#improbably poppy

[cultofpoppy-tm]

Revolver celebrates POPPY with special collector's issue

2024’s Artist of the Year

[sapphicbookclub]

Sapphic Books List: Witches

Gather your coven and familiars and dive into magical worlds 🧙‍♀️

The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinska

Now She is Witch by Kirsty Logan

The Scapegracers (trilogy) by Hannah Abigail Clarke

Payback's a Witch (series) by Lana Harper

These Witches Don’t Burn (duology) by Isabel Sterling

Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

Elysium Girls by Kate Pentecost

The Circle (Engelsfors trilogy) by M. Strandberg & S.B. Elfgren

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

The Lost Coast by A.R. Capetta

All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley

Witching Moon by Poppy Woods

The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska

The Reluctant Witch (trilogy) by Kristen S. Walker

The Sting of Victory (series) by S.D. Simper

Not Your Average Love Spell by Barbara Ann Wright

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker & Wendy Xu

Out of Salem by Hal Schrieve

Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Improbable Magic for Cynical Witches by Kate Scelsa

Walking Through Shadows by Sheri Lewis Wohl

Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno

[cherrythepuppet]

Puppets before Christmas [Part 3]

AU belongs to @cloudy-dreams [This is only going to have 5 chapters! Each is pretty long word wise ha ha]

"This has never happened before!" The clown Dog, Barnaby, said "It's suspicious!" A witch exclaimed "It's peculiar!" Another witch exclaimed "It's scary!" A vampire

"Stand aside!" Howdy yelled "Coming through! We've got find (Y/n)! There's only 365 days left till next Halloween!" Howdy announced "364!" someone in the crowd yelled

"Is there anywhere we've forgotten to check?" Howdy asked "I looked in every mausoleum!" Barnaby said"We opened the sarcophagi!"  "I tromped through the pumpkin patch!"

"I peeked behind the Cyclops's eye! I did! But They weren't there!" "It's time to sound the alarms!" Howdy yelled...."Frog's breath will overpower any odor" Wally mumbled as he poured the frog's breath into the pot but it smelled horrible and he began coughing

"Bitter!" He yelled while coughing "Worm's wart! Where's that worm's wart?!" He said as he searched the cabinets until he found the worms wort

"Wally, that soup ready yet?" Poppy asked "Coming!" Wally yelled as he poured the worms wort into the pot before getting a wooden spoon and bowl 

After a moment Wally walked upstairs to where Poppy was working "lunch" he said as he set the bowl in front of poppy "Ah, what's that? Worm's wart! mmm, and...frog's breath" Poppy muttered

 "What's wrong? I-I thought you liked frog's breath!" Wally replied "Nothing's more suspicious than frog's breath! Until you taste it I won't swallow a spoonful!" Poppy told him while she held the spoon out towards him

"I'm not hungry!" Wally lied as he knocked spoon onto the ground "Oops!" He mumbled before bending down to grab it "You want me to starve!? An old Woman like me who hardly has strength as it is. Me, to whom you owe your very life!" Poppy groaned 

Wally moved the wooden spoon to hide it under the table before he pulled out a trick spoon from his sock then he stood up "Oh don't be silly" Wally chuckled He ate the soup with trick spoon "Mmmm, see. Scrumptious!" He said, Poppy was still skeptical but she at Ate soup...

~

"Did anyone think to dredge the lake?" Howdy asked "this morning!" Barnaby yelled then everyone went quiet As they could hear the sounds of faint meowing Everyone then looked in the direction of the meowing "(Y/n)'s back!" someone exclaimed

"Where have you been?" Howdy asked"Call a town meeting and I'll tell everyone all about it!" (Y/n) told him "When?" Howdy asked "Immediately!" (Y/n) yelled"Town meeting, town meeting, town meeting tonight, town meeting tonight!" Howdy announced as he drove around in his truck...

~

"Listen everyone. I want to tell you about Christmastown!" (Y/n) told the town as Music began playing

"There are objects so peculiar They were not to be believed All around, things to tantalize my brain It's a world unlike anything I've ever seen And as hard as I try I can't seem to describe Like a most improbable dream But you must believe when I tell you this It's as real as my skull and it does exist Here, let me show you This is a thing called a present The whole thing starts with a box!" "A box? is it steel?" "Are there locks?" "Is it filled with a pox?"

"A pox How delightful, a pox!" "If you please Just a box with bright-colored paper And the whole thing's topped with a bow!" "bow? But why? How ugly What's in it? What's in it?" "That's the point of the thing, not to know!""It's a bat Will it bend?" "It's a rat! Will it break?" "Perhaps it s the head that I found in the lake!" "

Listen now, you don't understand That's not the point of Christmas land Now, pay attention We pick up an oversized sock And hang it like this on the wall!" "Oh, yes! Does it still have a foot?" "Let me see, let me look!" "Is it rotted and covered with gook?" "Um, let me explain There's no foot inside, but there's candy Or sometimes it's filled with small toys!"

"Small toys?" "Do they bite?" "Do they snap?" "Or explode in a sack?" "Or perhaps they just spring out And scare girls and boys!" "What a splendid idea This Christmas sounds fun I fully endorse it Let's try it at once!"

"Everyone, please now, not so fast There's something here that you don't quite grasp Well, I may as well give them what they want And the best, I must confess, I have saved for the last For the ruler of this Christmas land!"

"Is a fearsome Queen with a deep mighty voice Least that's what I've come to understand And I've also heard it told That She's something to behold Like a lobster, huge and red When She sets out to slay with her rain gear on Carting bulging sacks with her big great arms!"

"That is, so I've heard it said And on a dark, cold night Under full moonlight She flies into a fog Like a vulture in the sky And they call her! Sally Claws!" Everyone was cheering as (Y/n) walked off "Well, at least they're excited But they don't understand That special kind of feeling in Christmas land Oh, well..." They mumbled

"You've poisoned me for the last time you wretched Doll!" Poppy yelled before she locks Wally away and a loud dingdong"Oh my head...the door is open!" She said

"Hel-lo?" (Y/n) yelled "(Y/n) Skellington, up here my Friend!" Poppy exclaimed "Dr. I need to borrow some equipment!" (Y/n) told poppy "Is that so, whatever for?" Poppy asked

"I'm conducting a series of experiments" (Y/n) explained "How perfectly marvelous! Curiosity killed the cat, you know!" Poppy said with a small laugh But that made (Y/n) frown "I know" They grumbled

"Come on into the lab and we'll get you all fixed up!" Poppy added, Wally heard everything as he was leaning aginast the door "Hmm. Experiments?" He asked quietly"Otoo, I'm home!" (Y/n) yelled as they began to set up all their science equipment then began working

"Interesting reaction....but what does it mean?" (Y/n) groaned before they heard a knock? At the window?(Y/n) walked over to the window and saw a basket hitting it, they opened the window and looked down to see the blue haired Ragdoll

Wally smiled at (Y/n) making their skull turn a small shade of grey, (Y/n) waved at Wally before taking the basketThey looked down but Wally was gone...After Wally gives (Y/n) them the basket and sneaks off He picks a flower which turned into a Christmas tree then catches on fire

"Something's up with (Y/n) Something's up with (Y/n)! Don't know if we're ever going to get Them back! They're all alone up there Locked away inside Never says a word Hope They haven't died Something's up with (Y/n)! Something's up with (Y/n)!"

"Christmas time is buzzing in my skull Will it let me be? I cannot tell There's so many things I cannot grasp When I think I've got it, and then at last Through my bony fingers it does slip Like a snowflake in a fiery grip Something here I'm not quite getting Though I try, I keep forgetting Like a memory long since past Here in an instant, gone in a flash What does it mean? What does it mean?"

"In these little bric-a-brac A secret's waiting to be cracked These dolls and toys confuse me so Confound it all, I love it though Simple objects, nothing more But something's hidden through a door Though I do not have the key Something's there I cannot see What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?"

"Hmm... I've read these Christmas books so many times I know the stories and I know the rhymes I know the Christmas carols all by heart My skull's so full, it's tearing me apart As often as I've read them, something's wrong So hard to put my bony finger on Or perhaps it's really not as deep As I've been led to think Am I trying much too hard? Of course!"

"I've been too close to see The answer's right in front of me Right in front of me It's simple really, very clear Like music drifting in the air Invisible, but everywhere Just because I cannot see it Doesn't mean I can't believe it You know, I think this Christmas thing It's not as tricky as it seems And why should they have all the fun?"

"It should belong to anyone Not anyone, in fact, but me Why, I could make a Christmas tree And there's no reason I can find I couldn't handle Christmas time I bet I could improve it too And that's exactly what I'll do Hee,hee,hee!" (Y/n) pushed open the windows "Eureka!! This year, Christmas will be ours!" they exclaimed as the town began to cheer but Wally looked worried...

~

"Patience, everyone! (Y/n) has a special Job for each of us! Dr. Poppy, your Xmas assignment is ready. Dr. Poppy to the front of the line!" Howdy announced "I knew it! Dr. thank you for coming! We need some of these!" (Y/n) said as they showed a picture of Santa and sleigh

"Hmm.. their construction should be exceedingly simple. I think" Poppy mumbled "How horrible our Xmas will be!" Howdy exclaimed"No--how jolly!" (Y/n) corrected making Howdy switch faces "Oh, how jolly our Xmas will be..." He said befire he gets pelted by rocks then sees the three trick or treaters

"What are you doing here?!" He asked"(Y/n) sent for us!" Julie grinned "Specifically!" Frank said "By name!" Eddie added "(Y/n)! (Y/n) it's Home's Henchpeople!" Howdy yelled

"Ah, Halloween's finest trick or treaters. The job I have for you is top secret. It requires craft, cunning, mischief!" (Y/n) told the three"And we thought you didn't like us, (Y/n)!" Eddie said with a laugh "Absolutely no one is to know about it. Not a soul. Now!" (Y/n) replied

(Y/n) whispered the plan to them before speaking louder nkw "And one more thing -- leave that no account Home out of this!" They demanded "Whatever you say, (Y/n)!" "Of course (Y/n)!" "Wouldn't dream of it (Y/n)!"all said with their fingers crossed before they ran out of the town and to a small little tree house

"Kidnap Mrs Sally Claws!" "I wanna do it!" "Let's draw straws!" "(Y/n) said we should work together!" "Three of a kind!" "Birds of a feather!" "Now and forever Wheeee La, la, la, la, la Kidnap the Sally Claws, lock her up real tight Throw away the key and then Turn off all the lights!"

"First, we're going to set some bait Inside a nasty trap and wait When She comes a-sniffing we will Snap the trap and close the gate!" "Wait! I've got a better plan To catch this big red lobster Star! Let's pop her in a boiling pot And when She's done we'll butter her up!"

"Kidnap the Sally Claws Throw her in a box Bury her for ninety years Then see if She talks!" "Then Mr. Home Can take the whole thing over then He'll be so pleased, I do declare That he will cook her rare!" "I say that we take a cannon Aim it at her door And then knock three times And when She answers Sally Claws will be no more!"

"You're so stupid, think now lf we blow her up to smithereens We may lose some pieces And then (Y/n) will beat us black and green!" "Kidnap the Sally Claws! Tie her in a bag Throw her in the ocean Then, see if She is sad!" "Because Mr. Home is the meanest guy around If I were on his list, I'd get out of town!"

"He'll be so pleased by our success That he'll reward us too, I'll bet!" "Perhaps he'll make his special brew Of snake and spider stew Ummm! We're his little henchmen and We take our job with pride We do our best to please him And stay on his good side!"

"I wish my cohorts weren't so dumb!" "I'm not the dumb one!" "You're no fun!" "Shut up!" "Make me!""I've got something, listen now This one is real good, you'll see We'll send a present to her door Upon there'll be a note to read Now, in the box we'll wait and hide Until her curiosity entices her to look inside!" "And then we'll have her One, two, three!"

"Kidnap the Sally Claws, beat her with a stick Lock her up for ninety years, see what makes her tick Kidnap the Sally Claws, chop him into bits Mr. Home is sure to get his kicks! Kidnap the Sally Claws, see what we will see Lock her in a cage and then, throw away the key!"

"Sally Claws..hahaha!" Home exclaimed.....

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🔮 Good afternoon, my bookish bats. I hope you've had an enchanting, spell-binding October so far. If you want to add a little more magic to your TBR, consider these witchlit books featuring sapphic witches and other mystical beings!

🔮 The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke 🪄 Payback's a Witch by Lana Harper 🔮 These Witches Don’t Burn by Isabel Sterling 🪄 Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley 🔮 The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska 🪄 Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

🔮 Now She Is Witch by Kirsty Logan 🪄 The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinska 🔮 The Circle by M. Strandberg & S.B. Elfgren 🪄 The Witch and the Vampire by Francesca Flores 🔮 The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson 🪄 Elysium Girls by Kate Pentecost

🔮 Edie in Between by Laura Sibson 🪄 When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey 🔮 Marvel's The Runaways 🪄 Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson 🔮 Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall 🪄 Buffy the Vampire Slayer Willow & Tara

🔮 All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle 🪄 The Severed Thread by Leslie Vedder 🔮 The Lost Coast by A.R. Capetta 🪄 Romancing a Gorgon by Tallie Rose 🔮 Improbable Magic for Cynical Witches by Kate Scelsa 🪄 The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

🔮 Not Your Average Love Spell by Barbara Ann Wright 🪄 The Sting of Victory by S.D. Simper 🔮 Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno 🪄 The Reluctant Witch by Kristen S. Walker 🔮 Witching Moon by Poppy Woods 🪄 Keep Your Witches Close by Colette Rivera

🔮 Walking Through Shadows by Sheri Lewis Wohl 🪄 Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moïra Fowley-Doyle 🔮 Out of Salem by Hal Schrieve 🪄 Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker & Wendy Xu

[wizardingworldlibrary]

Minerva McGonagall (2) Masterlist

part one

A Birthday For Kitten (fanfiction.net) - Hogwarts Duo albus/minerva G, 12k

Summary: The staff of Hogwarts decides to throw Minerva McGonagall a surprise birthday party. Albus asks her to dinner to get her out of the castle while they prepare...romance blooms and when they come back surprises await...

A Cup of Tea (fanfiction.net) - My Dear Professor McGonagall G, 3k

Summary: Minerva's birthday, a cauldron of Pepper-Up Potion, and a few cups of tea to improve the mood.

Autumn is a Time of Change (ao3) - wasureneba G, 2k

Summary: Minerva's birthday is 4 October. Although autumn is thought to be a time of death, it has always been a time of beginnings for Minerva.

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (ao3) - Squibstress minerva/snape E, 34k

Summary: If war is hell, Severus Snape and Minerva McGonagall are in the Ninth Circle. During Snape's awful year as Headmaster, he and Professor McGonagall draw closer as they are forced into a desperate arrangement.

Fools Rush In (ao3) - Squibstress albus/minerva T, 12k

Summary: At nearly 100, Albus is surprised to find that he is, very improbably and most inconveniently, in love.

Growing Entanglements (ao3) - apricitydays minerva/pomona T, 200

Summary: Minerva has a crush. Pomona has something else.

Manual Transmission (ao3) - Ms_Anthrop minerva/snape E, 9k

Summary: Severus Snape was never one to lose a bet, but then, neither was Minerva McGongall...

"Are you willing to increase the wager?" she repeated, and he was startled to see that her emerald eyes gleamed with a cunning, predatory anticipation.

"That depends," he answered slowly, not above dragging it out a bit. "What are you offering?"

Masquerade (ao3) - FairyQueen (etoilecourageuse) G, 200

Summary: It had been quite a while since Minerva McGonagall had last attended a traditional Masquerade.

Minerva's Birthday Surprise (fanfiction.net) - kidarock G, 10k

Summary: UPDATED AND COMPLETED! Minerva is looking forward to her 70th birthday but it seems everybody has forgotten!Why are the staff acting so strange? How will Albus make it up to her?

Tatters (ao3) - aspionage T, 10k

Summary: In which Severus and Minerva pay a visit to Number Four Privet Drive. Takes place during chapter 14 of A Patchwork Family.

The Art of Self-Fashioning (ao3) - Lomonaaeren M, 283k

Summary: In a world where Neville is the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry still grows up with the Dursleys, but he learns to be more private about what matters to him. When McGonagall comes to give him his letter, she also unwittingly gives Harry both a new quest and a new passion: Transfiguration. But while Harry deliberately hides his growing skills, Minerva worries more and more about the mysterious, brilliant student writing to her who may be venturing into dangerous magical territory.

The Cat and the Parasol (ao3) - songquake minerva/sybill E, 8k

Summary: Sybill Trelawney adjusts to her appointment as Hogwarts’ Divination Professor.

The “Mrs. Clauses” (ao3) - Shanone minerva/poppy G, 591

Summary: Minerva has a holiday tradition to fulfill for her Gryffindor cubs. Poppy helps.

To Some a Gift (ao3) - kelly_chambliss minerva/snape M, 6k

Summary: After Voldemort's first defeat, Severus has a great deal to atone for. Minerva finds a way to help him.

Worth the Wait (ao3) - Kittenshift17 sirius/minerva E, 3k

Summary: *ONE-SHOT* Sirius Black had been trying to sweet talk his way into Minerva's knickers since before he'd had any business fancying girls, let alone fancying a witch like Minerva. Ten years, he'd been wanting to ravish the witch, and this year for her forty-fifth birthday, he might just get his wish.

Yellow and Gold (ao3) - sdk minerva/pomona G, 200

Summary: At a Halloween gathering for the professors at Hogwarts, Minerva has a hard time controlling her gaze.

[silent-stories]

Today we are trying to understand the meaning of improbably poppy. Failing.

[thereadingchallengechallenge]

🔎 YA Under the Radar Part 6 🔍

for a long time, I've been keeping (and eventually posting) lists of YA books I read that have received less attention than they deserve. it's been more than 12 months since I posted the last list in this series but I finally hit 50 the other day so here it is, the latest instalment of my YA Under the Radar series 😊

all of these books have less than 15,000 ratings on Goodreads, give or take, and were books that I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend. I've marked ones with queer rep with pride flag emojis and ones with disability rep with wheelchair symbols. be sure to check them out!

Vampires Never Get Old (ed.) by Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C Parker 🏳️‍🌈 ♿️

Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales (ed.) by Poppy Nwosu 🏳️‍🌈

How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow 🏳️‍🌈

This Poison Heart duology by Kalynn Bayron 🏳️‍🌈

All These Bodies by Kendare Blake

Slipping the Noose by Meg Caddy 🏳️‍🌈

Into the Crooked Place duology by Alexandra Christo

The Scapegracers series by HA Clarke 🏳️‍🌈

Lakesedge duology by Lyndall Clipstone

Clean by Juno Dawson 🏳️‍🌈♿️

Meat Market by Juno Dawson 🏳️‍🌈♿️

Wonderland by Juno Dawson 🏳️‍🌈

Stay Another Day by Juno Dawson 🏳️‍🌈♿️

The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake 🏳️‍🌈♿️

The Witch King duology by HE Edgmon 🏳️‍🌈

The Not So Chosen One by Kate Emery

Ghost Bird by Lisa Fuller

Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard 🏳️‍🌈

At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson 🏳️‍🌈♿️

The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza by Shaun David Hutchinson 🏳️‍🌈

The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson 🏳️‍🌈

Social Queue by Kay Kerr ♿️

Kiss and Tell by Adib Khorram 🏳️‍🌈

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger 🏳️‍🌈

What They Don’t Know by Nicole Maggi

Fix by J Albert Mann ♿️

The Holiday Switch by Tif Marcelo

The Killing Code by Ellie Marney 🏳️‍🌈

Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore 🏳️‍🌈♿️

Fraternity by Andy Mientus 🏳️‍🌈

Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moskowitz 🏳️‍🌈♿️

At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp 🏳️‍🌈♿️

Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses by Kristen O’Neal ♿️

The Woods Are Always Watching by Stephanie Perkins

Wider Than the Sky by Katharine Rothschild 🏳️‍🌈

Trouble Girls by Julia Lynn Rubin 🏳️‍🌈

Crown of Coral and Pearl duology by Mara Rutherford

Surrender Your Sons by Adam Sass 🏳️‍🌈

The 99 Boyfriends of Micah Summers by Adam Sass 🏳️‍🌈

Improbable Magic for Cynical Witches by Kate Scelsa 🏳️‍🌈

Market of Monsters trilogy by Rebecca Schaeffer

Windfall by Jennifer E Smith

Field Notes on Love by Jennifer E Smith

Arden Grey by Ray Stoeve 🏳️‍🌈

Definitions of Indefinable Things by Whitney Taylor ♿️

Stars in Their Eyes by Jessica Walton & Aśka 🏳️‍🌈 ♿️

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White 🏳️‍🌈 ♿️

The Chaos of Stars by Kiersten White

Henry Hamlet’s Heart by Rhiannon Wilde 🏳️‍🌈

Where You Left Us by Rhiannon Wilde 🏳️‍🌈

More of my rec lists can be found in my "book recommendations" tag

[haumanuspeaks]

Poppies

What are we?Why are we?Answers no easier with ageBut maybe the questions are clearerLife clings tenaciouslyWherever it canConstantly striving to beA poppy, a bird, you, or meSo much improbability, entropyIn Life’s TreeYet so much defiant braveryYes, I will exist!And do my bestTo use my giftsTo wonder, and discoverTo meet the gaze of a wild creatureAnd ask that question … Why?To feel, if only for…

[occasionallythreeowls]

for the ask game, 9 + 13 for whatever fic(s) of your choice :)

Let's see, how about

she sleeps below (so down you go)

(aka, what would happen if only Van survived the crash? Bad things. Bad bad things.)

9. Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

The fic had an alternate ending: while driving her mother home from a bar, Van has a panic attack at the wheel and crashes. Her mother dies, Van survives (again), and having another instance of stupid, improbable, absurd survival (and the fact that she now has no one left to take care of) causes Van to break. After this, Van makes her way north to the wilderness, chasing her ghosts into oblivion. Ultimately, I went with a much more immediate, grim and violent ending. But hey, at least Van's happy. Her mind is shattered beyond repair, but she's happy.

13. What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

I don't necessarily listen to anything in particular while I write. That being said, there are two songs that I think of for this fic: Exit Music (For a Film) by Radiohead, and Growing Poppies by Alec Lambert.

Thanks for the ask!

[cultofpoppy-tm]

Free ticket for Improbably Poppy tonight! Oct 11, 2024, 10pm ET. Go to @veeps on instagram. Link in bio, make an account, claim free ticket.

[omens-and-more]

She released 2 albums because she wrote two albums.

Lmao. Poppy has never written anything in her life. Other people write her stuff. All of her youtube videos were there covers of other peoples songs or skits written by Titanic Sinclair. All of ehr music was written by other people, and yes, even the lyrics. She only ever has concepts of lyrics before. Improbable poppy was written by someone else. She takes credit for other people's work. I wish you guys would see that and stop giving her credit she doesn't deserve. She's not creative. The people she pays to be around her are.

….

[chirpsloth]

paying for a veeps subscription just to watch improbably poppy

[antiques-for-geeks]

Kolchak : The Night Stalker at 50 - The Zombie

This week, Carl will mostly be dealing with a zombie.

Eight weeks is all the BBC’s introduction to Kolchak amounted to. Although all 20 episodes were available, a decision had been taken to show them out of US broadcast order in their late night Mystery Train strand. Maybe, you’d assume, the BBC went for episodes more in the overall theme when bundled with that evening’s short and film, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Maybe the series curator just liked these episodes best.

Maybe the Director General just threw darts at a board and those were the episode numbers they chose to air. 

When the first Mystery Train appeared at a quarter past eleven on Friday October the 11th 1991, it kicked off eleven with the fifth episode of the Kolchak series, The Werewolf. Confusingly we’d have to wait until October the 25th for the series’ second episode, The Zombie, that US audiences had seen on the 20th of September 1974.

Presenter Richard O’Brien hammed up the episode introductions for the camera on a spookily deserted, low lit tube station where the titular train stood at the platform, shrouded in a generous cloak of smoke to aid the ambiance. Memory plays tricks, however. Watching a clip back today however, the station wasn’t quite deserted. It was full of statues of people doing what people do in stations every day of every week of every month of every year. Going about their business.

A welcoming character, wouldn't you agree?

It strikes you that the Mystery Train might have been conceived to exist in a slice of time behind ours. An empty space between seconds or the beat your heart skipped, A personal fiefdom where O’Brien’s character rules supreme, his subjects frozen in time. Viewers assume they are in on the game, that they are somehow apart from it all, but in reality were just as trapped as the statues littering the platform until the programme concluded.

Or perhaps it was just a TV  show and all this is just imagination running wild. Whichever, The Zombie to made its debut on British television, complete with knowing glance and a suitable quip from O’Brien about the improbability of their being a Haitian Community in Chicago in the 1970s.

Less improbable than the episode, mind.

Plot

There’s a series of brutal murders among those in the Chigaco criminal underworld, which all seem to be linked to the gangland killing of a Haitian man. A Haitian man whose corpse keeps turning up in the Police Department morgue despite being buried following his last visit.

Guests

Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland were joined by :

Charles Aidman - Captain Winwood

Joseph Sirola - Benjamin Sposato

Val Bisoglio - Victor Friese

J. Pat O’Malley - Caretaker

John Fielder - Gordon Spangler

Antonio Faragas - Sweetstick Weldon

Scat Man Corthers (sic) - Uncle Filemon

With

Paulene Myers - Mamalois Edmonds

Earl Faison - The Zombie

Carol Ann Susi - Monique Marmelstein

Ben Frommer - The Monk

Roland Bob Harris - Poppy

The Scoop

Pop : A garbled story about revenge enacted by the victim of a gangland slaying, brought back to life by the power of ...voodoo!

This episode does have some plus points. I enjoyed Carl trying to squirm his way out of a hospital trip when he's discovered snooping about by some Italian mobsters. He’s clearly made many enemies on both sides of the law by this point, and it’s a wonder how he hasn’t ended up encased in a concrete piling on a building site.

There’s also the usual selection of stunt-victims being thrown about - this time with a sound like snapping bread sticks as their spines are crushed.

I also think the zombie makeup itself, at least in the final scenes, is as good as could reasonably be expected for a 70's American TV show. 

And since this is a 70's American TV show and also features several prominent black characters we also get small roles for Scatman Crothers and Antonio Fargas (who plays a flash proto Huggy-Bear gang boss).

Despite this it's clearly a step down from the pilot, and seems a much more rushed affair, both in writing and production value.

It’s also worth mentioning that the presentation of the Haitian community (even if just the criminal community) as chicken sacrificing voodoo practitioners sounds like a rambling, semi-coherent bit of 'word weaving' from a Donald Trump rally.

If the story can't really be coherent, make it pretty.

Tim : This is one of the episodes I didn’t catch when it was broadcast, my only memory of the story being a vague outline from a discussion with Pop the Monday after.

The re-telling wasn’t compelling; "there’s a zombie and Kolchak has to fill its mouth with salt. Oh, and it’s really dark so you can’t make out what is going on."

I felt a sense of urgency to watch it from a completist point of view, but not enough to seek it out at all costs. Years later, I found  myself watching a low quality transfer of it online. And frankly I was confused.

Part of that came down to the crime, not being familiar with the concept of the numbers racket. Obviously, it wasn’t a problem for a late-night US audience in the 1970s.

The other part was that we learned a lot from exposition as opposed to seeing the action. Sure, this can work, but when you notice it’s happening, you know it’s not working. Where we do see action, it’s really empty and a massive step down from The Ripper. The Zombie himself barely appears on screen. Even the scenes he’s in, he feels strangely absent.

And this is where the episode falls down in many respects. If we barely see him, why does he need to be a zombie in particular? Replace him with any strongman and the end result would be the same. The whole voodoo thing feels tacked-on in an attempt  to turn a story without a supernatural slant into a Kolchak episode.

Antonio Fargas and Scatman Crothers, while good to see them, aren't used to the extent of the talents, however the inclusion of John Fiedler as morgue attendant Gordo the Ghoul stands out. Sure he’s corrupt, selling information about the bodies in his charge to reporters, but it’s kind of endearingly so. Fiedler Carol Ann Susi’s character of Monique Marmelstein is also a worthwhile addition, the character is played mainly for comic relief, which is a shame.

Yes, there is some decent world-building going on, which suggests better for the future, But this outing feels underdeveloped or even like the script was just in the wrong series. After the strong start with The Ripper, you can’t help but feel disappointed.

Highlight

Pop : Carl climbing into the back of a hearse in a junkyard at night so he can lay the zombie to rest with some salt and a needle and thread is actually one of the more memorable monster encounters from the series, and pretty well executed. The surprisingly decent zombie makeup and the helpless position Carl finds himself in really add to the tension.

Tim : The scenes with the Chicago mob definitely has the hand of David Chase on their shoulder, but it’s the one where Kolchak has to talk his way out of being killed by crime boss Benjamin Sposato and his trusted acolyte Victor Friese that hits best. The punchy, fast dialogue succeeds in being both amusing and menacing at the same time.

That's supposed to be a zombie under the sheet.

Lowlight

Pop : The Zombie returns to his nocturnal den in the junkyard by bus!

Nobody bats an eyelid, and from Carl's vantage point riding on the back bumper he looks like he could pass for a living person... yet when we next see his skin looks like melted cheese and he is clearly very dead. Inconsistencies like this kill any tension the episode was trying to build.

Tim : The criminal underworld’s characters do feel a little too stereotyped, but it’s not as much a deal breaker as the Zombie itself. While we barely see it, when we do it’s.. mixed. During the morgue scene, it’s represented by a healthy arm and feet painted with blue food colouring under a white linen sheet. The way it looks; it might be one of the Blue Man group under there. If they existed in the 1970s. Which they didn’t.

Updyke vs. Kolchak

Updyke doesn’t appear in this episode - so it’s still 1-0 to Kolchak on aggregate.

Score on the doors

Pop : It’s a bit half baked, but still has some Night Stalker magic 4/10.

Tim : An episode that was still working out what it wanted to be pretty much to the end. 3/10.

As the old adage goes; if you need a zombie taking care of, you're best off doing it yourself.

[thetoxicgamer]

Sett support and a pentakill 7 years in the making highlight a short second day of MSI 2023

The games between Movistar R7, Bilibili Gaming, Golden Guardians, and GAM Esports only lasted roughly three hours, which may come as a surprise to those who missed the second day of the 2023 League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational. The competition was relatively one-sided today with each series only going two games, but they were still full of surprising picks and exciting moments to write home about. Some players were making their long-awaited international debuts, while other popular veterans were finally stepping back onto the MSI stage for the first time in years. From absolute domination on Summoner’s Rift to perfect executions and a pentakill along the way, here are the biggest highlights from the second day of MSI 2023. Aurelion Sol arrives, but BLG bully R7 into submission Not many people expected much from Bilibili Gaming’s series against Movistar R7—and for good reason. The LPL’s second seed is a powerhouse, featuring some of the best players in their role at MSI, while LATAM representatives have always been an underdog at best at international events. Although BLG made short work of R7 at the end of the series, the Chinese reps didn’t look completely infallible. The first game was a wash, but in the second match of the day, R7 mid laner Jeong “Mireu” Jo-bin built a decent lead against Zeng “Yagao” Qi on Aurelion Sol. Top laner Cho “Bong” Bo-woong even scored a rare solo kill against Chen “Bin” Ze-Bin, who many consider one of the best top laners in the world. Unfortunately for R7, there was a massive disparity in strength in the bottom lane as BLG’s AD carry Zhao “Elk” Jia-Hao brought down punishment on his lane opponents from the first minute onward. He and Luo “ON” Wen-Jun were relentless in their early poke, and with the help of jungler Peng “Xun” Li-Xun, they stomped their opponents with brutal dives. BLG support ON had two kills, 36 assists, and two deaths in today’s series. Elk finished with 21 kills and 16 assists without dying once. With their firepower and late-game scaling, BLG used superior aggression and teamfighting skills to overwhelm their opponents as they didn’t have a game over 26 minutes. Stixxay hadn’t been to an international tournament since he attended the World Championship with CLG in 2016. But in his first series at MSI 2023, the veteran superstar didn’t miss a single step. With his trusty lane partner Huhi, the veteran duo helped Golden Guardians crush GAM Esports while featuring some unique picks and exciting plays along the way. Huhi played 12 unique support champions during the 2023 Spring Split, but he still managed to add some spice today by picking Sett and Amumu support for the first time this year. He ended up being the lynchpin for the team as he found picture-perfect angles to engage on either champion, ending today’s match with 30 assists. Not to be outdone, Stixxay also caught fire with 17 kills, 15 assists, a single death, and the first pentakill of the tournament on Tristana. Fans can tell this Golden Guardians squad is rolling after their improbable LCS finals run and that they are enjoying every moment on stage together. Golden Guardians’ top lane leader Licorice might not have had as flashy a game as his bottom lane counterparts, but the 25-year-old veteran was an unsung hero for his team as he absorbed a ton of pressure from GAM jungler Đỗ “Levi” Duy Khánh. He was able to knock away multiple ganks with Poppy’s hammer and soaked up enough attention while his bottom lane scaled to unreachable heights. Read the full article

[mrschwartz]

Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner: ‘I’m comfortable with the idea that things don’t have to be a pop song’

The most influential frontman of his generation is also the least at ease with it. He discusses abandoning rock norms, singing from the gut and treading the fine line between cryptic and gooey on new album The Car

Not for the first time, Alex Turner has lost his train of thought. In a booth of a downtown Manhattan diner, the Arctic Monkeys frontman is hunched forward, grasping for words to describe their new album – a black-tie orgy of cinematic soul, lurid funk and perfumed 60s strings. A waiter swoops in to save him. Would Turner like some milk for his coffee? “I’ll have a bit of milk, yes please,” he says. She returns a minute later, and Turner, having strung together no more than half a sentence, eagerly tops up his mug. “OK,” he says, rubbing his hands. “OK. Now we’ve got it.”

During our two-hour conversation, the affable introvert is determinedly, delightfully animated: he bashes imaginary woodblocks, sprawls across his moulded seat, clasps thin air and shakes it like a Magic 8 Ball. His turquoise jumper’s V-neck reveals a thin gold necklace, which he fondles while digressing into monologues on the genius of composer David Axelrod. Turner has been portrayed as aloof and evasive, but he is a man of pensive silences – an ambivalent overthinker trapped in an eccentric entertainer’s body.

He tries to describe orchestrating that new album, The Car. “Rather than strings on top of rock,” he says finally, “I was interested in switching the ‘rock band’ bit on and off.” He tweaks levels on a mixing desk in his mind’s eye. “With the Sculptures song” – the dizzyingly gorgeous Sculptures of Anything Goes – “the ‘rock band’ fader comes up for two bars here and there, and then it’s switched back off.”

He inspects this thought, then ​​flings out his arms and freezes. He looks like a magician alarmed the rabbit is missing from his hat. Slowly, he reboots. “And I don’t remember doing that quite so … deliberately before,” he concludes. A boyish smile. “Phew!” He clutches his chest. “I didn’t think I was gonna get to the end of that sentence.”

But Turner, 36, is nothing if not acutely self-aware and very funny with it. But surely this superstar, whose new haircuts trend on Twitter, is too famous to be such a brooder. Each of his eight albums, including the two with the Last Shadow Puppets, his project with friend Miles Kane, has debuted at No 1 in the UK. Since its 2013 release, the Monkeys’ juggernaut of a fifth album, AM, has taken just one week’s holiday from the UK Top 100. It spent most of September back inside the Top 10, after the band headlined Reading and Leeds festivals.

The AM era lasted a couple of years – long enough for the Sheffield boys’ image as pomade-slick, leather-jacketed Los Angeles dirtbags to stick in the public memory for good. So when Arctic Monkeys got back to mischief, with 2018’s fantastically strange Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, fans were confounded. Turner had assembled a cast of distractible narrators to interrogate modern society – technology, politics, hyperreal LA – in a retro-futurist concept album set in a lunar colony. On stage, dressed like a 70s geography teacher, he now addressed crowds with comical formality. Sceptics said he had lost the plot, calling it an act of self-sabotage – or worse, a class betrayal. In Sheffield, somebody graffitied a coffin on a gate at Hunter’s Bar – the area immortalised in Fake Tales of San Francisco. “Hey Alex,” the caption read. “How’s California?”

While tighter and grander than its predecessor, Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album is blissfully unconcerned with correcting the record. It swings from a louche, movie-soundtrack intro to Portishead-stark noir, improbably catchy yacht-funk and the poppy bombast of Elliott Smith’s LA era. At times, Turner dips into a slick, syrupy croon, though he recoils from the word’s stuffy baggage.

“You sort of wish there was a way around the things attached to that word [croon],” he says. “But yeah, everything’s come down a little bit. And I like that, because if it’s come down here” – he runs a finger from his forehead to his ribcage – “it’s out of your head. It’s more coming from …”

He hunts for the word. The heart? I suggest, as he flings invisible confetti from his chest.

“The heart,” he agrees, sounding a bit uncomfortable. “Or even better: the gut.”

Turner is not all the way out of his head just yet. He sings much of The Car in a falsetto that trapezes between Sly Stone and David Byrne. The anxious melodies strike a delicate balance with the sumptuous strings. “You don’t want it to get gooey,” he reasons. “But it’s nice to get to the perimeter of that. There may have been discussions about where that line is, and how many times you can get close to it.”

Still, Turner’s bamboozling lyrics preclude slushiness. Traces of Yorkshire chansonnier Jake Thackray and punk-poet John Cooper Clarke remain, but Turner’s bon mots are now elaborately encrypted. Struggle though you may to picture festival crowds bellowing some of the lyrics here (Hello You opens: “Lego Napoleon movie / written in noble gas-filled glass tubes / underlined in sparks”), you can never rule it out. The similarly inscrutable 505, an album cut from 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare, recently caused a sensation on TikTok.

Maybe tackling impenetrable lyrics helps bring us deeper into a song, I suggest. Turner laughs. “I like the idea of you putting that in here and everybody going: ‘Ah, I dunno, sounds tough. We won’t give it a listen after all.’” He admits to scribbling notes in his printed lyric book, teasing out themes mysterious even to him. “The Annotated Lyrics,” he jokes, imitating a 1950s ad man. “Get that stocking filler out for Christmas.”

From the moment in the mid-00s when Arctic Monkeys blew up, Turner has longed to go incognito. He strode undercover into his new public life, a frightened teenager hiding inside a big swagger, collecting shiny awards for songs he had written for mates of mates in pub backrooms. In 2006, the band released what was then the UK’s all-time fastest-selling debut album – a death sentence for his man-of-the-people, kitchen-sink writing style.

On 2009’s Humbug, co-produced by Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Turner escaped into a rock archetype. The band’s hairier second phase amped up the sleaze and elliptical lyrics, culminating in the darkly spectacular AM. By this point, the bequiffed Turner was harder to read, particularly in his divisive speech at the 2014 Brit Awards. “That rock’n’roll, eh,” he drawled with indeterminate sincerity. “It’s always waiting there, just around the corner. Ready to make its way back through the sludge and smash through the glass ceiling, looking better than ever. Yeah, that rock’n’roll …”

At the mention of the speech, and its concluding mic drop, Turner winces, sucking air through his teeth. But, I say, since Tranquility, the moment looks more like performance art – perhaps it anticipated his scepticism towards the rock construct. He listens intently, then, on the last point, springs back as if harpooned to his seat. “That’s interesting, yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, head bobbing vigorously. He chews it over, talking half to himself. “So we’re saying it’s tied to AM, because of the haircut and … that performer …”

He seems unsure just how much of himself was in the mic-dropping rock star.

“When you think about that, and the clothes,” he continues, “I wasn’t doing that with [fourth album] Suck It and See or [third] Humbug. It wasn’t grease in the hair.” He pauses again, considering each album’s “performer” – always a fractured reflection of himself. “Normally, the record you make encourages a certain style of performance. But thinking about the performer in relation to Tranquility, or even this thing” – meaning the new album – “I have considered that you can invert that. The performer can influence the music, rather than the other way around.”

The Car’s performer more closely resembles the Turner I meet today: brilliant company but palpably self-scrutinising – a far cry from the headstrong Brits character. Turner wrote most of the album at the piano, souping up Tranquility’s vanquished lounge singer with a spritz of Rat Pack razzmatazz. Turner and the band’s producer, James Ford, separately drafted string arrangements that the composer Bridget Samuels simplified and edited.

Turner seems mildly embarrassed by the prospect of using strings live (a proposed orchestral TV special was deemed too predictable), but the album sounds just as exquisite without them. During a stunning show at Brooklyn’s Kings theatre the week of our interview, the band premiere three songs: the resplendent There’d Better Be a Mirrorball, a fingerpicked heart-warmer called Mr Schwartz and soon-to-be staple Body Paint, whose gnomic chorus crowdsurfs along a festival-slaying melody: “Straight from the cover shoot,” Turner coos, “There’s still a trace of body paint / On your legs and on your arms and on your face.”

As with 505 or Crying Lightning, it is a head-scratcher fated for mass seduction. “Not exactly what you’d imagine singing over the loud bit,” Turner concurs, chuckling. The body paint could represent almost anything: a literal costume; a stubborn artistic persona; or in a spunkier reading, the residue of an illicit affair. “But it’s as much about the musical ideas as the lyrics,” Turner says. “On Mirrorball, before the words even come in, that instrumental piece [establishes] the feel of the record”: wistful, enigmatic, acutely reminiscent of 70s European cinema. “All right,” Turner recalls thinking after writing it in 2020. “This feels like how the next record starts.”

Turner now lives between London and Paris with the French singer-songwriter Louise Verneuil. He composed most of the album alone, using the technique he road-tested on AM and adopted wholesale on Tranquility: compose, demo, inspect, tweak and re-record, repeat the process to death and eventually add drums and vintage keyboards. Finally: bring in the band.

In the summer of 2021, Arctic Monkeys convened at Butley Priory, a wedding venue and makeshift studio in Suffolk. On a whim, Turner brought his 60mm video camera to document the sessions, later compiling his footage for the impressively chic There’d Better Be a Mirrorball video. “That gave everybody a bit of room,” he says. “James [Ford] definitely didn’t mind that I had something to play with.” During downtime, the band watched the Euros and nipped outdoors for kickabouts. “I do get caught up in those tournaments. Something about that feeling connects you to when you were a kid. You find yourself thinking about Euro 96. And then it ends, and you almost feel a bit mad for feeling like that.”

That proximity to yesteryear haunts the record, not least in the creeping jazz element, which evokes his jazz-musician dad’s records and saxophone noodlings in Turner’s childhood home. “It came out the front in Tranquility, and there’s definitely a bit more this time,” he says. “It’s one of those things that you try to fly quite close to without [crossing over]. That music you’re around when you’re a kid always has a special power.”

Strikingly, the more sentimentality creeps into the music, the less forthright emotion surfaces in Turner’s lyrics. I ask if he is equally withholding in private – does he find it harder, as he gets older, to tell people he loves them? He laughs. “No, no, I don’t think so. I like to think that outside songwriting, I find it more straightforward to be direct.” He is prone to embarrassment by lyrics from bygone years. Perhaps the more elemental style, with fewer obvious footholds, helps minimise the cringing? “I like the idea that I’m getting better at the … I sort of want to say distillation.” He handles the word cautiously. “I think I’m better at picking the moment to expose the idea behind the song. But you have to be comfortable with the idea that things don’t have to be a pop song.”

What has remained constant since the beginning, he says, “is the instinct of it all”. Even the meticulous experiments of Tranquility and The Car stem from his faith in his bloody-minded intuition. I remind him of something he said, aged 19, about the perils of fame: “When you want it and you get obsessive, you mould yourself to be whatever they want you to be.”

He laughs. “It’s a heck of a time to drop a quote from 2005, when we’re talking about stuff to be embarrassed about.” But he agrees Arctic Monkeys’ instincts and gang mentality insulated them from industry games and greed. “The name of the band seems to allude to how limited the expectations were,” he adds. “If you realised you were gonna be doing this 20 years later, you might’ve had another hour in that meeting.”

Fatalistic fans have already forecast the band’s demise based on the single’s valedictory lyrics, but while the album abounds with goodbyes, Turner seems full of optimism about the future. His bandmates are, too. “You can tell when they’re excited and when there’s that palpable indifference,” he says, grinning. Does he still get much of the latter? “Surely. Intermittently. I’m grateful for it sometimes.” He drifts off again with a dreamy look, zeroing in on the right turn of phrase. “Between the band and James Ford …” he begins, unhappy with the imperfect words he has found. “I can’t do it on my own, I guess is what I’m trying to say.”

[theageoftheunderstatement]

Spin: Arctic Monkeys Hit A New Gear

Written By Steve Appleford, 18/10/2022

It’s a warm, cloudless night in Los Angeles when the Arctic Monkeys step onto a festival stage at the far edge of Chinatown. They’re confident English dudes in windbreakers and leather jackets, picking up their instruments and arriving to the sound of Stan Kenton’s 1970 instrumental recording of the standard “Here Comes That Rainy Day,” a song both muted and deeply emotional, wounded and effervescent.

The sound is a clue to the state of a rock band caught at another moment of evolution, equally connected to their past, present and future, still rockers at their core after two decades, but aspiring to expand beyond that. The Monkeys are here headlining the final day of Primavera Sound, the international Barcelona-based festival making its U.S. debut in L.A., drawing 50,000 fans into the city.

The Arctic Monkeys have been at this since they were teenage mates bashing out modern guitar rock with emotion and bite, quickly growing into superstars in the UK, and festival headliners in the U.S. and everywhere else. The band’s core band members – singer Alex Turner, drummer Matt Helders, guitarist Jamie Cook and bassist Nick O’Malley – are augmented tonight by three other players. The sound is arch and sophisticated, like a next-generation Roxy Music, noisy and unruffled through clanging guitars, alluring piano melodies and lyrics wide open to interpretation.

The biggest international hits would come later in the set, but early on they share a song from the band’s new album, The Car, a shimmery funk tune called “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am.” The song is ready for the dancefloor or your nearest smoke-filled room, as Turner’s voice goes higher, if not quite falsetto, singing soulfully of a dystopian future (or dystopian present): “Freaky keypad by the retina scan…”

With a disco ball at his feet, Turner doesn’t say much between songs, but never comes off as distant, either leaning into the mic or strumming his guitar. When he does speak, the words are as opaque as his lyrics, ending one song with a teasing: “Yes, you like that? I understand loud and clear. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

Two weeks later, Turner is in the mostly deserted bar of a small boutique hotel on Hollywood Blvd., wearing an embroidered Guatemalan shirt over a faded black top. He sits at a table with a nearly empty bottle of sparkling water and a small paper coffee cup, a lick of dark hair dangling stylishly over his forehead.

As a host, Turner is perfectly relaxed and cordial, but chooses his words carefully during our interview, finding the messages he wants to convey slowly. Seeing his words in print since he was barely 20 no doubt brought him to this careful state, but he also looks pleased when you recognize one or another inspirational touchstone (Mick Ronson, Brian Wilson, etc.) in the new songs.

In town to talk up the album, the bar is a convenient meeting place. On the wall behind him is a collection of ancient class photographs, of strapping young men in school, on sports teams, all forgotten memories from the last century. “I hadn’t noticed that. Actually just been too busy making it all about me,” Turner says with a knowing laugh.

The whole band lived in L.A. for a time, but now only drummer Matt Helders remains, and between Monkeys projects is a member in good standing of Joshua Homme’s rotating crew of players and accomplices. (Which meant being recruited in 2015-16 for Iggy Pop’s Post Pop Depression.) While Turner still likes to squeeze in some quality time in the city, he now mostly bounces between London and Paris, usually accompanied by the French singer-songwriter Louise Verneuil.

A few days after Primavera, the band headed out to New York for a quick visit to premiere more songs from The Car on The Tonight Show and at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. It’s an album The Guardian has already praised as a wide-ranging collection of “Portishead-stark noir, improbably catchy yacht-funk and … poppy bombast.”

Two decades after forming as a band of neighborhood teenagers in Sheffield, England, the Arctic Monkeys have maintained relevance as artists and hitmakers by following their own creative impulses rather than passing trends. They began as excitable rockers with flinty bad attitude and pop instincts, quickly hitting No. 1 in the UK with their anxious second and third singles, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” and “When the Sun Goes Down.” Compare that with The Car, and the evolution to music of increasing sophistication is startling and undeniable, with Turner growing from sneering punk to multiple layers of feeling.

Historically, you might compare Turner and the Monkeys’ evolution to Bowie’s mid-’70s leap from edgy rocker Ziggy Stardust to the deeply emotional crooner of Station to Station and Heroes, and still always sounding like no one but himself. Helders began to notice a change in the vocals when Turner started working with his other project the Last Shadow Puppets, which then carried over into the Monkeys. “It was less shouty and fast and more like Walker Brothers singing. He’s leaned into that a lot more vocally. I’m like, ‘Oh wow. You’re actually a singer now,” Helders says later on the phone, laughing.

In 2022, as much as the sound has changed over time, Turner insists the core quartet is still “following our instincts, which is precisely what we were doing in the summer of 2002.” They were kids then, and songs were composed in that early stage around their abilities in the rehearsal space, designed to be played live in a small club. They now record music with no concerns about recreating the same sounds onstage, allowing their creative impulses to drive the recordings.

He’d grown up surrounded by music, his father, David Turner, a big band musician and educator who actually sat in with the Last Shadow Puppets during a 2016 set in Berlin, blowing sax on “The Dream Synopsis.” That early influence not only reached young Alex, but the friends who came over to the house, including future members of the Arctic Monkeys.

Long before he was a musician himself, Helders heard a lot of mysterious sounds from the distant past at the Turner home that most neighborhood kids were not, learning of an earlier generation’s iconic figures that definitely weren’t being written about in NME.

“When I went around to his house – which was often – big band and jazz and swing was on,” says Helders. “It has always been a powerful thing for Alex. And me too. When I first saw Buddy Rich playing drums on TV, it was before I played drums. I didn’t really understand what was happening. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is blowing my mind!’

“There’s just so much feeling when you listen to music like that,” he adds, noting their current use of Stan Kenton as intro music. “Musically it’s like a masterclass. We’re not quite there yet, but maybe it is enough to know what skill level we’d like to be at.”

The musical lessons kept coming, even as the Monkeys grew into a leading force in a new wave of British rock and pop music, with their every move documented and scrutinized.

The band experienced a career-altering revelation while working with Homme as co-producer on 2009’s Humbug, which in hindsight looms even larger in their story. Rolling out into the high desert to make that album with the Queens of the Stone Age leader opened their eyes to the freedom available to them as artists. Getting weird was something to be embraced, not avoided.

Helders says, “It was Josh who said, ‘Whatever you do in this room, it’s still you. No one can tell you it’s not you. You’re doing it.’ As simple as that sounds, it makes sense. It made us feel like, Oh, we can do whatever we want.”

They’d first met the tall, redheaded rocker backstage at a Belgium rock festival. “We heard him coming down the corridor shouting ‘Monkeys! Monkeys!’” Turner recalls with a smile. Arctic Monkeys had been open in the press about being fans of QOTSA, and now, “He’d come looking for us.”

After that encounter, Domino label co-founder Laurence Bell suggested they reach out to Homme to see if he would be interested in producing. He said yes, and guided the band through seven songs on Humbug. (Four other tracks were produced by longtime collaborator James Ford in New York City.) Looking back, Helders says their first trip with Homme to the Rancho de la Luna recording studio, way out on the edges of Joshua Tree, “felt like I was on another planet.”

“Had we not had that experience at that time, I’d question whether we would still be going now,” Turner says thoughtfully. “At that moment, it felt as if we were put in a bit of a dead end, and creatively it felt like we’d ran out of steam a little bit.”

The Monkeys eventually returned to Joshua Tree (minus Homme) and came back with the monster album of their career to that point, 2013’s AM, which reached platinum in both the UK and U.S. The songs mixed G-funk rhythms with their edgy guitar rock and Turner’s words of romance and ruin. Songs traveled from the crunchy riffs of “Arabella” to the swaggering, woozy funk of “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” Mojo called the album “exciting, audacious work,” and NME declared, “Smart, randy and touched by genius.”

The wildly enthusiastic public reaction that greeted AM didn’t lock the band into a sound, or pressure them to produce sound-alike albums. If anything, it only freed Arctic Monkeys to do as they pleased, to follow their meandering muse wherever it led them.

The band’s last album, 2018’s sci-fi conceptual Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, threw things for a loop. The Car is another step forward, unimaginable in their early days as a stripped-down rock act. Back then, the quartet were on a mission to be as new and original as they could. Helders made a point on the early records to create new beats that were flashy and technically difficult, looking to always “make this new weird thing,” he says.

“That was great for then and it matched what we were doing with the riffs and maybe the aggressiveness of the singing,” he adds. “Now I appreciate restraint and being able to play a groove in a really good way. It’s not any less fun for me, contrary to what it might look like. Even though the drumming is calm and more laid back, it’s as much fun as it is to play more showy.”

The new album’s gently urgent closing track, “Perfect Sense,” came together quickly, with strings mingling with drum beats to create a swirling Brian Wilson flavor. The Beach Boys maestro “has always had a place in my heart,” Turner says. “That’s been in the back of my mind since I was a five-year-old kid.”

The lyrics paint a murky, playful picture: “Having some fun with the warmup act/If that’s what it takes to say goodnight then that’s what it takes. … four figure sum on a hotel notepad … A revelation or your money back.”

“I suppose overall none of it makes a great deal of sense in the traditional sense,” Turner acknowledges happily. “It’s like when you’re trying to leave a party and this is like the fifth attempt. Okay, now I’m really going. That’s what it sounds like to me.”

On the album cover is a photograph shot by Helders in downtown Los Angeles, looking down at a lone car parked on a rooftop lot amid other tall buildings in 2019. The drummer is serious about photography, has published a book of pictures from the Tranquility Base sessions and shown in galleries. For that photograph, he was simply trying out a new lens on his Leica, walking around the city or shooting out his bedroom window, inspired by vivid color work of master photographer William Eggleston.

Helders liked the picture and included it with some others he shared with Turner. “He was like, Oh, wow. He kept coming back to it, like, ‘There’s something about that photo. It tells a story somehow.’” The singer eventually wrote a song inspired by it, and began thinking of the album as The Car, with that image as the cover.

On the title track, as Helders plays brushes on record for the first time, Turner sings his evocative, mysterious, disjointed lyrics: “Your grandfather’s guitar, thinking about how funny I must look trying to adjust to what’s been there all along ... But it ain’t a holiday until you go to fetch something from the car.”

Ahead of the sessions with the band, Turner wrote and recorded preliminary demo versions of the songs, written half on acoustic guitar, half on piano. He sensed where the album was headed when he landed on the instrumental section that begins the opening track “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball.” “That felt right,” he says, “and of course the words have to get on board with that.”

They recorded basic tracks for The Car in an ancient, 700-year-old house called Butley Priory in the English countryside of Suffolk. With arched windows and walls made of stone, the two-story building has recently been refurbished as an elegant venue for weddings and other events. With producer Ford, the Monkeys rented it out and transformed it into a studio.

Says Helders, “We managed to make it feel like a place you wanted to make a record.”

The idea was to somehow replicate scenes Turner had read about, of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones camping out at a large country home, and parking a mobile recording truck outside. In the ‘70s, a truck had to be packed with recording gear: tape machine, mixing board, speakers, plus engineers and the producer, with cables running into the house.

Loren Humphrey, a frequent Monkeys engineer in recent years, had given Turner a copy of the book The Great British Recording Studios, and the singer became fascinated with its pictures of the famous Stones Mobile Studio unit, with its linoleum floor and history of recording multiple classic rock albums. Modern digital equipment has made the need for a mobile unit mostly obsolete, but the idea of recording at a home in the country stuck in his mind.

“That was kind of the dream idea, but we didn’t quite make it all the way to the linoleum floor in the truck,” he says with a grin. Band and crew instead loaded in their gear and computers and got to work. The band also lived on-site during the recording, and between sessions would gather in front of broadcasts of the 2021 UEFA European Football Championship, where England got to the final.

“That was a pretty exciting time in England then, and we were all watching the games and hanging out,” says Turner. “We hadn’t seen each other for a while and I think that got that kind of the energy of the band back together again.” Helders recalls sessions being structured around soccer viewing. “It really dictated the mood,” the drummer says. “If England had a bad game, it wasn’t going to be a good day in the studio.”

For the band, now looking back at 20 years of history, the sessions were a throwback to the Monkeys’ debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, recorded in 2005 at Chapel Studio in the countryside of South Thoresby. That album might not have happened any other way.

“If we were in a city, we would’ve never finished that record,” Helders says with a laugh. “We needed the discipline of like, ‘Okay, we need to do a song every day. We don’t want any distractions.’ We were just teenagers.”

Sessions for The Car were delayed for a year because of COVID-19 restrictions. It took time for Helders to get back to England from L.A., and he was required to arrive first so he could quarantine ahead of the rest of the band and crew. But Turner used the year to refine his songs, to experiment and explore “a few blind alleys” without concerns about time.

Later, vocals and overdubs were recorded in another house in France, where Turner picked up a 16mm movie camera and captured footage of the band at work, handing it off during his vocals. Some of those grainy color and black-and-white moments turn up in the music video for “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball.”

“I found that having the camera kind of removed me a bit from the situation and hopefully allowed a bit more space for the band to fill,” he says now of his foray into filmmaking. “It gradually transformed itself into a promotional music video, so it all happened pretty naturally.”

In London, strings were recorded at RAK Studios, not to add “sweetness” but evoke complex emotions. That final ingredient is essential to the sound of The Car, contributing to its 10 tracks a consistent personality, a bit like an old Sinatra record as arranged by Nelson Riddle.

“Those arrangements of Sinatra were definitely on when I was in the passenger seat as a kid,” says Turner, whose songwriting usually begins on piano, where he sometimes drifts towards the kind of chord structures his father played at home. “But obviously it’s not swinging quite in the way that stuff is.”

For all the willingness to slow down and use understatement along with noisy guitars, the Monkeys remain at their core a rock band. So Turner embraced the idea of using each piece only as needed, with the strings rising at one moment, then disappearing as the rock instruments roar back. With Tranquility Base, the band looked to create a consistent sound and mood from song to song, and The Car takes that a step further, sounding like a larger work rather than a collection of songs.

“I think we’ve done a better job this time with the dynamics of the whole thing, like allowing each element to have its space and come into focus and disappear when the time is right,” he says. “I felt like there had to be some caution, like the alarms going off: Don’t just go throwing the strings on top of the rock band sort of thing. Let’s try and find a way that it can sort of take turns. There was an idea before the record about splicing two things together from a totally different time and space.”

“Body Paint” captures that balance, starting gently with strings before leading to an explosive guitar piece played by guest Tom Rowley. Turner hadn’t imagined that particular crescendo when laboring over the song alone in a room, before reinterpreting it with the full band. “Having everybody there, it gives you that energy of the band you can’t really replicate,” he says, adding he welcomes the surprises.

There is also an undeniable strain of funk across the songs, which marks a different kind of blast from their past. “It did probably start with opening the drawer and finding the old wah-wah pedal again from 15 years ago,” says Turner. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, let’s audition that again in this creative juncture.’ When we played it in rehearsal in the first place, it was exciting to sort of blow the dust off the wah-wah pedal.”

That makes The Car a record they could only have made now. The original sound and energy of the Arctic Monkeys wasn’t ready for it. They weren’t self-aware enough to have such aspirations.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do this 10 years ago, or 15 years ago,” confirms Helders. “Everyone sort of learned their instruments at the same time, at the same pace and got better. We’ve got to a place where we can make music like this.

"I think everything happened at the right time.”