Arctic Monkeys Turn Josh Homme Into a 'Zombie'

Posted on Jul 29th 2009 2:00PM by Mike Ayers
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While the Arctic Monkeys have worked with several producers in their short career, none have had the star power of Josh Homme. The brash quartet hooked up with the Queens of the Stone Age singer for production duties, a bit of backing vocals and all-around directive advice for their third album, 'Humbug,' and it seems to be exactly what the British lads needed.

"I think one thing that strikes me, is that it's more of a guitar record, I suppose," frontman Alex Turner tells Spinner. "There are solos on it that we haven't really delved into before. He encouraged that. And it was terrific. We squashed that reluctance that we once had."

Homme also provides very apparent, creepy sounding backing vocals on a few tracks, most notably on 'Potion Approaching.' "He would sing often with Matt [Helders] or Nick [O'Malley]; the three of them would do zombie voices," Turner explains.

Turner doesn't recall a specific moment when they decided to wrangle Homme for 'Humbug.' Instead, it came about in a much more casual fashion. "We're big fans of his band and we played a show together in Houston and got chatting there. And maybe in an interview or something we said we were into this and that; there was a bit of that going on. We sort of forgot about it. We got a call and asked if we were still up for doing that. It was at that time where we would try to build a studio and do it ourselves and create our own little world. We'd get this engineer we know to do that, but I don't think we were really ready. We'd still be plugging things in."

So for all you bands just starting out: if you'd like to work with a musician in some capacity, try mentioning it in an interview, forget that you did so and hope for the best.