Listen to The Last
Shadow Puppets
Haring across London in the back of a people carrier, sitting between Alex
Turner and Miles Kane, is not an altogether comfortable place to be. It
isn’t that they aren’t affable; on the contrary, the Arctic Monkeys front
man and the lead singer of the Rascals, whose debut album together as the
Last Shadow Puppets went straight in at No 1 last Sunday, exude bonhomie.
For all that, the experience reminds you of those waspish Beatles press
conferences where reporters were put to the sword with sharp, nee-dling
in-joke wordplay - as if the Fab Four were toying with large, slightly dumb
animals, and winking at each other as they did so.
Much the same sense of a private communication pervades the duo’s album, The
Age of the Understatement - a sequence of songs that, by accident rather
than design, came to turn on the theme of the femme fatale and the
fall-out from their entanglements with versions of the archetype. In both
musicians’ cases, the record is an away day from their main occupations: for
Turner, of course, it represents an artistic left turn between Arctic
Monkeys albums; and for Kane, a breather as he prepares to concentrate his
energies on breaking through with his own band, Liverpool trio the Rascals.
When each of them stresses that Understatement is the consequence of
friendship, not ambition, you believe them, because that’s exactly how it
sounds. A dozen songs tear by in just under 35 minutes, as if their writers
were struggling to get them down. “Me and Miles,” Turner says, “if we had
grown up in the same area and gone to the same school, maybe we’d be in a
band together anyway.”
The album, recorded, breakneck, over two weeks in a rural studio in France
last summer, is, he says, an expression of that friendship - not, as cynics
are surmising, part of some grand chart-domination scheme. “If that sort of
thing had bothered us,” Turner continues, “we probably wouldn’t be mates. It
would never have got that far.”
Billowing with violins and brass, indebted to the three-minute melodramas of
the Walker Brothers and early Bowie, of arrangers such as Ivor Raymonde and
Wally Stott, the album could so easily have died a death as hollow pastiche.
Yet nowhere is there a sense of the opportunism and precision-guided
politesse that render many current retro-soul artists so obnoxious and
risible. Urgency, enthusiasm and sheer love for what they’ve created have,
instead, produced a record that sounds bracingly contemporary. “It’s soul,
rather than soulless,” Kane suggests, as the discussion - all of it
unprintable, none of it complimentary - turns to what distinguishes the LSPs
from, say, Duffy. “And true - that’s it. It’s true. We’re writing, quite
personally, about what goes on.”
With shared and rapidly swapped vocal lines, the songs often sound as if they
are stories, anecdotes the pair are telling each other. “I think that worked
with the writing, too,” Kane says. “I suppose we do have, like, similar
heads, and can understand what the other one is saying. In your band, it’s
cool, but you’re on your own [both he and Turner are their bands’ chief
songwriters]. When we’re together, the other person can drag more out of
you. That’s a dead special thing, I couldn’t do that for anyone else, I
think.”
Turner adds: “You feel some of the tunes are more personal than the ones
you’ve done on your own. Because you’ve got a partner, you don’t feel so
exposed, perhaps – or you’re not so afraid.”
It is this tenderness, almost, and willingness to at least grapple with
candour that takes the edge off the LSPs’ air of watchful exclusivity. A
photo in their album booklet shows the pair in matching polo necks, moptops
brushed modishly forwards, faces near identical. Their singing voices, too,
have a spooky similarity. “We had to be held back on that a bit,” Turner
says, recalling recording sessions with the producer James Ford. “We were
always saying, ‘We should do a line [of a song] each, in turn’, but James
just went, ‘Calm down.’ ” They both sing in the same clipped, spiky way, a
manner that lends itself to dramatic exaggeration and barbed lyrics. “Well,
I think so,” Turner agrees, “but someone I read said something like, ‘It
gets on your tits after a bit’ – like our voices weren’t suited to it or
whatever.”
Harmonies are another feature. Turner, who has been looking a bit downcast,
having remembered the critic’s putdown, brightens up. “Yeah, man, that’s
great, isn’t it? We’ve always, like, loved your Spector and all that, grown
up with the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We’re planning to do a cover of [the
Beatles’] This Boy. But I want to get better at them. I’d love to be able to
sing three-part harmonies.”
It’s easy to forget, as the conveyor belt of modern entertainment zooms by,
that Turner is, despite having the fastest-selling debut album ever under
his belt, only 22 (as is Kane). The caustic, sometimes world-weary
chronicler of the first two Arctics albums is, in person, surprisingly
inarticulate, with a Stan Laurel-like expression, halfway between bemusement
and bashfulness. His doe eyes and experimenting-with-shaving complexion only
add to the sense of an innocent abroad. We know from his songs, of course,
that he is infinitely more complex, more wised up, than that; he is just
quieter about it than most. Yet, watching him sparring and joshing with
Kane, it is easy to get the impression that the latter has cajoled out of
Turner something he didn’t know he had in him, and is delighted to discover
he has.
Listen to the way he cuts loose vocally towards the end of the album track
Separate and Ever Deadly; or to the pathos he brings to the melody on the
closing track, The Time Has Come Again, which, with its predecessor, Meeting
Place, serves as a haunting grace note to the album. And remember his
expression of inadequacy about those three-part harmonies. The dour, sullen
Sheffield lad that Arctic Monkeys detractors perceive, cocky beyond his
years, swollen with self-belief, is impossible to square with the burbling,
slightly awkward person beside me on the seat.
Kane, on the other hand, brims with Scouse mischief and bravado, relishing
what he calls “spat-out” lyrics such as “When we walked the streets together
/ All the faces seemed to smile back / Now the pavements have nothing to
offer / And all the faces seem to need a slap”. Fans have already speculated
that, far from doing Turner a favour, the Rascal has chucked him a king-size
dilemma: will he be able to return to the, as some see it, relatively
ham-fisted simplicities of his day job with the memory of Owen Pallett’s
mind-blowing string arrangements, of the great torch singer he suddenly
located within himself, fresh in his mind? (This swerve was arguably
anticipated on at least two tracks on the Arctics’ second album.)
Front on, Turner won’t address this. Sideways, though, he offers a hint of the
seeds freshly sown in his head when he says of the duo’s plans to tour the
album: “If we could realise it live, that would be even more of a thing. If
we could become that band we wanted it to be, well, that’s what you’re
trying to do, isn’t it?”
For the moment, the Last Shadow Puppets can sit back and marvel, as can we,
that a project that began as song ideas swapped casually in dressing rooms,
when Kane’s band supported Turner’s, has turned into a record of such
beautiful surfaces, dark corners and deep resonance.
The irony is, that album title is wrong. We live in an age of needy,
ridiculous, 24-hour hype. But it is, for once, no overstatement to say that,
in rescuing melodrama from the clammy embrace of kitsch, in reviving the
idea of musicians working together out of hours not because of calculation
but because of camaraderie; and in tangling with the femmes fatales
who inspired their scorching songs, the Last Shadow Puppets have made one of
the outstanding British pop albums of recent years.
The Age of the Understatement is out now on Domino
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
How absolutely brilliant that these two admirable young men have discovered, dusted off and EXPANDED a hinterland that we'd all long forgotten. Thanks chaps, for reminding us that 'Rubber Soul' was a staging post, not the beginning of great britpop ( I am not being sarcastic - this is a great record
David , Ruddington, England