Desert Storm
You’ve grown your hair and want to make a bitching rock record. Who do you call? Arctic Monkeys tell Stuart Clark about their remarkable journey from Sheffield to the Mojave.
Stuart Clark, 21 Aug 2009
For a moment there I thought I’d stumbled on to the set of a Led Zeppelin biopic.
When Hot Press last spent quality time with the Arctic Monkeys it was regulation indie crops all round, but now three-quarters of the band have the cascading curls favoured by Plant ‘n’ Page in their lemon squeezing prime. Even the one conscientious objector, Matt Helders, has been getting up to some decidedly rock star hi-jinx recently with his new bezzie mate P. Diddy (more of whom anon).
The long hair meant they fitted right in when Josh Homme whisked them off to Rancho de la Luna studio in Joshua Tree to record a large chunk of their new album, Humbug. Famous among stoner rock fans as the setting for Homme’s Desert Sessions, the one horse southern Californian town was put on the musical map in 1973 by Gram Parsons who availed a little too freely of the local peyote and ‘shrooms and OD-ed there, and has subsequently played host to everyone from U2 and The Rolling Stones to The Eagles and Donovan who interior designed his own suite in the Joshua Tree Inn.
“It’s like something David Lynch or Wim Wenders might have dreamt up,” laughs Alex Turner with a toss of his Timotei main. “There was this place nearby we frequented called Pioneer Town, which was built for a movie set and had a really cool bowling alley that we hung out in quite a bit. You’d walk up to buildings thinking, ‘Great, let’s check this out’, only to discover that they were just facades. I don’t know if the Joshua Tree of U2 fame is still there (It isn’t, know-all Ed.) but there are thousands of them dotted around the desert, which you imagine to be a bit featureless but is full of all these amazing rock formations.”
Did they check out the area’s more, shall we say, exotic flora and fauna?
“Peyote and stuff?” he says catching my pharmaceutical drift. “You don’t need to ‘cause everything looks psychedelic naturally. All you had to do to think you were tripping was look at one of the sunsets!”
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