the card to be able to live an adolescent life forever. You're celebrated, the more of a child you are.
When you're growing up you also like to go out and party a lot, and the music that we would hear going out would be techno and electronica. And earlier stuff like the Prodigy. It kind of stood out from everything else. Y'know, 'Firestarter,' where did that come out of? It sounded alien and otherworldly.
When I first came to London I thought there'd be this amazing music scene, but I was quite let down by how little was going on and how few ideas there were in music. Bands were writing songs that had no melody, and I wondered, why is that, melody is the most important thing in a song. It's the thing that sticks in your head.
I remember looking at my iTunes and was like, 'I haven't listened to an album in about three months.' What happened? I was once an 18-year-old kid who would just devour everything and want to know everything about every member of every band I liked. It became this thing where I hated the idea of music, and I didn't know if I wanted to make music.