Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner has admitted that he and drummer Matt Helders dressed up and pretended to be Oasis in their school assembly.
Speaking to Pitchfork, the frontman named Oasis’ 1995 album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory as one of the LPs which had had the most influence upon him as a teenager, and revealed that he had performed tracks from the record in front of his peers while brandishing a tennis racquet.
“In the UK, you go from primary school to secondary school at age 11,” he explained. “And when we left primary school, all the kids would form groups and do a performance, like the girls would do a dance to the Spice Girls, or whatever.”
He added: So me and Matt and some of our friends put on ‘Morning Glory’ – we ‘played’ some tennis racquets and pretended to be Oasis. Matt was Liam Gallagher, he had the bucket hat on. I was the bass player.
The singer claimed their tribute act wasn’t well received, however. “We were just standing ther, doing what Oasis did onstage,” he said. “Which was not a great deal. I don’t think we got as good a reaction as the Spice Girls.”
Speaking about why he loved the LP, meanwhile, he said: “With Oasis, it’s just that attitude, like it’s resistant against everything else that’s going on in music. I don’t know if you can fully understand that– it’s like an impulse, innit? Especially at that age, you don’t rationalize, you’re just like, ‘That looks cool.’
“And I feel like that’s the fucking way it should be now, in a way. Guitar music or rock’n’roll or whatever you want to call it sort of goes away with trends, but it’ll never go away completely. It can’t die because it’s so fundamentally attractive.”