Songfacts®:

• This song is about prostitution in the Neepsend district of Sheffield in England. The Arctic Monkeys are from High Green in Sheffield, which they refer to in their song "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secure."
• This song was originally known as "Scummy."
  
  "We never really had a name for it for a long time," drummer Matt Helders told Radio X. "We used to just refer to it as 'Scummy' ourselves or 'Scummy Man', at first. But then we realized it weren't just about a scummy man. It were like general scum!"
• This was the Arctic Monkeys' second successive UK #1 after their debut release "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England, for all above
• This song inspired Scummy Man, a short film released on DVD by the Arctic Monkeys' label Domino Records. It tells the story of one night in the life of a teenage prostitute and drug addict.
• "When the Sun Goes Down" draws its gritty realism from the streets around Sheffield's Neepsend area, where Arctic Monkeys rehearsed early on. The song shines a light on the sex workers, hustlers, and late-night characters who appeared after dark, giving Alex Turner firsthand material for the lyric's watchful tone.
  
  The studio staff warned them about the neighborhood's shift in mood after hours. "The engineer would say, 'When you're in here at night, make sure you lock the door, because it changed when the sun goes down,'" Alex Turner told NME. As the band packed up their guitars, passersby would eye the equipment not as instruments but as commodities. "You'd be packing your guitars away and somebody'd walk past and be like, 'How much is one of them worth?'"
  
  Those encounters fed directly into the song's narrative, grounding it in a very real place where daylight respectability gave way to nighttime desperation.
• Alex Turner rarely needed more than two or three vocal takes during sessions for Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. "He'd say, 'Shall I do it again?' and I'd say, 'No, it sounds fantastic,'" in-house producer Alan Smyth told The Independent.
  
  That confidence paid off in a big way. The opening section of "When The Sun Goes Down" on the album is the original demo take, lifted straight from an early recording session. "That's the original take for the first bit," confirmed Smyth. "The opening guitar and him singing, it's never changed."