Songfacts®:

• A riot van is a police vehicle that can hold several people, allowing the cops to make multiple arrests during a public disturbance. In the United States, it is often called a paddy wagon. This song is about a group of unruly British youth who taunt the police until one of them finally gets thrown in the riot van and taken away.
  
  "We weren't hoodlums or anything," Alex Turner told Radio X. "It was sort of things that we saw when we were like a bit younger and that."
• Arctic Monkeys' debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, was deliberately sequenced to mirror a full night out in Sheffield, unfolding like a blurry crawl from early excitement to morning-after regret. The album kicks off with the nervous anticipation of pre-drinks on "The View from the Afternoon," moves through sweaty dancefloor flirtations and late-night chaos on "Riot Van," then slides into the comedown and consequences of dawn on tracks like "From the Ritz to the Rubble."
  
  "There's five songs on the album, spread throughout like five little segments, from the evening to the morning sort of thing," Alex Turner said.