There was little understatement about pop in the 1960s. Music may have been irrevocably changed by rock’n’roll; but to be a band in that era really represented the best of both worlds. You could write and record your own songs – weird as you liked – and then, should you need it, you could deploy the services of arrangers who learnt their trade in an era when most popular music was steered by a conductor’s baton.

These people still had to find work in a radically changed music industry. The unsung heroes of songs by the Bee Gees, Dusty Springfield and the Shadows were characters such as Bill Shepherd, Ivor Raymonde and Norrie Paramor.

Of all the current indie vanguard, it seems surprising that Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner – in tandem with the Rascals frontman Miles Kane, the arranger Owen Pallet and the producer James Ford – should have yearned to recreate those days with his latest project. At least it seems surprising until you hear the new single yielded by the alliance. Listening to words tumble from Turner’s mouth on The Age of Understatement, you realise that perhaps this may have been what he was hearing in his head when he presented his “proper” band with Brianstorm.

The two songs aren’t so different, except for the lyrical worlds from which they spring. It takes no genius to work out that Scott Walker has crashed into Turner and Kane’s lives in dramatic fashion. The buccaneering narratives dispensed by the two even chime with the accidental poetic nuances that – on Walker’s album of Jacques Brel songs – came of translating a Belgian writer’s lyrics into English.

“Can’t you see I’m a ghost in the wrong coat, biting butter and crumbs?” they declaim with spittle-flecked zeal on Separate and Ever Deadly – while the excellent Calm Like You unfolds in streets that smell of “burglary and fireworks”.

Don’t think it a bad thing that the kinetic charge of Standing Next To Me shares most of its DNA with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich’s Legend of Xanadu. It isn’t – although, oddly, the influence of Richard Hawley yields the most unnecessary moments: a lament called The Time Has Come and The Chamber.

A couple of years ago, Turner seemed to display an almost aggressive mistrust of everything that newfound celebrity had conferred upon him. Some people treat fame like a prison; others are quick to realise that it’ll allow them to try all sorts of things that the rest of us wouldn’t dare dream of.

In The Age of the Understatement Turner sounds as if he’s having a blast. And even if one or two songs wear a smirk out of all proportion to their actual cleverness, it would take a curmudgeon not to join in.

(Domino, TMS £9.99, call 0845 6026328)

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