" The View from the Afternoon " is a song by Arctic Monkeys originally released on the band's first album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in January 2006. It was also the lead track on the Who the Fuck are Arctic Monkeys EP. This release had an accompanying video.
Themes
The themes of "The View from the Afternoon" are based around observations of behaviour on an excursion into local nightlife. In a repeated verse, vocalist Alex Turner comments on the expectation that an evening that will be enjoyable will likely lead to disappointment. He describes various scenes; a group of meretricious females who have rented a limousine for a fancy dress party; a gambler who has won and then lost the jackpot on a fruit machine; text messaging through the lock/unlock function on a Nokia mobile phone; "two for the price of one" drinks promotions, which Turner explicitly blames for the drunkenness of the sender and his predicament.
Composition
Alex Turner said "This is one of the last songs written for the album. There's nothing clever, it's just about anticipating the evening, finding comfort in familiarity and the fact that you know you're bound to send a daft message or something before the sun comes up. I think I've stopped doing that now." The lyric "you can never beat the bandit, no" refers to the same fruit machine that the Reverend and the Makers sing about on the song Bandits. Both of them describe losing out to the fruit machine.
Music video
The video is based around a young male in a parka jacket playing the drum part of the song in the middle of a courtyard between blocks of high rise flats. Then, there is a sequence of surreal elements; an Indian schoolgirl walks past wearing plastic devil horns; a running fox; three men trying to attract his attention of the drummer who ignores them; the drummer is fed milk by the schoolgirl and then a brief shot in colour of him washing himself in shallow water. The music stops and it is revealed that his drumming has led his hands to bleed. Then, a shot of man in the dark wielding a baseball bat; a brief shot of the moon which then appears to explode; an older man struggling to lift a dumbbell. Finally the man with the bat comes near to the drummer and is about to strike him but the audio stops and we see a last shot of the male being showered in what could be rain or the fragments of the moon. The video is shot in black and white and was filmed near Park Hill flats in the Arctic Monkeys' native city of Sheffield, directed by W.I.Z. for Factory Films.
References
- ^ NME (01-06). "Arctic Monkeys - In The Own Words". IPC MEDIA . http://www.nme.com/arcticmonkeys/ownwords . Retrieved 2006-06-04 .
External links
- "The View from the Afternoon"
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