Sheffield, England’s Arctic Monkeys introduced themselves with the snotty and brilliant debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not. Since then, the quartet’s punk-inspired guitar pop has matured into a gloomy blend of R&B and stoner rock.
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Their songs have no shortage of riffs or syllables detailing sweaty clubs, dance floor lust, and one-night stands. “I Wanna Be Yours” from their colossal album, AM, uses mercantile language to express love. But it all began with a poem.
A Punk Poet
The lyrics to “I Wanna Be Yours” were taken from John Cooper Clarke’s poem of the same name. Clarke, who calls himself Johnny, is a performance poet with vivid words and outlandish hair. The Salford bard has shared bills with Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Elvis Costello.
Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner heard Clarke’s poetry as a teenager. His teacher read Clarke’s poem, “I Wanna Be Yours,” and according to Turner, it forever changed his writing.
I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
Let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots, babe
I just wanna be yours
Clarke’s poem is a romantic lament using everyday things to express love. It’s not the first time his words were put to music. Post-punk bands backed his performance readings in the late ’70s and early ’80s. On AM, the group propels Turner’s rendition along with a plodding groove and dusty guitars. Producer James Ford told NME the band wanted a different approach to AM, and it began with using a drum machine for the first time. The programmed beat restricted the band, adding tension to the general paranoia of the album.
Turner added a new verse to the poem, showing Clark’s influence.
Secrets I have held in my heart
Are harder to hide than I thought
Maybe I just wanna be yours
I wanna be yours, I wanna be yours
In an interview with NME, Clarke compared Turner’s new verse to Frank Sinatra’s interpretation of a Cole Porter tune. It pulled the poem into a modern romance ballad.
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In 2023, Ben Thomas-Beaumont, writing for the Guardian, said of “I Wanna Be Yours,” “It was previously Britain’s favorite wedding poem, it’s now quantifiably the world’s favorite British poem, full stop.”
Turner met Clarke for the first time at an early Arctic Monkeys show. Clarke said he liked the band name. He continued, “I love it. It’s like a picture, a drama, this monkey in the snow!” Turner’s gaudy storytelling set the band apart in the early days. Arctic Monkeys continued in the tradition of literate British bands like The Smiths. His wit separated the group from the other garage rock revival bands of the time.
The music industry was chasing the trend of bands like The Strokes and The Vines, and Arctic Monkeys rode the wave to become an indie buzz band in 2004. But the Monkeys proved to be bigger than the trend. The garage rock revival was their foot in the door, but what became immediately apparent was the Monkeys had more to say than the pastiche of the “latest craze.”
Joshua Tree
AM was partly recorded at Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California. The band’s fifth album sounds expansive and solitary; indeed, recording in the desert impacted the music.
Queens of the Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme sings backing vocals on AM, returning the favor of Turner appearing on the Queens’ album …Like Clockwork. Homme, born in Palm Springs, frequently records at Rancho De La Luna and hosts a musical collective at the studio called the Desert Sessions, featuring players from the Palm Desert music scene. Arctic Monkeys adopted the same psychedelic desert rock played by Homme.
Thematically, AM addresses loneliness, spoiled romance, and sex. The album has a darker, slow groove kind of burn that traces Homme’s desert rock to earlier influences like Black Sabbath. But the Mojave doom didn’t deter fans. AM shot straight to No. 1 in the U.K., and it was a Top 10 album in the U.S. NME called AM the best album of the decade.
Turner was born a few years after Clarke wrote “I Wanna Be Yours.” Yearning for adoration is generationally boundless. The Stone Roses wanted to be adored in late ’80s Manchester, mixing psychedelic rock and acid house. Turner took a British poem from the post-punk era to the California desert and created a flawless love song for flawed individuals.
Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images
