? e n o y n A , Ping-Pong The Arctic Monkeys Grow Up, a Bit When you’re a teenager, you drive in a van from Sheffield to smalltown gigs across England, party every night, meet girls: everything moves fast and you like it. Your song about some girl who looks “good on the dance floor,” which rhymes a reference to the Montagues and Capulets with “banging tunes and D.J. sets,” leads to Internet fame, the fastest-selling debut in British history and, in 2006, instant, MySpace-amplified international stardom.
The next day Turner sits in the back of an SUV on the way to a Boston radio station. He’s in good spirits. The previous night was a success. A lot of young, new fans came to the show, and there’s a deserved sense that this album may be the band’s best. Turner thinks back to those early days of youthful myopia, when teenage life was what he knew and he wrote what he knew. “We thought everyone was just like us,” he says. “And they were, I guess.”
But then years and albums go by.
On the second album he tried to hold on to that youthful exuberance, to varying success. On the third he amped up the production to a heavily instrumented complexity. This time around, a worldlier Turner opted to simplify. He wrote melodies whole, on a guitar, instead of creating pastiche in a studio. He streamlined his famously verbose lyrics while keeping them cryptically humorous. ‘‘It’s like that George Jones song ‘Relief Is Just a Swallow Away,’” he explains. It’s a silly idea for a song, but the humor comes from the dark truth of it. An inside joke can be understood as profundity if the song is well crafted. “It’s always nice to leave that door open, isn’t it?” he says. “Or at least the light on.”
Alex Turner, the Arctic Monkeys frontman, now 25, sits backstage at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, an early stop on this year’s tour for their fourth album, ‘‘Suck It and See.’’ The room is not luxurious. And no matter how big the band gets, its members sleep on two cramped buses and shower in grimy backstage stalls. Yet with all of these places, Turner explains, ‘‘it feels a bit like coming home.’’ As an adult, that’s a depressing idea. On the band’s previous tour, one strategy for keeping sane was intensely competitive Ping-Pong. Today the table is set up, but no one seems interested. Instead the Monkeys venture out in search of a bar they remember from a previous trip. It turns out, though, that the Silk City Diner doesn’t open for another 30 minutes. Like a scene out of “This Is Spinal Tap,” everyone stands by the chained door making awkward small talk on a deserted street corner.
At the House of Blues, Turner ducks out of the SUV and into the club through two crowds, one lined up to see his band, the other at Fenway Park, across the street. Inside sits the Ping-Pong table. After sound check, the band decides to play a quick game.