Arctic Monkeys at NOS Alive festival review: ‘Dripping with archness and sex appeal’
But this set from the Monkeys has the rising and falling energy of a main pop girl doing mostly ballads.
How is it almost 18 years since ‘I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ was released? And still the Arctic Monkeys’ lightening-in-a-bottle indie-pop-punk smash sounds fresh as a daisy. And they’ve since been prolific of course, with seven huge albums and 23 singles to their name. So prolific, in fact, that it wasn’t clear if ‘I Bet…’ – easily their best song, the youthful vigour of which they’ve long since moved on from, artistically – would make the cut at their headline set at last weekend’s NOS Alive festival in Lisbon, Portugal.
There was almost a sigh of relief, then, when those urgent chords kicked at the gig’s climactic moment. For the previous hour, there had been a sense of confused resignation across the crowd – the weekend’s biggest – that the Monkeys’ oeuvre, actually, is not as good-on-the-dancefloor ready as you thought.
“Crawlin’ back to you…” frontman Alex Turner sings on ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, a song so deliciously rocky but so gruellingly downbeat, you’re indeed inclined to crawl rather than dance to it. Obviously, it’s an excellent track – its performance on Spotify will make you do a double take: it and two other similarly slow songs from 2013’s critically-acclaimed AM have well over a billion streams. It just doesn’t hold an open-air crowd quite as you expect.
Turner’s heavily affected stage schtick isn’t for everyone
The same goes for the sparse and shuffling ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’, which opens proceedings on a note of ‘huh?’ Luckily, the seductive and energetic ‘Brainstorm’ kicks things into gear, with the urgently screeching and squelching guitar that is, or was, the Monkeys’ trademark. But the setlist is, ultimately, a tonal hodgepodge of rising and falling energy. Equivalent to a main pop girl landing a headline slot but performing mostly ballads.
Turner’s heavily affected stage schtick isn’t for everyone, either. For better or worse, his evocation of brooding masculinity has more than a touch of high camp to it. (Think James Dean meets Johnny Cash meets Simon Cowell.) It prompted this audience-member to reflect for hours – yet again, and not without enjoyment – on his infamously bizarre and actorly Brit Awards acceptance speech from 2014. That rock and roll, eh? That rock and roll…
He’s entertaining, sure. But the problem with his swaggy demeanour is, it affects how he sings. He elongates and warps his words, making it hard to understand him, let along sing along. His sound, however – rich and deep, dripping with archness and sex appeal, like the music itself – is compelling. Actually, it’s like a second bass guitar. And there’s no denying the faultless aptitude of the other Monkeys. But if they’re going to be the Rolling Stones of tomorrow, they need a few lessons in crowd pleasing.