Listen to The Last Shadow Puppets

Haring across London in the back of a people carrier, sitting between Alex Turner and Miles Kane, is not an altogether comfortable place to be. It isn’t that they aren’t affable; on the contrary, the Arctic Monkeys front man and the lead singer of the Rascals, whose debut album together as the Last Shadow Puppets went straight in at No 1 last Sunday, exude bonhomie. For all that, the experience reminds you of those waspish Beatles press conferences where reporters were put to the sword with sharp, nee-dling in-joke wordplay - as if the Fab Four were toying with large, slightly dumb animals, and winking at each other as they did so.

Much the same sense of a private communication pervades the duo’s album, The Age of the Understatement - a sequence of songs that, by accident rather than design, came to turn on the theme of the femme fatale and the fall-out from their entanglements with versions of the archetype. In both musicians’ cases, the record is an away day from their main occupations: for Turner, of course, it represents an artistic left turn between Arctic Monkeys albums; and for Kane, a breather as he prepares to concentrate his energies on breaking through with his own band, Liverpool trio the Rascals.

When each of them stresses that Understatement is the consequence of friendship, not ambition, you believe them, because that’s exactly how it sounds. A dozen songs tear by in just under 35 minutes, as if their writers were struggling to get them down. “Me and Miles,” Turner says, “if we had grown up in the same area and gone to the same school, maybe we’d be in a band together anyway.”

The album, recorded, breakneck, over two weeks in a rural studio in France last summer, is, he says, an expression of that friendship - not, as cynics are surmising, part of some grand chart-domination scheme. “If that sort of thing had bothered us,” Turner continues, “we probably wouldn’t be mates. It would never have got that far.”

Billowing with violins and brass, indebted to the three-minute melodramas of the Walker Brothers and early Bowie, of arrangers such as Ivor Raymonde and Wally Stott, the album could so easily have died a death as hollow pastiche. Yet nowhere is there a sense of the opportunism and precision-guided politesse that render many current retro-soul artists so obnoxious and risible. Urgency, enthusiasm and sheer love for what they’ve created have, instead, produced a record that sounds bracingly contemporary. “It’s soul, rather than soulless,” Kane suggests, as the discussion - all of it unprintable, none of it complimentary - turns to what distinguishes the LSPs from, say, Duffy. “And true - that’s it. It’s true. We’re writing, quite personally, about what goes on.”

With shared and rapidly swapped vocal lines, the songs often sound as if they are stories, anecdotes the pair are telling each other. “I think that worked with the writing, too,” Kane says. “I suppose we do have, like, similar heads, and can understand what the other one is saying. In your band, it’s cool, but you’re on your own [both he and Turner are their bands’ chief songwriters]. When we’re together, the other person can drag more out of you. That’s a dead special thing, I couldn’t do that for anyone else, I think.”

Turner adds: “You feel some of the tunes are more personal than the ones you’ve done on your own. Because you’ve got a partner, you don’t feel so exposed, perhaps – or you’re not so afraid.”

It is this tenderness, almost, and willingness to at least grapple with candour that takes the edge off the LSPs’ air of watchful exclusivity. A photo in their album booklet shows the pair in matching polo necks, moptops brushed modishly forwards, faces near identical. Their singing voices, too, have a spooky similarity. “We had to be held back on that a bit,” Turner says, recalling recording sessions with the producer James Ford. “We were always saying, ‘We should do a line [of a song] each, in turn’, but James just went, ‘Calm down.’ ” They both sing in the same clipped, spiky way, a manner that lends itself to dramatic exaggeration and barbed lyrics. “Well, I think so,” Turner agrees, “but someone I read said something like, ‘It gets on your tits after a bit’ – like our voices weren’t suited to it or whatever.”

Harmonies are another feature. Turner, who has been looking a bit downcast, having remembered the critic’s putdown, brightens up. “Yeah, man, that’s great, isn’t it? We’ve always, like, loved your Spector and all that, grown up with the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We’re planning to do a cover of [the Beatles’] This Boy. But I want to get better at them. I’d love to be able to sing three-part harmonies.”

It’s easy to forget, as the conveyor belt of modern entertainment zooms by, that Turner is, despite having the fastest-selling debut album ever under his belt, only 22 (as is Kane). The caustic, sometimes world-weary chronicler of the first two Arctics albums is, in person, surprisingly inarticulate, with a Stan Laurel-like expression, halfway between bemusement and bashfulness. His doe eyes and experimenting-with-shaving complexion only add to the sense of an innocent abroad. We know from his songs, of course, that he is infinitely more complex, more wised up, than that; he is just quieter about it than most. Yet, watching him sparring and joshing with Kane, it is easy to get the impression that the latter has cajoled out of Turner something he didn’t know he had in him, and is delighted to discover he has.

Listen to the way he cuts loose vocally towards the end of the album track Separate and Ever Deadly; or to the pathos he brings to the melody on the closing track, The Time Has Come Again, which, with its predecessor, Meeting Place, serves as a haunting grace note to the album. And remember his expression of inadequacy about those three-part harmonies. The dour, sullen Sheffield lad that Arctic Monkeys detractors perceive, cocky beyond his years, swollen with self-belief, is impossible to square with the burbling, slightly awkward person beside me on the seat.

Kane, on the other hand, brims with Scouse mischief and bravado, relishing what he calls “spat-out” lyrics such as “When we walked the streets together / All the faces seemed to smile back / Now the pavements have nothing to offer / And all the faces seem to need a slap”. Fans have already speculated that, far from doing Turner a favour, the Rascal has chucked him a king-size dilemma: will he be able to return to the, as some see it, relatively ham-fisted simplicities of his day job with the memory of Owen Pallett’s mind-blowing string arrangements, of the great torch singer he suddenly located within himself, fresh in his mind? (This swerve was arguably anticipated on at least two tracks on the Arctics’ second album.)

Front on, Turner won’t address this. Sideways, though, he offers a hint of the seeds freshly sown in his head when he says of the duo’s plans to tour the album: “If we could realise it live, that would be even more of a thing. If we could become that band we wanted it to be, well, that’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it?”

For the moment, the Last Shadow Puppets can sit back and marvel, as can we, that a project that began as song ideas swapped casually in dressing rooms, when Kane’s band supported Turner’s, has turned into a record of such beautiful surfaces, dark corners and deep resonance.

The irony is, that album title is wrong. We live in an age of needy, ridiculous, 24-hour hype. But it is, for once, no overstatement to say that, in rescuing melodrama from the clammy embrace of kitsch, in reviving the idea of musicians working together out of hours not because of calculation but because of camaraderie; and in tangling with the femmes fatales who inspired their scorching songs, the Last Shadow Puppets have made one of the outstanding British pop albums of recent years.

The Age of the Understatement is out now on Domino

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