Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys records new album with side project The Last Shadow Puppets
By Maria Rodriguez
After an agonizingly long wait, fans of Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s side project The Last Shadow Puppets are finally getting the best Christmas present: the first new music from the band in nearly a decade.
You know Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. You may also know him from the soundtrack to Submarine. And yet this modern rockabilly-lookalike is also known from a one-off side project he did back in 2008, when many of us were still in middle school: The Last Shadow Puppets.
On November 17th, band member, drummer, and producer for The Last Shadow Puppets, James Ford was quoted in an interview with Chilean website Rock & Pop saying “This year, I’ve just done a Last Shadow Puppets record, which is the guy from Arctic Monkeys and Miles. So we did the follow-up album to that. That’s the last thing I did.”
Fans on the internet went nuts. This was the fulfillment of years of promises of new music.
December 3rd, the band’s YouTube page released a teaser video that showed flashing clips of seeming non-sequiturs, was filled with suspenseful strings, and featured a cute little bulldog. There’s no way to describe it, you’ll just have to see it.
The Last Shadow Puppets is fronted by Turner and his best mate Miles Kane. Their mop- top haircuts and sixties string orchestra lent a Beatles-esque vibe to the band. (Seriously, watch their music video for “Standing Next to Me,” it looks like it’s pulled from an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show plus props).
It was a nice change. Arctic Monkeys started off as punk rock. Miles Kane was in the indie band The Rascals.
Their album went to number 1 in the UK, and the band went on a brief tour. They played a concert as part of the BBC Electric Proms. The Electric Proms were an October music festival which was held during the years 2006-2010 with events in Liverpool and London. The Last Shadow Puppets crowned their achievements with a performance in 2008 in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall. They won the NME Award for Best Music Video In 2009 for their song “My Mistakes Were Mean for You.” But after that, they faded from view, because, they never released any more music.
The success of the band, drawing from the behemoth success that was the Arctic Monkeys in the UK, ensured many devoted fans. But in spite of all this success, The Last Shadow Puppets was only ever a side project. Turner and Kane returned to their respective bands with promises of new material to come, without fruition; fans were left hanging.
It seems that the Arctic Monkey’s hiatus has produced some good after all. While Alex and the boys from the Monkey’s certainly need the rest, fans everywhere hope that they’ll follow The Last Shadow Puppets’ suit and record some new stuff. And while they’re at it, maybe they’ll join forces with the Strokes, who announced that they were back in the studio this past September at Washington, D.C.’s Landmark Music Festival.
