Maybe you’re about to read this and find out about a band called Arctic Monkeys. Or maybe you already know more about them than words could ever convey. Maybe you downloaded their songs months before record companies cared and maybe you were grabbed by the sudden urge to drive for half a day just to see them play. Maybe you picked up one of the demos they handed out at early gigs, memorised every word and bellowed them back at them during their next gig. Maybe you were one of the kids who’s taken up surfing across Monkeys’ crowds as a full-time hobby. And maybe you’ve also ended up with a permanent monitor-related injury because of it. Because unless your definition of success rests on how many private yachts you can afford, Arctic Monkeys were already massive way before they inked a deal with Domino in June 2005

Of course, it was guitars that kick-started this hurricane of hero worship: two of them, given to Alex and Jamie Cook as Xmas presents just three years ago. The pair began practising furiously – some might say competitively - before Andy Nicholson (bass) and Matt Helders (drums) joined the throng. Bonding over everything from Oasis and The Smiths to Roots Manuva and Mancunian poet John Cooper Clarke (“A true creative mind” reckons Alex), the band concocted the razor-sharp lyricism that fuels songs like ‘Sun Goes Down’ and ‘A Certain Romance’, witty observations of small-town life where “there’s only music so that there’s new ringtones” and going out could sometimes mean having a pool cue wrapped around your head.

Within the space of a few gigs the band found themselves playing in front of crowds who knew words that even Alex hadn’t learnt properly yet. The reason? The demos they’d been handing out for nowt at gigs in true DIY punka style.
“I used to work in a bar at venues and it really annoyed me when bands said ‘We’ve got CDs for sale at the back, three pound each’,” says Alex. “You’d think ‘Fuck off, who do you think you are?’ We had this one time where people were literally running up to the stage clambering for these demos, a right frenzy! We thought ‘Fucking hell this is cool’.

As songs swapped hands, bizarre things started happening. Bizarre things like turning up for gigs in Wakefield to be greeted by hardcore Monkeys fans who’d driven from places as far away as Aberdeen. And when the band played the Boardwalk at the start of this year they were greeted with the entire crowd singing the lyrics to ‘When The Sun Goes Down’, a song that’s never been released (at the time of writing this, the band have released just one single). “It just erupted into this thing,” raves Alex. “We had people crowd-surfing and landing on monitors. One kid came flying over the crowd and his cheek just smashed on the side of the stage, another just rolled across, a perfect land like a gymnast. But best is when everyone’s just bouncing.”

And, naturally for a band who’ve never once sat and contrived things, questions of the ‘where next’ variety are met with a shrug: “People already proper care about the music. You can see it in their eyes. But I guess it can still get bigger. Instead of hundreds of people singing the words, it could be thousands. Does that feel any different, I wonder?”

Maybe like you, he’s about to find out.