Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Jim Abbiss produced the album, which the band finished at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire in January 2006. Release was brought forward from 30 January to 23 January because of high demand. It includes re-recorded versions of both tracks from the Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys EP, and many of its songs had already circulated free online in late 2004 on the unofficial Beneath the Boardwalk compilation. It is the only album to feature Andy Nicholson on bass.

The title comes from a line in Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Turner said several of the songs cover that bit of the weekend, and that a lot of people were saying a lot of things about the band that it could not control. The cover is a black-and-white photograph of Chris McClure, a friend of the band, taken in the early hours at the Korova bar in Liverpool. The band had given him, his cousin and his best friend 70 pounds for a night out. Laurence Gruer of NHS Scotland criticised the cover for reinforcing the idea that smoking is okay.

Reception

On its first day the album sold just under 120,000 copies, and by the end of the week 363,735, more than the rest of the top 20 combined. An HMV spokesman told the BBC that the retailer had not seen anything quite like it since the Beatles. In the United States it entered at number 24 on the Billboard 200 with about 34,000 copies, and it also went to number one in Australia and Ireland. Metacritic gives it 82 out of 100.

Alexis Petridis in the Guardian heard a band that bundled its influences together with compelling urgency and snotty confidence. Tim Jonze at NME called Turner a master of observation. Barry Walters in Rolling Stone wrote that the reality nearly meets the hype. Scott Plagenhoef at Pitchfork was cooler, finding it charming and oddly affecting but understandably something less than life changing. The album won the Mercury Prize in 2006 and the Best British Album Brit in 2007, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.