A view from the childhood kitchen

 As a 28 year old homeowning man, my Friday nights now consist of watching finales of popular reality television and trawling the website of my local council to find out how much it costs to have a garden waste bin & essentially being a slave to my two cats. 

It was whilst performing these menial tasks & scrolling some social media hellsite did I discover it was 20 years since the release of Arctic Monkeys debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Or the ever succinct acronym of WPSIATWIN. (Muscle memory from the Indie Twitter days meant I was able to type that with more speed and accuracy I care to admit). 

Upon this realisation I immediately threw it on (played it through my airpods) because a) I like to have my finger on the pulse & b) it’s not something I’d done in years. It turned into quite a grounding moment; in my mid teenage years this band & album was absolutely everything to me. But in reality it goes back much further. I’m of that age where this album soundtracked so much of my youth. All the way back 20 years ago, watching the music video of A view from the afternoon in absolute awe as an 8 year old; or the album being an ever present for years, be it in the car, kitchen or ipod. It followed me for a long time and I allowed the band and their music to mould into my personality as a teenager. For a number of years there wasn’t a man I wanted to be more than Alex Turner. 

I fell out of love with Arctic Monkeys and their music for a while to explore a more pretentious side but as soon as I listen to this I'm all in. It has a charm to it that makes me think of that Peep Show quote when Mark goes on about wine not being as delicious as coke or hot chocolate. For all the Black Country New Road records out there - they just haven’t got what this album does.

Now I could go on about how this album is **still** the best debut album of the century thus far, how on every listen you look at the tracklist and underestimate tracks like You Probably Couldn't See for the Lights but You Were Staring Straight at Me or Riot Van. Or how it has that perfect amount of timestamping with references to Tropical Reefs whilst still retaining a timelessness on a whole.

 But that's not really why this album works. It’s not even nostalgia. It’s not even the fact it’s still really fucking good. It’s not Alex Turner’s Sheffield poetry. 

It’s more that it can’t be replicated. The music, the trajectory, the what came after. So much has changed within the musical landscape since this came out and the fact this was written and performed by essentially teenagers in a truly organic way feels so alien now. 

I am still and forever an 8 year old in my Mum & Dad’s kitchen air drumming to A View From The Afternoon listening to this album for one of the first times. Forever lost in transit somewhere between home and forever away. No matter how many garden waste bins I order.