100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 The View from the Afternoon

02 I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor

03 Fake Tales of San Francisco

04 Dancing Shoes

05 You Probably Couldn’t See for the Lights but You Were S taring Straight at Me

06 Still Take You Home

07 Riot Van

08 Red Lights Indicates D oors Are Secured

09 Mardy Bum

10 Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong, But…

11 When the Sun Goes Down

12 From the Ritz to the Rubble

13 A Certain Romance

As records go, the Arctic Monkeys’ propulsive, offhand but intricate debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, would object to being included in this list. ‘Get off the bandwagon, and put down the handbook’, runs the refrain in ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’, and it’s typical of the group’s then teenage songwriter, Alex Turner, that he was onto those who might grandly elevate his band before they’d even had a chance to mention the phrase ‘canon’.

The fastest selling debut album in British history – almost 120,000 copies on the first day, a total just shy of 364,000 in the first week – Whatever People Say I Am was a blistering amalgam of biting, frenzied guitars, whiplash lyrics that mixed idiom and idiocy with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a sense of time and place that put the 13 tracks in the pantheon of British youth culture. The album didn’t have an axe to grind or a stake to claim, but via Turner’s broad Yorkshire accent it illustrated the grim streets and bright dancefloors of Sheffield that could easily have come to encompass his life.

‘There’s only music so there’s new ringtones,’ Turner sings on the closing ‘A Certain Romance’, but the album sets that notion right. Arctic Monkeys sound like a band with no shortage of ideas and vitality across the song cycle of a frenzied night dissolving into a reflective day. The first 10 seconds of their breakthrough single, ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ could be Rage Against the Machine’s high octane fury, while the next 20 were classic British new wave pop. Everything is shaken up before Turner has even started to bob and weave through the lust-filled nightlife (‘Oh there ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets/Just banging tunes ’n’ DJ sets’, runs one memorable couplet).

The group – vocalist and guitarist Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook, drummer Matt Helders and soon-to-depart bassist Andy Nicholson – were firmly plugged into the recent history of British guitar music, taking in the one-liners favoured by Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, the clatter and melancholy of the Libertines and the joyous pop smarts of Franz Ferdinand. But they were beholden to none of them, or a fixed historic perspective, and Turner was not unaware of hip-hop. They could take what they needed and not look back, frenetic to the point that the cymbal wash on ‘Still Take You Home’ is pure excitement, while ‘The View from the Afternoon’ spits out lyrics and power chords before the razor-like rhythm kicks back in.

On ‘When the Sun Goes Down’, a sombre Turner sings about the prostitutes and their pimp that the group would sight near their rehearsal room and the images are switchblade sharp above barely-there guitar chords: ‘And I’ve seen him with girls of the night/And he told Roxanne to put on her red light/They’re all infected but he’ll be alright,’ he observes, but instead of embracing the maudlin, the band charge forward and envelope the characters. These songs haven’t dated because there are few easy judgments. Even ‘A Certain Romance’, which picks over the UK’s working class chav culture with clear eyes, ends with the acknowledgment that some of them are Turner’s mates.

With tracks such as ‘From the Ritz to the Rubble’, Arctic Monkeys simply sound like the bolshiest band for the ages. Even as Alex Turner sings about the lack of clarity that dogs the previous night’s ironclad resolutions, he and his bandmates make jumping up and down and yelling with great gusto sound like pure deliverance. Everything makes sense on Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, but it takes one heck of a ride before you realise just how that came to be.