Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album, The Car, was released on October 21st, 2022. One of the best songs is “Hello You”, with very cryptic lyrics that few people understand.
What is “LEGO Napoleon”? Is Rawborough Snooker Club a real place? What does Alex Turner mean when he talks about apologizing “for one of the last times”?
The song was born in 2019, Alex Turner explains in an interview with Radio X, when Arctic Monkeys started recording sessions for a new album.
We all know what came next: a pandemic and, with it, a lot of restrictions that delayed movies, video games, and yes, entire albums too. From those sessions at the end of 2019, only the first versions of “Hello You” survived, the song we can now listen to on The Car.
The lyrics begin with this line: “LEGO Napoleon movie, written in noble gas-filled glass tubes”. Alex Turner explains that, to begin with, that first line has to do with a project that Stanley Kubrick planned after 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
The film director was so obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte that he wrote a script, intended to become an ambitious film project, but it never made it to the big screen (and, instead, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange).
“There’s LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Batman”, says Turner. “I imagined that those guys took the Napoleon script that Stanley Kubrick didn’t make. I think I was thinking something like that, that they gave it to the guys who made the LEGO movies”.
Turner says that in the past, the song would have stayed away from being about the creative process. “That probably wasn’t welcome in the lyrics of the song, but it’s a bit of a reference to the idea of having ideas… or something.”
John Kennedy of Radio X emphasizes how curious it would be to see the little hand of the LEGO Napoleon figure and how they would make it fit inside his jacket.
About Rawborough Snooker Club, Alex Turner explains that it’s not a real place, but it’s not his own fiction either. It’s a reference to a place within the 1958 movie Tread Softly Stranger. Nobody in the band has seen it, but Turner has a connection with his grandfather through that movie, in which he worked during the recordings near his home.
“Hello You” by Arctic Monkeys
LEGO Napoleon movie
Written in noble gas-filled glass tubes
Underlined in sparks
I’ll admit it’s elaborate for a waking thought
Vortex to vortex
The business they call show
Hasn’t ever been this pumped up before
Hello, gruesome
There’s just enough time left to swing by
And re-address the start
If you call and have them pull around the car
And stop specializing in stories from the road
Hello you, still dragging out a long goodbye?
I ought to apologize for one of the last times
As that meandering chapter reaches its end
And leaves us in a thoughtful little daze
This electric warrior’s motorcade
Shall burn no more rubber down that boulevard
Read the message I left on the thank you card
Overtaking the tractor
Waiting for sets of winds and bends to level out again
Picking your moment along a country lane
The kind where the harmonies feel right at home
Hello you, still dragging out a long goodbye?
I ought to apologize for one of the last times
Taking a dive into your crystal ball
I’ve snorkeled on the beaches fruitlessly
Why not rewind to Rawborough Snooker Club?
Could pass for seventeen if I just get a shave and catch some Z’s
Hello you
Hello you
