ARCTIC MONKEYS - "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"

(#1020, 29th October 2005)

“Don’t believe the hype” says Alex Turner at the start of the “I Bet..” video. “We have no influences” he says in one of their dozens of interviews that winter. It’s an itchy, wary refusal to be defined - positively or negatively - that finds voice in the debut album title: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. The impression, thoroughly backed up by the scratchy blurt of “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” is of a fizzy, mouthy, pouty intelligence, determined to be taken on its own terms or not at all. The kind of mildly paranoid self-confidence that’s a good survival strategy if you’re 19 years old and the press are calling you a genius.

So what did people say they were? Important, for a start, but in ways hindsight has put a different spin on. In 2015 the Guardian published a 10th anniversary piece on this single: I read it and was slightly surprised to find myself quoted in it, saying something I’d entirely forgotten about the industry response to the Monkeys’ success. To the biz, I said back then, it looked like the gold rush years of Britpop might be back, a development plenty of influential people made no secret of desiring.

The 2015 piece overall struck a curious tone though, more elegiac than celebratory. By then, “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” felt to some like an end of something, not a feisty beginning. It was now impossible to imagine, one participant said, a British indie act as good or successful as the Arctic Monkeys again. By 2015, the shut-out of British rock bands from the singles chart was already near-total. In 2025, despite the occasional effort to hype an indie band to prominence, that continues.

Nobody in October 2005 was predicting that the Monkeys were as good as it was going to get, and record labels spent a long, hard time testing the hypothesis. “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” is too confident and idiosyncratic to be ‘landfill indie’ itself. But it is a template, an ideal of what labels were looking for in 00s British rock. No-nonsense arrangements, kitchen sink lyrical observation, skinny good looks, a dash of wit, plenty of energy and good quotes. Where Britpop had looked back to the pop art highs of the 60s and centred itself in London, this new wave of indie was more regional, singing songs from and for a grotty, underfunded, suburban Britain that was starting to fray at the edges.

Or that seemed to be the idea. We’ll have chances to explore what went wrong as the decade winds on. For now there was a grass-rootsiness to the Arctic Monkeys that thrilled an industry which seemed to palpably enjoy being taken by surprise.

That was evident in the other big story around “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, the logistics element. The Monkeys were written up as the first big Myspace band, a group of lads who had bypassed the biz and grown an audience organically via traded MP3s on file-sharing services and fan message boards. Downloads by this point represented over a third of singles sales, and you didn’t have to be a visionary to realise the transition from physical to digital was accelerating and permanent. Fans swapping files or CD-Rs of new acts was already a common tactic, but the Monkeys were the first to be a big enough success that it became the story.

Journalists seized on the Arctic Monkeys as avatars of this brave new era, kicking off a brief period where a thriving MySpace presence was the badge of authenticity for new stars. Where the Crazy Frog represented the vulgar horrors of internet-powered pop - megaviral novelties exploited by ruthless chancers, selling by the crateload to phone-addled kids - “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” offered a more wholesome, reassuring vision. It was proof that the online future could upend music business hierarchies while still delivering good honest guitar-bass-drums rock bands. The concept of a music industry ‘democratised’ by fanbase-driven grassroots MySpace acts sits next to Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, Clay Shirky’s ideas of the participatory web and Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” in a gallery of late 00s techno-optimism.  

Arctic Monkeys were the perfect fit for this idea because they were fiercely, mockingly, and audibly local. Alex Turner sings in a sardonic Sheffield drawl-bark; at points on “I Bet…” he’s almost languid while Jamie Cook and the rhythm section stop and start and twist on the hook of the song’s frustration, boiling under Turner’s put-on insouciance. They were an indie-gig goer’s dream made flesh, the third-on-the-bill local lads who were obviously going to be huge, and the file-swapping angle meant more people could feel in on the discovery. Turner leaned in to the idea. “You’re not from New York, you’re from Rotherham” he sings on their debut EP, calling out scenester phoneys: “Get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook”.

Later on Turner would admit there’s some self-mockery in this - starting out, he said, he wanted to be in The Strokes, who had grabbed the indie world’s attention when Turner hit his mid-teens. By 2004, the British response to New York garage rock was up and running: Turner’s jibe at transatlantic fakers was pushing on an open door. Being ‘in the Strokes’ in Britain meant being in Franz Ferdinand or The Libertines, bands who’d come tantalisingly close to Number 1, buoyed up by a new infrastructure of alternative radio stations, XFM and BBC Radio 6. 

“Dancefloor” sounds less like The Strokes and more like a more wired, aggressive younger brother of The Libertines’ lore-heavy “Can’t Stand Me Now”, kept off the top only by Busted’s “Thunderbirds”, the less acceptable face of young British rock. At the time, this lineage was enough to curdle the record and the band for me - the last thing I wanted to hear was some precocious young NME-approved gunslinger.

Coming back to it, though, I’m happy that “Dancefloor” was the breakthrough, because it sounds designed to be, a carefully prepared blurt of noise and words built to pop on radio. Everything about the intro feels like a band announcing itself: the rhythm section jolting the song into action, then Jamie Cook’s meandering guitar line winding its way to where Alex Turner is ready to, not so much sing as declaim his lyrics. 

Turner had two qualities which can only help a teenage prodigy: preternatural self-confidence and, more of a rarity in 00s British rock, high quality control. “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” went through three different producers before the band were happy with a version that got its spiky, ramshackle appeal right. He’s also always been helpfully candid about which other artists have got into the Monkeys’ evolving sound, as his own fame and critical respectability have led him back into rock history.

I can hear echoes of that history from the beginning, though they’re almost certainly not intended. The way his voice curls around the beat on the verses, leading to odd, memorable little stresses in strange places - “you’re sending me TO despair” - reminds me a bit of newly electric Dylan, though the source is more likely Jarvis Cocker and could even be Mike Skinner. The milieu of the song reminds me of Gang Of Four’s “At Home He’s A Tourist”, and the comparison points up how the 21st century take on post-punk kept the sound and ditched the theory.

But most of that stuff was for critics to fill in. Turner and his band were not actually classicists - they grew into that role later. His listening when he started making music was contemporary - Britpop and hip-hop, both of which played into the other defining element of the Arctic Monkeys: Turner’s lyrical virtuosity, or verbosity. Leaving aside rappers, you have to go back a long way to find a Number 1 as lyrically dense, and as obviously pleased with its own wordplay, as “Dancefloor”. Musically, the song introduces the band with remarkable swagger, but everything about it is put in service of what Turner’s singing.

The words are what gives “Dancefloor” its character, which is a strength and a weakness. It’s apt that this comes just after “Push The Button” - and that Sugababes actually covered “Dancefloor” - because it’s the same song from a reverse angle, one a girl desperate for a guy to make a move, the other a guy wanting some kind, any kind of unmixed signal. And while I like both records, for me the simplicity and plain-spokenness of “Button” gets its feeling over more than the prolixity of “Dancefloor”, with its crammed-in references to old songs and GCSE English set texts.

There are bits of “I Bet…” where words and music really click, most importantly the chorus. “Dancing to electropop like a robot from 1984” is a terrific, memorable line, capturing desire and distance and sounding great every time Turner sings it. And the bathos of the “Montagues and Capulets” bit works cos it’s Turner acknowledging that the song’s laying it on a bit thick for a tune about a night on the pull. On the other hand, “your name isn’t Rio but I don’t care for sand” is a mess, a bit where I think, OK, this is trying too hard.

But we’ve had two Oasis songs at No.1 this year, and it’s a lot better to try too hard than to not try at all. Turner’s precocity is far more endearing than annoying, signaling an ambition most of the Arctic Monkeys’ contemporaries couldn’t match. As their success allowed us to find out, at length.

8 out of 10