It’s last orders at the lunar hotel. Alex Turner and co. have business back on earth; their seventh album The Car is out next month. To celebrate their earthly return, I’ve soundtracked one last jaunt to the bar at Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino. Here are 101 gems of shimmery, sad piano balladry to be played at some ungodly hour. Synths glinting and sparkling over drum machine loops. Sax solos. Schmaltzy crooners giving their all to a handful of regulars. Jaded jazz singers, smoky club rooms, late nights at the dive bar. It’s a musical trope that keeps on giving. Tom Waits built half his career on it. Father John Misty is still wringing fresh drops from its whiskey-soaked bar rag. ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’, the lead single from The Car, confirms that Turner is fixed firmly in lounge lizard mode – though his lunar residency is coming to an end. So here’s to one last night at the Tranquillity Base bar – you can sleep off the martinis on the rocket home.
Arctic Monkeys went all in with Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino, and, in my reckoning, they left with the jackpot. Not many bands would follow the stratospheric success of AM with a sci-fi concept album about a hotel on the moon, opening with a slow-tempo piece of lounge jazz. Their latest single starts with lavish, cinematic strings, that seem to pan out like the opening shot of a Caribbean island in an old Bond film. In some ways it feels like a continuation of the Tranquillity Base era, but, then again, these are sounds that sit deep in Turner’s musical vocabulary; they can be heard on the retro stylings and slick strings of the first Shadow Puppets release, way back in 2008. The playlist is smattered with pieces of 60s French pop, film scores, and orchestral flourishes – nods to artistic threads that run throughout Turner’s work. But if one thing unites his recent output it is the centrality of the piano, something that has opened up new sonic and compositional avenues. Whoever gifted him that Steinway piano for his 30th has much to answer for.
Leonard Cohen, master of the gloomy ballad, is a figure who looms large in Turner’s interviews and lyrics. The influence is most recognisable when listening to Cohen’s much maligned 1978 album Death Of A Ladies’ Man. Sullied by its association with Phil Spector, recorded in chaos, and released to overwhelmingly negative reviews, it is nonetheless one of my favourite Leonard Cohen albums. In both lyrical content and musical delivery, it is a sin-soaked soiree of maximalist smut: a wall of sound, an onslaught of onanistic obscenity. Part of the backlash was from folk purists, upset that Cohen’s tender plucking had been replaced by an overproduced full band sound, horns and all. Whilst Cohen was never exactly coy in earlier recordings, he really does go all out on Death Of A Ladies’ Man – there is genuinely a song called ‘Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On’. The album doesn’t know whether it wants to tell a cautionary tale, or to extol a life of unbridled hedonism – but then again, neither did Cohen. When he wasn’t busy cavorting, he was giving up his worldly goods to live in a Buddhist monastery. That split allegiance to the sacred and the profane – and a recognition that one cannot be truly understood without the other – defined Cohen both as a human being and as an artist. On Death Of A Ladies’ Man he is indulging purely in the profane; it’s a late night, booze-soaked record fit for the Tranquility Base jukebox. I include Nina Simone’s rendition of ‘I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl’ just as a reminder that, whatever you’re trying to achieve, Nina Simone probably did a better job of it a few decades prior. It is a stiflingly sultry piece of music – a blues number pushed up to the border of jazz, innuendo pushed to the brink of obscenity.
This is a largely languid playlist that waltzes near to, but never quite touches, the likes of disco, dance or funk. It occasionally flirts with blues and soul, but settles mostly with the softer, jazzier inflections of pop and rock. Nothing here is quite danceable. ‘Nobody’ by Mitski switches into a disco beat as the track progresses, but the relentless and unsettling key shifting at the end makes you feel like you’ve drunk a bit too much, and desperately need to retreat to the dark corner of a booth. These are songs that you can’t boogie on down to – they are better suited to a slow sway in the dark, a night skulking by the bar, music to nurse a drink to.
As the night wears on, the playlist begins to fall asleep. There are some tired, jazzier numbers. The spacey vintage synths of Corntuth’s ‘A-004’ hum along serenely, sounding like a Bowie-Eno ambient instrumental that got lost off the back end of Heroes. Things then get a little weird as the moon music kicks in. This is how I imagine it must feel to have a bad acid trip whilst watching Thunderbirds or old episodes of Scooby-Doo. No instrument is quite as unnerving as the theremin. Everything sags into a period of stultifying muzak, winding up with ‘Star Eyes’ – an actual piece of hold music. Your call is important to us. Then back on hold, until at last someone picks up – you can probably guess who.
Tranquillity Base is singular in its style – the video shot on old film, the musical production littered with retro touches. These deliberate analogue distortions of the tape-era – both audio and visual – form the retrofuturistic glue that binds the whole project together. It’s all delivered with the flamboyance, the joyful artiface, and the showmanship of a late night entertainer. It’s a persona that Turner inhabits with panache – a style that’s as knowingly unreal and showy as the deliberately oversaturated and grainy film footage. And all the better for it.
From there we move to closing time, to Mitski’s two slow dancers, last ones out. And finally, Alex Turner asking if you’re going to walk him to the car.
Music of this kind walks a path between sophistication and cheese, between sincerity and irony, between suave jazz and plinky-plonky elevator music. Some of these songs firmly sit in one camp, but many are straddlers – and the it’s straddlers that are so often my favourites. You’re left asking whether it sounds urbane, or like an inoffensive piece of easy listening that belongs on Smooth FM. Is it cool or corny? And who really cares when the cocktails are this good? There’ll be martinis and mojitos aplenty. There’ll be doo-wop progressions, line clichés and 6/8 shuffles. Sparkly synths, starry-eyed crooners and slow fade-outs. And yes, there will be a mirror ball.
Tom Ronan 