STACK #219 January 2023

FEATURE MUSIC

Revolutionising music sales Prior to the release of WPSIATWIN , more than half of the album’s 13 tracks had already been heard by Monkeys mega-fans. Mardy Bum, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Fake Tales of San Francisco, Dancing Shoes, Still Take You Home, Riot Van, When the Sun Goes Down (formerly known as ‘Scummy’ or ‘Scummy Man’) and A Certain

red light”) is referenced during When the Sun Goes Down ’s second verse: “And I’ve seen him with girls of the night, and he told Roxanne to put on her red light.” Who dat on the cover? The geezer punching a dart who features on WPSIATWIN ’s cover is fellow Sheffield band The Violet May’s lead singer Chris McClure, brother of Reverend and the Makers frontman Jon McClure, and also a close friend of Arctic Monkeys. Chris went full method for this shoot, according to artwork designer Scott Jones: “We did one version and he wasn’t p-ssed enough. His eyes weren’t right; he looked a bit too conscious and the position he’s in wasn’t right. So the next week we got him completely hammered in the Korova bar in Liverpool. He was sort of quite ill at the time, to the point of, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’

We did have a couple of photos of him lying on the floor, being sick everywhere. So we got him back up and he was bright as a button five minutes later, so I think the puke did him good.”

DID YOU KNOW?

WPSIATWIN is the only Arctic Monkeys album that features bassist Andy Nicholson, as he left the band shortly after the record’s release.

Romance had been made available via the collection of free homemade demos, widely referred to as Beneath the Boardwalk (2004), which Arctic Monkeys frequently distributed at their early gigs. These songs soon found their way onto the internet, and were promptly file-shared amongst fans and uploaded to their social media sites (mainly MySpace). As such, this then-unsigned, unknown band cultivated a fanbase completely organically before transforming into chart-topping superstars within six short months. Rather than career suicide, giving away their music for free definitely worked out for Arctic Monkeys. BC

Chris McClure in the image used for WPSIATWIN ’s back cover.

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