Arctic Monkeys Take Rapid Climb in Stride

A year ago, drummer Matt Helders admits, no one in Arctic Monkeys was thinking, "I bet we'd look good on the pop chart."

But in October, the Sheffield band's debut single, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," entered the British pop chart at No. 1. An anthemic punk-pop song addressing romantic frustration and nightclub rituals, it crushed the comeback single by Robbie Williams, England's biggest hit maker of the past decade.

And when "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" was released in January, it became the fastest-selling debut album in British history. First-week sales were 360,000; the previous record holder was Hear'Say's 2001 "Popstars" with 307,000, not surprising for an album featuring a group assembled on "Popstars," the popular British show that spawned "American Idol."

But the notion of an underground band doing it -- and with opening-day sales of 118,500, outselling the rest of the top 20 albums combined -- was staggering.

"No, we had no idea about all that stuff," Helders laughs from Cologne, Germany, a stop on a triumphant world tour that none of the band members (Helders, singer-lyricist Alex Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook and bassist Andy Nicholson) could have imagined six months ago. Stateside, the tour that brings Arctic Monkeys to the 9:30 club Monday sold out quickly.

"People rise to fame and come to it pretty quickly over here," Helders says of being England's latest rock sensations. "We don't take it too seriously, but we do talk about it. We've done a lot already, achieved much more than we expected to achieve. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't last forever."

That could be why the musicians -- two are 19, two 20 -- still live with their parents amid a rise to stardom considered fast even by the hyperspeed standards of modern pop culture. Even the record industry and the media, mainstream and music press alike, have had to play catch-up.

Witness: The band built a vast virtual fan base before getting a record deal, giving CD-Rs of demos to kids who came to shows; those fans in turn posted and swapped them on the Internet. As a result, Arctic Monkeys packed their live shows with fans who knew their songs by heart. Eventually, their grass-roots success caught the attention of major record labels, of which many came a-wooing (inspiring the pithy "Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong, But . . . ").

Last June, the band signed with hip indie label Domino (home of last-year's buzz band, Franz Ferdinand). Soon, the British media, especially the hyperbolic music press that sees itself as the trend-setter and taste-maker in pop culture, were on the case. NME (New Musical Express), slow to the band, made up for it by putting Turner at the top of its "cool list " for 2005 and naming "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" the fifth-best album of all time -- the week it was released. A first-week sales boom was inevitable.

"By then, people had written so much about us that they couldn't not like us," Helders suggests, "whether that's a wrong reason or not. If you have that much hype, you might fall on your ass. All we have to do is just live up to it."

What's likely to help the band live up to the hype is Turner, a genuinely precocious lyricist who is being labeled the voice of a generation (which may explain why he has stopped doing interviews). Turner is blessed with an eye for vivid detail, an instinct for lyric and melodic economy, and empathy for his adolescent peers. His songs are about not getting into nightclubs, losing girls to a cooler guy, being harassed by the police, alcohol-fueled fights -- snapshots of provincial ennui in a working-class northern town. The Guardian dubbed it "social-realist rock."

All this began four years ago when Turner and Cook, then 16, received guitars for Christmas. A year later, they had hooked up with Helders and Nicholson.