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13:14 · 2,042 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- After AM, Alex Turner had writer's block and had also lost interest in writing love songs following the second Last Shadow Puppets record.
▶ 00:01:05
- Fellini's 8 1/2 broke the block, a film about a director with stifled creativity trying to make a science fiction epic, which pointed Turner at the genre.
▶ 00:01:22
- A Steinway Vertegrand given for his 30th birthday became the centre of a makeshift spare-room studio he called the lunar surface, and the record was written there.
▶ 00:01:53
- The title names the Apollo 11 landing site, and the jazz lounge setting came from watching Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai.
▶ 00:02:13
- He was reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death while writing, which contrasts Orwell's fear that what we hate will ruin us with Huxley's fear that what we love will.
▶ 00:02:30
- The record sides with Huxley, drowning in irrelevant information rather than having it withheld, which is why the persona is a washed-up performer looking down rather than a dissident.
▶ 00:03:24
- Postman's information-action ratio is used directly: access to everything, no idea what to do with any of it, and a kind of paralysis that follows.
▶ 00:05:08
- Turner points to Leonard Cohen's Dress Rehearsal Rag as his model for obscurity, hearing Cohen say something plainly inside writing that does not obviously carry it, and copying that approach.
▶ 00:07:01
- There was a real question whether it should be a solo record. He brought Matt Helders in after demoing, they considered releasing it outside the band, then brought Jamie Cook in and recorded it together by mid-2017.
▶ 00:08:14
- No singles preceded it, and it still took the Mercury nomination, a Grammy nomination, a sixth consecutive UK number one and the fastest-selling vinyl record in Britain in 25 years.
▶ 00:09:57