New Old-fashioned

The Age

Friday May 2, 2008

Bernard Zuel

Two young Brits have the spirit of the '60s on a string, writes Bernard Zuel.

THE Last Shadow Puppets are two 22-year-olds from northern England who have discovered Scott Walker's theatrical and dramatic music of the late 1960s, thrown in a dash of Ennio Morricone magic and added it to their energetic rock and straight '60s guitar pop.

It works surprisingly well on their debut album The Age of the Understatement; their dual-voiced melodies are not mere throwaways as the songs gallop with fervour.

One of those singers is not famous, yet. His name is Miles Kane, and he has a regular band called the Rascals. The other has a regular band called Arctic Monkeys. His name is Alex Turner - and he is very famous.

And he is happy to talk. He's polite and amusing; we discuss Scott Walker and his song Jackie, which both Turner and Kane have cited as an important inspiration. I remind Turner of the line "If I could be for just one little hour/ Cute, cute, cute in a stupid-ass way", which any Arctic Monkeys fan could imagine being sung by him.

"We love that song," he says slowly. "I think it was the size of it - we wanted to capture the grandeur, which was not something we were used to hearing."

Kane, meanwhile, was the one who introduced his good friend Turner to Walker. "I love the words in it, I love the drama, the melodies and I wanted to get into that world," he says enthusiastically in the broadest Liverpudlian accent.

"So I started writing songs in that style, and when me and Al decided to do an album together I played him all them Walker tunes and he really got into it as well."

How comfortable was it for a pair, who are the main writers in their respective bands, to write with someone else?

"It was amazing, you know," Kane says. "The thing that we both found is we are very similar in many ways in terms of outlook on music. We are both always writing songs, even now.

"Today, before I go to lunch, I've got a song to finish ... and that's what he's like. I never had that before with anyone else.

"It feels like an old-fashioned writing partnership."

As with those old-fashioned partnerships, did they have to learn how to give each other space, what to say and what not to say?

"No," Kane says with another burst of enthusiasm.

"We'd be sitting in my bedroom or his room and going through these ideas, spitting words out at each other, melodies. It would grow like that.

"The first song we wrote together was a song called The Chamber, which is on the album, about not being able to sleep because you've got these ideas in your head.

"And that's when we did it with the two vocals as well.

"Before this I'd never sung with anyone else really, and that was something that interested us. It was very exciting."

The Last Shadow Puppets' The Age of the Understatement is out now.

© 2008 The Age

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