It's January 2006. Jonny Bradshaw, a product manager at Domino Records, is on holiday when his boss, Laurence Bell, gives him a call. "I'm putting the Arctic Monkeys record out a week early," Laurence says. Bradshaw laughs at the memory. "I remember going: 'Oh shit!'" He soon realised that his absence didn't matter. "Nothing we could do as a label could make a difference to this band. There was no marketing plan. There was no anti-marketing plan. The stock was sitting in our warehouse, and the normal rules didn't apply. This was happening already." In its first week of release, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not sold an astonishing 363,735 copies.
This is how the latest chapter of indie history really began – not with a bang, but a shocked, surprised band, and an industry perplexed by how the internet was changing the rules it had taken for granted.
After forming in 2002 in the Sheffield suburb of High Green, then gigging around the city's sticky-carpeted pubs, and endorsing the swapping of their demos among friends and fans, something new took Arctic Monkeys' music further than they ever imagined: peer-to-peer filesharing. The band didn't actively promote this music-swapping themselves, nor were they a success story for new social networking sites such as MySpace. Their success was built on an old-fashioned principle delivered by modern means: the exchanging of bootlegs over millions of megabytes, the spread of word of mouth via ADSL.
Naturally, it helped that their music captured the public imagination. Arctic Monkeys were a gang of schoolfriends, for starters. Their songs soaked up the rhythms of indie's recent past – the lusty guitars and drums of the Strokes and the Libertines – and made them sound boy-next-door rather than idol-about-town. Alex Turner's observational lyrics from the bar stool were refreshing, too. They made particular sense after the success of the Streets, who encouraged young men in pop to use their own argot rather then faux-Americanisms. In Fake Tales of San Francisco, we identified with the put-down of the poseurs: "You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham"; in I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, we knew the nightclubs where "there ain't no Montagues or Capulets", just "dreams of naughtiness". Coming across like ideas from the chewed Bic of an adolescent Alan Bennett, Turner's words showed us ourselves.
Mark Bull, the Sheffield photographer known to the band as Sheriff, who posted their demos online under the title Beneath the Boardwalk (named after a local pub that they regularly played), believes that people adored them for another reason: "There was an element of people feeling they discovered the band. I mean, everyone appreciated that they would always have been popular going down the traditional route, but by selling out the [2,000-capacity] London Astoria before even releasing an album, people felt they were there at the start." The group's reluctance to conform to the demands of mainstream media endeared them to people even more, he says, especially in a pop culture dominated by overexposure. Above all, this phenomenon felt revolutionary; it seemed to be happening without any permission.
A&R men started to sniff around the band in early 2005, but they were beaten by Domino Records. The label had launched in 1993 to license US discs by artists such as Smog and Will Oldham, and was still thought of as a small label with one recent, freaky success: the sharp, Scottish band Franz Ferdinand. That group's breakthrough success showed the indies could now compete with the majors – but the Arctic Monkeys were already a much bigger prospect.
Bell was a huge fan of the band. He went to see the band in Nottingham in March 2005, Bradshaw explains, and then spent five days with them. "Laurence is a real character, a generous human being. The band had obviously been faced with so many people that weren't." The band signed to Domino in June, started recording straight away, and wrapped the album up by September – no fuss, no nonsense. "Domino had that same spirit of independence that Sheffield had, that the boys had," Bradshaw says. "And that implicit relationship is still there, five years later. We still support the band creatively. We never dictate. And any business is still done over a pie and a pint."
This approach is also redefining the way the whole music industry works – take the recent international success of Adele, who ignores the media game in a similar way, and who is also signed to an indie label (XL, in her case). And even though our culture is driven by virtual communications, it doesn't mean the public doesn't crave real people, real lyrics, real songs.
Back in January 2006, when Bell let the stock leave the Domino warehouse a week early, the brave new world was actually anything but. Technology was finally catching up with the way we wanted to share what we loved – a sentiment as old as Sheffield's seven hills.