One Point Perspective

Album: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • This melancholic song is a track from Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, which has a loose theme running through it of the Arctic Monkeys taking up the role of the titular hotel's house band.

    I've played to quiet rooms like this before

    During an interview with Pitchfork, frontman Alex Turner responded to the interviewer's suggestion that the residency has lost its lustre:

    "In my head, the whole verse, the whole song - maybe even the whole record - just tees up the idea of playing to a quiet room.

    The quiet rooms thing also had something to do with the fact that, on a lot of the vocal recordings for the album, I was the only person in the building, just sitting there with my microphone and tape recorder, writing lyrics. That perhaps allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have done elsewhere. And eighty percent of the time, including on this occasion, those are the vocals that we kept for the record."
  • During the third verse, Turner croons several tongue-in-cheek lines about being a fan of a fictional documentary film called Singsong Around the Money Tree.

    "Singsong 'round the money tree"
    This stunning documentary that no one else unfortunately saw
    Such beautiful photography, it's worth it for the opening scene
    I've been driving 'round listening to the score
    Or maybe, I just imagined it all


    Turner explained to Pichfork: "I feel like I was often overhearing conversations that went along the lines of, 'Have you watched such and such?' I do that too, I'm only human. When I was writing this record, I was turned on to these three Jean-Pierre Melville films—Un Flic, Le Cercle Rouge, and Le Samouraï—that all star Alain Delon and have this jazz lounge club at the center of the story. And the clubs in these films were often very obviously film sets, which is something that interested me as well. At the end of Le Samouraï, for instance, there's a shot that zooms out from one of these clubs almost to the point where you see the film lights. So when I would sit at the piano and play these types of chords, I was thinking about those Melville interiors a lot.

    There's also this movie called Spirits of the Dead, which is made up of three shorts based on Edgar Allan Poe stories shot by three different directors. Fellini did one of them, and there's an airport scene in it with the strangest, orange sky outside. It's fantastic. There's also this weird award scene in it with this light up floor and a body of water next to it and a psych band playing. It's like, 'How did you think of this?'"
  • Little eight-year-old Alex Turner first learnt to play the piano with his father, David and he wrote much of the Tranquility album on the instrument.

    "There's something about the stuff I wrote on piano that definitely reminds me of the types of thing he would play, and still does even now," he told NME. "There's this bit in 'One Point Perspective', the sort of jazzy bit of that, that every time it comes around, when I sit there, it feels like something he would play. That's the thing I've been playing whenever I've sat on a piano stool since I was a kid, but I never thought it would find its way into my compositions as much as it has on this record."
  • In cinema, one-point perspective is a visual composition technique used to create depth and convey a sense of space within a scene. It is based on the principles of linear perspective, which is a method of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.

    The director frames the scene in a way that all lines converge to a single vanishing point on the horizon line. This vanishing point represents the viewer's perspective and creates the illusion of depth, with objects appearing to recede into the distance.

    Alex Turner found out about the phrase through the movies of Stanley Kubrick. "In his films, he often used it to create this," he told Radio X. "There's something ominous about it, inherently; certainly, in his films"

    "I think it's quite unearthly unsettling as a view when it's used because you're not sort of used to seeing it, there's something harmonious about that," Turner added to Radio 101WKQX. "There's something about the feeling that this creates in these movies that I think it's in tune with the type of ideas we're exploring in the lyrics on this tune."

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