Arktische Affen
German people, maybe like everyone else in the world, have a weary attitude to the Arctic Monkeys. This review in Die Welt is typical. The perception is that Britain functions in exactly this way – finding a band that plays the same punk song in a few different forms and finds all the right clichés, then the NME gets all the kids excited about it and then people can’t buy tickets and everyone drinks lager in plastic cups and throws them and people sweat and cry and have sexual fantasies and no-one hears about the band ever again.
But British people love all these things for exactly the same reasons. The British never tire of a song sung about themselves and wet pavements and unrequited lust, because these are the things that Britain understands as romance, and the British also believe – like no other nation - that pop music is all about romance.
The Arctic Monkeys touch the soft heart of the British, the side that likes to describe the squalor of a night out in Great Britain, and simultaneously celebrates and ridicules it. Britons have completely mastered the craft of hating and loving themselves at the same time. They disarm their nationalism in the act of pronouncing it. The average Briton will take the piss out of, say, Prince Charles, but then he’ll beat up any foreigner up who does the same.
But strangely, there are many Germans who have a real affection for this self-contradictory national character. Germans love to holiday in English squalor. There’s so much they don’t have.