Leave Before The Lights Come On

Album: Single release only (2016)
Charted: 4
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Songfacts®:

  • Most of the songs on Arctic Monkeys' debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, were first-person narratives about what Northern England youths get up to on their nights out. However after the success of the record, frontman Alex Turner had become something of a celebrity and he knew he couldn't realistically continue to identify with the lives of such folk.

    This stopgap single was released a year after the LP. It was Turner's way of closing the chapter on that part of his world for ever. "It's the last song I wrote about going out and that," he told NME. "My life's not really like that guy anymore."

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