Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not turns 20 this week. To celebrate this milestone we took another look at this seminal album of indie rock.
We also rank all of Arctic Monkey’s released here.
To write this review I cold-turkeyed from Arctic Monkeys for a couple of months. I wanted to try to hear the album with “fresh ears” but the reality is, part of the magic of Whatever People Say I Am was that everyone already knew most of it before it came out.
It’s predecessor, Beneath the Boardwalk was quietly traded at shows, ripped and uploaded to online forums and the band’s already loyal fan base were singing along way before tracks such as Mardy Bum and Fake Tales of San Francisco saw their official release.
I think that’s something about this album that will never really be understood. Now new songs get leaked on TikTok the first time they’re performed live and die hard fans know the words from day one, but back then, it just didn’t happen. People didn’t go to gigs and sing unreleased songs, not like this. The swelling of support behind Arctic Monkeys was such that everyone knew this album was going to be special, that this band was doing things differently. As they got closer to the release the energy in the room at their gigs just built and built, people were desperate to see them, people missed out because they blew up as soon as the album dropped and had to cancel a bunch of their smaller gigs. People will talk about the legendary Leadmill gig in the same way our parents or grandparents talk about the first time they saw The Beatles. The magic was in the momentum as much as it was in the music.
It some ways, reflecting on the album brings a tinge of sadness as you release the band in some ways became exactly those people they were mocking in their early work. 20 year old Alex would have ripped into the 40 year old sunglasses-indoors-wearing, pretentious-French-restaurant-
However if you step back from that for a moment, what you get is a glorious glimpse into young Turner’s analytical mind and his keen observations of the day-to-day life being a teenager in Northern England. He made the everyday interesting. Suffused with witticism, the album shows the strength of the songwriter he was always going to become, but it also has a pleasant naivety that was quickly washed away, certainly by the time humbug came around if not before.
A lot of people complain that Arctic Monkeys don’t make music like this anymore, but a careful listen to this album makes it clear that they can’t even if they wanted to. They’re not those people, wandering about on a night out seeing a drunk hen party, or hanging out in dive bars and night clubs chatting up girls. Part of that is age, and part of that is fame. But either way, it’s an album you have to revisit through the rose tinted lens of nostalgia. The world moves on, and we go with it.
I do find it interesting that tracks like When the Sun Goes Down have faded into the background somewhat with that passage of time. Alex distancing himself from performing it live definitely feeds into that but when it was released that song was a huge part of their journey to fame, and it very firmly got left behind in favour of other, at the time, less prominent numbers.
20 years down the line, I feel we can split the album into three categories:
There’s clear anthems, those tracks that define this era of the band: Mardy Bum, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor and Fake Tales of San Francisco most notably, with the strings version of Mardy Bum at Glastonbury in 2013 cementing it for sure as one of the bands most iconic songs.
There’s also those less stand out songs but the ones that when you relisten to the album you remember how good they were. They need a catchier name, I know. A Certain Romance and The View from the Afternoon are both in this category for me, along with Riot Van and probably Still Take You Home. They’re the tracks that aren’t as iconic, but when you hear them you’re still quite taken with what they have to offer. Whether it’s the riff of A Certain Romance, the acutely real narrative in Riot Van, or the clever little lyrical moments in Still Take You Home they each reveal something that made this album wonderful and they’ve all stood the test of time fairly well.
And then there’s the more forgettable:
You Probably Couldn’t See For The Lights but You Were Staring Straight at Me, Perhaps Vampire is a Bit Strong but… and Red Lights Indicate Doors are Secure. I’d say they’re the tracks people would struggle to name off this album. In some ways it feels a little unfair. You probably Couldn’t See… actually has a great opening, and I quite like Red Lights Indicate… but the stories just don’t add too much to what we’ve already heard in better tracks on the album. Musically the mix of You Probably Couldn’t See… between the vocals and the instruments isn’t great and the guitars are too aggressive on Red Lights. Dancing Shoes, Still Take You Home or A Certain Romance take similar themes and elevate them more clearly over better put together backing tracks.
I’ve always felt WPSIATWIN was a great debut. It’s become the sound so many young indie bands seek to live up to. But I’ve also always believed it’s an album carried by its strongest tracks and not defined by its weakest, and two decades on, with the best fresh ears I could manage, this still feels true.