Mckrell 1 Teddy Mckrell Professor Sonevytsky Music, Sexuality
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McKrell 1 Teddy McKrell Professor Sonevytsky Music, Sexuality & Gender 2 June 2018 Standing Next To Me The Last Shadow Puppets are a rock supergroup fronted by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane. They released their first album The Age of the Understatement in 2008, then went back to their respective projects before getting back together in 2016 to release Everything You’ve Come to Expect. While there was not much of a tour for their first album, they performed together a few times in the interim, and their 2016 album had a much more aggressive tour schedule. Over the course of their recent album’s promotion and subsequent tour, Miles and Alex played up what British GQ and NME both termed “a certain bromance” in entirely different articles, playing off the title of a song from the Arctic Monkeys’ first album (Lynskey 2016; Perry 2016). At times, Miles and Alex’s interactions seem like the joke these publications assume it to be; often in interviews it feels as if the two are egging each other on. However, in live performance their interactions tend to take on a different tone, one that oscillates between moments that are clearly staged, even choreographed, and more spontaneous moments that feel sincerely intimate. Neither Miles nor Alex has actually said anything official regarding their sexuality, so it is entirely possible for one or both to be a member of the LGBT community. However, it is also possible that both are heterosexual men who have never felt the need to publicly identify as such. I do not wish to “prove” their sexuality either way—to do so would be unfairly presumptuous, McKrell 2 and I do not believe that celebrities are obligated to disclose their identities. Whether Miles and Alex’s relationship is entirely platonic or something else, it is still interesting to explore what allows and motivates them to publicly show intimacy in ways that are often interpreted as homoerotic by their audience. Furthermore, I am interested in what draws audiences to seek out and celebrate these shows of same-sex intimacy. The Last Shadow Puppets’ demeanor in interviews often leads interviewers to describe a feeling that there is a joke they are not quite in on. In their interview with NME, their interviewer Kevin Perry describes the process as “[feeling] like interrupting a conversation that’s been going on since 2005” (Perry 2016). Often, this joking nature comes along with references to them possibly being in a relationship, like in an interview with FaceCulture where Miles and Alex respond to a question about them being only children by adopting silly accents and saying together, “Let’s cut to the chase… What they really wanna know is, do you bum?” (FaceCulture 2016). In this case, the implication of a sexual relationship and its position as a subject of public scrutiny seems to be a source of humor and camaraderie. Danny Kaplan identifies a similar dynamic between male soldiers that he refers to as the “homosocial joking relationship.” He goes on to describe this relationship as something “men employ...to negotiate intimacy,” that “in itself can be interpreted as a mode of interaction that produces desire.” Interestingly enough, Kaplan also acknowledges the importance of publicity in this dynamic of seduction—whereas such displays might be considered too obviously genuine in private, homosocial settings and opportunities seem to “paradoxically afford them more room to maneuver their feelings” (Kaplan 2006, 574-75, 90). While I have no frame of reference for how Miles Kane and Alex Turner act McKrell 3 in private, the presence of an audience is essential to understanding their dynamic, which in itself is very often performative. It is important to note, however, the subtle differences in situation between Kaplan’s subject of Israeli soldiers, and my own of a British rock duo. Firstly, the homosocial environment of a group of soldiers has the added complexity of war and by extension violence that should not be overlooked. Secondly, the bulk of media pertaining to The Last Shadow Puppets and their second album is from 2016, a full ten years after Kaplan’s article was published, as well as a landmark year for LGBT rights. These differences are palpable in some of the more violent interactions between Kaplan’s subjects, as well as the heavy fear of being perceived as homosexual (Kaplan 2006, 584, 87). Miles and Alex’s public interactions never verge on violent, and perceptions of their relationship as something other than friendship have never been met with distaste. Some of these differences are likely brought out by the large difference in public attitudes surrounding homosexuality and same-sex intimacy between 2006 Israel and 2016 Britain and America. While it is certainly not a stretch to describe rock and roll as homosocial, as Helen Davies does in her essay on British Rock Media, with the lasting influence of queer artists like Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, or to look further back, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, it is still a wholly different environment to a war zone, with different rules to negotiate (Davies 2001). The Last Shadow Puppets are anything but shy with their influences, and Bowie was a clear influence on The Last Shadow Puppets’ second album; on the latter half of the tour they regularly performed a cover of “Moonage Daydream,” which of course has the wonderfully playful lyric, “The church of man, love, is such a holy place to be.” Though in interviews and more press-driven events the joking nature of Miles and Alex’s seems to be aligned with the kinds of McKrell 4 homosocial bonding rituals seen in Kaplan’s study, their interactions and gestures take on a different tone when they are actually performing their music. One of the clearest and most consistent gestures utilized by the duo in concert performance is the act of sharing microphones. This gesture fits rather poetically with a song from their first album, “Standing Next to Me,” which ostensibly describes the course of a relationship in which both parties no longer share the same feelings they once had (Domino Records 2008). Miles takes the melody on the song, while Alex joins in with upper harmonies. “Your love is standing next to me,” sing the dual narrators, addressing the “you” rather than the “her” mentioned in the verses. One performance of the song at an Arctic Monkeys concert in Paris in 2012 involved Alex and Miles starting off the song at different microphones, then coming together at the same microphone for the final verse and chorus (AnezLullaby 2016). On their 2016 tour, this song was often performed the same way, with notable escalations in the amount of contact between the two, even at the expense of the actual music. In their performance at the Ace Hotel in LA, Alex throws away his tambourine before joining Miles at his microphone, while Miles turns all the way into Alex’s embrace and actually stops playing guitar to hold hands with him (Strangedaysindeed9 2017). Whereas older bands like the Beatles would often share mics due to technical limitations, The Last Shadow Puppets make the decision to share mics despite having more than enough microphones and fully functional monitors. In these earlier performances, the reference to the Beatles is likely a motivation for this gesture—the Beatles influence is particularly obvious on the first Shadow Puppets album, even down to Miles and Alex’s matching moptops. More recent artists have also utilized the gesture, one being the Libertines, whose shows of homoeroticism McKrell 5 coupled with legitimate drama and tragedy would warrant a paper of their own. Then there is of course Bruce Springsteen, for whom mic sharing came along with “lingering kisses” with his bandmates, often during ostensibly heterosexual songs (Fanshel 2013, 359, 372). Interestingly enough, Springsteen’s image in mainstream media and popularity with straight men directly contradicts much of his queer performance and aesthetic. Meanwhile, The Last Shadow Puppets have had the opposite trend: while they are still ostensibly within the bounds of heterosexuality, much of the buzz surrounding their work interprets them otherwise. By the time the second Last Shadow puppets album had been announced, their usage of mic sharing had clearly shifted to something closer to these other artists. The music video for “Bad Habits,” released two months before the album, alternates between clips of the band playing the song to a small crowd and erratic shots illustrating the story of the song. The live performance in the video involves Miles and Alex sharing a microphone with hardly any distance between them, turning their faces in towards each other before backing away as they reach a rest in the music. The more story-related parts of the video would be even more suggestive if they weren’t so dizzying and out of focus—a few shots show the silhouette of a woman leading the viewer up a set of stairs, and later in the video we briefly see Alex and Miles on a bed with the same woman just out of frame, implying a threesome. It could be said that the presence of a woman is what allowed such an overt reference to Miles and Alex’s relationship being a sexual one. Like with Springsteen, we see a double trap where the presence of a woman allows for queer possibility, but at the same time limits queer plausibility. This same stipulation is visible in The Last Shadow Puppets’ subsequent music videos for “Aviation” and “Everything You’ve Come to Expect.” These videos are implied to be part of McKrell 6 a larger narrative wherein Miles and Alex have in some way wronged a bride-to-be, and are then forced by a mafioso (perhaps the bride’s father) to dig themselves neck deep into sand on a beach at low tide.