Gateways: How Arctic Monkeys Playing “A Certain Romance” on SNL Changed Everything for Me
One man yawned, and the rest is history
Photo by Andy Willsher/Redferns/Getty
Welcome to our Gateways column, where Paste writers and editors explore the taste-defining albums, artists, songs or shows that proved to be personal “gateways” into a broader genre, music scene or an artist’s catalogue at-large—for better or worse. Explore them all here.
Taken completely out of context, “That man just yawned!” is a peculiar, if not completely random, four-word phrase to have made a seismic impact on my life. On its face, I guess it’s just a normal sentence—I mean, we all yawn, after all, and it is contagious, so they say.
But when Alex Turner exclaimed, “That man just yawned!” on Saturday Night Live just before blowing up “A Certain Romance” for its thrilling conclusion, a 15-year-old me was spellbound. Here, you had four British dudes—not particularly stylish, but also not not, either—playing the hell out of, at that point in my life (and maybe still), the best song I had ever heard.
They taunted the audience. Jamie Cook destroyed his guitar. They left the stage right in front of the camera, laughing as they did so. But they also had acne. They kind of looked like people I knew.
Growing up in a Bay Area suburb in the mid-2000s, I was too young for The Strokes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I didn’t have a cool older sibling to introduce me to the likes of Radiohead or Pavement. Jack Johnson was our style icon—cargo shorts and Rainbow flip-flops were a must in Northern California at the time—and you were infinitely more likely to hear Sublime, Slightly Stoopid or Dispatch in the high school parking lot than LCD Soundsystem or Interpol.
Conveniently enough, my curfew at this point was sometime between 11 and 11:30 p.m. on Saturdays to watch SNL. My family would gather around the TV to watch, though I’d typically be the only one to make it past Weekend Update, and someone would inevitably complain that the TV was on too loud when everyone else left to go to sleep.
I was introduced to a ton of pop culture through SNL, be it through the hosts, the things the show parodied or the musical acts. Sure, you could find some of this stuff on NBC’s website the next morning, though it never worked that well and you had to wait an eternity for it to buffer. Keep in mind, this is just before YouTube really took off, and music discovery was much tougher in the pre-streaming era (Kazaa destroyed our computer).
But on March 11, 2006, I was introduced to a completely new world of music. I remember sprinting to my computer right after Arctic Monkeys jumped offstage after “A Certain Romance” to download their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, then only about three weeks old, on iTunes. It was all I listened to for at least a month.
I felt as if I learned a new language after memorizing all of its lyrics, British slang and all. Police cars became riot vans, tracksuit pants became tracky bottoms. Trilbies, scummy men, mardy …
When not much was happening in my boring 16,000-person suburban town (read: basically always), I’d daydream about being in those bars they sang about, hanging out with the boys in bands and dodging the kids who like to scrap with pool cues in their hands. I knew Sheffield wasn’t the coolest city in the world, but it seemed as if it was brimming with the life my small town desperately lacked.