"Saturday night you have your fling at life ... and Sunday morning you face up to it!" ran the tagline for Karel Reisz's classic 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. After watching it, Alex Turner noticed that it shared similarities with the record his band had just made. So much so, in fact, that he nicked a line from Albert Finney's character for the title: "Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."
Arctic Monkeys' debut album was located firmly in the school of kitchen-sink realism, sharing its DNA not just with 1960s film-makers but also Morrissey and Marr. Not that these Monkeys were easy to pigeonhole. The title itself railed against simple categorisation, whereas drummer Matt Helders was far from your typical indie pot-basher – instead, he spent his school years "listening to gangster rap and UK garage, thinking I was a DJ". It was Helders battering seven shades out his kit in a fashion that owed as much to Schoolly D as it did Keith Moon that gave the album its propulsive start with The View from the Afternoon, setting up another tease courtesy of Turner: "Anticipation has a habit to set you up/For disappointment in evening entertainment but … Tonight there'll be some love/Tonight there'll be a ruckus yeah, regardless of what's gone before." Through deftly recasting familiar tales of underage drinkers and lads spoiling for a fight, Arctic Monkeys satisfied older fans while speaking to their own constituency. Music made for ringtones? Hardly.
Anticipation was such that the album became the fastest-selling debut in British history (until Leona Lewis snatched the record from them). Yet the band shrugged off the hype effortlessly, proof that they were as grounded in reality as their music.
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