ALEX Turner, the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys, didn’t become a rocker because of the bands he and his mates saw live at the U.K.’s star-studded summer music festivals. Rather, starting from the time he was 16, Turner took inspiration from his friends’ pub bands, which played around his hometown of Sheffield.
“We went to watch them, and I thought, I wanna do that, in the pub. It went on from there,” says Turner. “I always had an interest in making music. I liked messing about on the piano when I was young – messing around and making things up.”
No longer a pub band, the Arctic Monkeys perform on Tuesday at the Hammerstein Ballroom.
Early on, the Sheffield foursome – Turner, guitarist Jamie Cook, drummer Matt Helders and bassist Andy Nicholson (who was later replaced by Nick O’ Malley) – practiced by playing covers, a wide mix of rock including The Beatles, the White Stripes, the Datsuns and the Undertones.
“The songs we wrote at the beginning weren’t really songs because none of us could play anything,” he recalls. “It took a while.”
They began recording and performing their own tracks, one at a time. “It seems like so long ago,” says Turner, at the ripe old age of 21.
The grass-roots group built hype and love by distributing demos at shows and posting songs on the Internet. It worked. Their second single, “I Bet You Good Look on the Dance Floor,” topped the British singles charts, the first Internet-only release to do so.
U.K. music mag NME dubbed the band part of the “New Yorkshire” movement, along with other rock acts from Leeds and Sheffield, such as the Cribs, the Long Blondes and the Kaiser Chiefs. Then, the band’s 2006 debut, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not,” sold more copies in its first week of release (360,000) than any other debut album in British music history. It went on to sell an additional 305,000 copies in the U.S.
The chart-busting records continued with the group’s second effort, “Favourite Worst Nightmare,” released last month.
In Britain the band had 18 singles on the top 200 singles charts the day of release. “You’d probably have to go back to the heyday of The Beatles in the ’60s to find anything that could come close to matching this record,” an HMV spokesman told a paper.
“We wanted to make the sound bigger without getting a symphony in,” says Turner, noting they used more “echo-y sounds, tremolos, organs and surf guitars. It’s not as jagged as the first disc.”
The group’s songs have lots of attitude and energy, but Turner, whose sings a little like Blur’s Damon Albarn, seems fairly laid-back on the phone. As big as they are, he doesn’t take it all very seriously.
“I don’t think it of as a career, but I guess, in a way, that’s what is it now,” Turner says. “I always think of it as a laugh. It’s what I enjoy doing, sitting in and playing a guitar and writing songs. I see it all as an opportunity to be able to that.”
He’ll take the grass-roots approach to marketing any day, and the last thing he ever wants to do is star in an iPod ad.
“Songs, which could have meant something to someone before, all of sudden have just-a been shrunk down into a backdrop to some f – – – in’ daft-like colorful characters dancing around on a TV screen,” he says. “It’s not our scene.”
And moving from the pub to the public stage took some getting used to.
“Playing the Reading and Leeds festivals was a bit of startling moment,” he says. “We had only been [fans] there for previous years.”
marymhuhn@nypost.com