Incongruity - Arctic Monkeys play Salt Lake City

If American cities were named by outsiders, rather than by their pioneer founders, Salt Lake City would be ‘The Incongruous City’. This could well have been fitting: I don’t think Alex Turner has yet shoe-horned the word ‘incongruity’ into his Byzantine lyrical structures, but after this gig, he may feel compelled.

There are three centres to Salt Lake. Most famous is Temple Square and the surrounding squeaky clean, newly polished, bright-pin edifices, statuary and gardens that mark out the Mormons’ stake. Then there is the area of Main Street and State Street which is dominated by government buildings: fortunately the days in which these overlap with Category One have passed, along with polygamy. Thirdly, there is downtown ‘shopping’, but there are no normal shops in Salt Lake City. Want to buy a newspaper, a banana, a shirt? Forget it. There are quite a few art galleries (Mormon art is naive, sentimental and representational).

On the other hand, type ‘shops Salt Lake City’ into a search engine and the top listing is for tattoo parlours. My, they’re everywhere. And we’re in the very heart of the west, so between the tattoo parlours along State Street, south of town, are garages selling used Dodge trucks. For the lone woman on her way to an Arctic Monkeys’ gig, rule number one is avoid the Mormons; rule number two, avoid the truckers. There is ‘The Republican Club, est. 1916’ on State Street, but unfortunately, it’s members only.

The venue known as ‘In the Venue’ is out on the west side of the city, about a mile from the centre. It is, for those of us who despaired at the prospect of ever seeing Arctic Monkeys at a proper gig, rather than at a festival/stadium sensation (like watching an action film with an obscured view of the screen), a proper dive: windowless, black, all gantries, pipes and leads .... and dry ice (?). But no beer .... strangely, this is good news as I can’t hazard a guess at how much of it would have been sprayed the band’s way.

One thing that has always struck me as incongruous about Arctic Monkeys is the following from boys not yet old enough to understand the lyrics, and not sexually precocious enough to appreciate their rather maudlin and self-referential turn. And here, in the land of reactionary truckers, Colgate zealots and tattooed under-grounders, the predominant age of the male audience at this all-ages’ venue, is fourteen. The older ones didn’t seem much older. Despite the twiglet build, Alex Turner at Salt Lake City airport looked controlled and cool: skinny jeans and shades sharing the arrivals’ lounge with a suit and teeth whose family met him on his return from a faithful mission. In front of a packed crowd of Utah’s culturally-starved youth he looked strangely uneasy and vulnerable. It wasn’t just because none of the Americans knew Humbug. It wasn’t because they were unaware of the stop/start style that demands every pause in which no-one is playing anything be filled with clapping and whistling. It wasn’t the group of men who decided to cavort and carry-on in the same variable-speed skank daisy-chain, irrespective of what was playing (though when captured in the photo of ‘the crowd’ on the website, looking remarkably ‘normal’). The much speculated hair growth, the magical appearance of keyboards, the portentous surrealism – humbug. I didn’t want to be a detached observer. I wanted to be one of the crowd. But this had the air of a band running faster and faster to escape its own core audience.