Arctic Monkeys Sheffield: From High Green to LA - how schoolmates became superstars

Alex Turner, Jamie Cook, Nick O'Malley and Matt Helders are preparing for two giant homecoming gigs in the Steel City tomorrow and Saturday.

Hillsborough Park will be packed with thousands of fans as two sell-out crowds welcome the High Green boys home – just down the road from where their rise to world wide fame began.

“There’s not much more humble than High Green, we all lived within one road of each other basically on the same estate. Me and Alex went to school together from primary school, all the way until Barnsley College,” said drummer Matt Helders.

“So when we left secondary school, we went to Stocksbridge, we decided to start a band.

“We were all hanging out with each other anyway, and we had friends that had done it and watched them locally. Like Milburn and stuff like that. It made us feel like we could do it, we thought oh wow, we didn’t realise people just did that.

“It was such a weird idea to us at the time, I felt that bands just turned up on TV and that was it. I didn’t know the history of how they started or what they did, it was just such a foreign concept to me. I just felt like ‘there’s no way people like us could do it’, in a very cheesy cliché way…but, it was like that.

“We just gave it a go over the summer, got some instruments and just put this band together.”

And that was it, that is how the Arctic Monkeys began this journey which has seen them perform around the world, amass millions of fans and live the dream.

“I didn’t even have a drum kit at first, I just got some drumsticks to start with. Just to familiarise myself with what you do with them,” recalled Matt.

“We decided to practice for a year before we even wanted to try and do a gig. Then we did the first gig at The Grapes and that was the start of it.”

For years the venue was one of Sheffield’s standout music venues, naturally due to it being the place that hosted the Arctic Monkeys first ever gig — when the band members were just 16-years-old.

The room used for the now iconic gig was converted into a living area years ago. It remains a favoured haunt by some of the band, from time-to-time, and you may well see a Monkey or two if you happen to be passing by.

“After the first gig, we started recording demos and that’s when we got a taste for what it would be like to play in front of people,” said Matt.

What followed was quite the explosive response to the band, as their demo songs proliferated the social media platform MySpace. The band weren’t signed to a label back then, and were not directly involved in creating the surge in interest, preferring instead to focus on writing, gigging and sharing their demo CDs.

“That were the thing really, it was out of our hands. We didn’t have the genius thought to put ourselves out there. That was our mate Mark, who just knew how to do all of that,” said Matt. “We had no idea that it was even an option. We were just picking the CDs and he was putting them out there and then we noticed the website was getting a lot of action.”

The band became part of that new wave of music stars, including Calvin Harris, You Me At Six, Kate Nash and Lily Allen, who all saw their careers burst into the national spotlight courtesy of the now largely defunct social media platform.

“We noticed that people were knowing the words at gigs and that was a weird thing. I was like, ‘how do these people know these songs?’ And it was because he was putting them online,” remembered Matt.

But even bigger success was on the cards as their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, smashed the records selling over 360,000 copies in its first week and in doing so became the fastest-selling debut album in British music history — it’s since gone 7x platinum.

It didn’t do so badly in the US either, selling 500,000 to become the second best fastest-selling independent record label debut album. Not too shabby at all.

Matt and his bandmates may have a world-wide following, and life has certainly changed beyond comprehension, but they remain true to their roots – as Matt’s involvement in saving iconic Sheffield pub, Fagan’s, demonstrates.

Its future was in doubt following the retirement of landlords Tom and Barbara Boulding after 37 years spent running the establishment.

Dubbed “The Fellowship of Fagans”, rather amusingly by businessman James O’Hara, nine Sheffielders came together to ensure the pub didn’t go the way of other original city establishments, a point that Matt was keen to stress.

“My involvement is just that I felt it was an important place to keep alive, and I think that the people that were already part of the team to take it over will honour it as it was. It’s a pub I go to quite a bit whenever we are in town,” he said.

“Obviously, I didn’t grow up on that side of town. But when I started drinking, it was one of the places we’d always go to, plus it’s the one that Richard Hawley loves.

“It just felt like the right thing to do to be involved in it. For the people involved it doesn’t take much to keep it going, so if you can it’s a really good thing to do.”

Despite the somewhat obsessive interest that goes along with fame, it’s very apparent that there remains a desire from Matt to stay connected to his home. After relocating to Los Angeles, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was done with his hometown, so why bother coming back, a cynic might ask.

But, it’s safe to say it’s not a sentiment shared by Matt, who was even keen to reveal his favourite chippy as testament to his fondness for coming home.

“I would say Two Steps on Sharrow Vale Road, my dad used to go there in his twenties. Obviously we lived in High Green, so we didn’t go that much but I lived in Sharrow Vale before I moved to L.A. and I could just walk down, so the Two Steps is the one for me,” he said.

“Now if you’re in High Green, we always used to go to the Circle Friery which was just good because it was there.”

Asked what his take was, as well as his own experiences when it comes to dealing with all of the attention that comes their way, Matt said: “It’s true, I think I probably noticed it more a bit early on. It sort of never really bothered me that much because I was having fun. I kind of knew what we were doing was good…in the nicest possible way, I appreciated what we’ve got and don’t take it for granted.