You clicked on this. Not me. Nobody made you click on it
2005. Do you remember 2005? A Liverpool team consisting of: Jerzy Dudek, Steve Finnan, Jamie Carragher, Sami Hyypiä, DJIMI TRAORE, Xabi Alonso, Luis Garcia, Harry Kewell, Steven Gerrard (c), John Arne Riise and Milan Baroš won the Champions League Final.
Do you remember that? Didi Hamann and Vladimír Šmicer off the bench. Coming back from three goals down against a team so good they go simply by their surnames. Dida. Nesta, Stam, Maldini. Cafu. Pirlo, Gattuso, Kaka. Seedorf, Shevchenko. Crespo. Incredible.
And yet Liverpool pulled off the biggest upset since the 1994 final and best comeback since, well, ever.
2005 was mental. 2005 was this:
You remember, of course you do. Four mildly acne-ridden teenagers in bad jeans and polo shirts doing their best garage band impression and somehow it all just exploding over the airwaves.
‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ debuted at number one in the UK in October 2005 and stayed there forever. I am convinced it is still number one, somehow. People still chuck their WKDs in the air and go absolutely bananas whenever it comes on in a bar or nightclub, people still play in the office and at house parties, people still think it’s the greatest song ever.
‘I Bet You Look Good’ was a good, fun song. Nothing more. It’s just power chords and bad couplets though, the sound of a young band finding their feet. By the time Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not came around in 2006, people knew what the Arctic Monkeys were about, which was actual bangers like ‘The View from the Afternoon’ and ‘Perhaps Vampire Is a Bit Strong But…’.
Consider, for a moment, the fact that ‘I Bet You Look Good’ contains the most unnecessary, pointless lyric of all time in “Your name isn’t Rio but I don’t care for sand”. Consider the fact the two mini-guitar solos are really, actually, really quite bad. There are four chords. Consider it all, and don’t take it as a criticism of the song itself. It’s not a great song, but it is very much a product of its time, a gleaming time capsule of 2005, when Djimi Traore could snatch a Champions League winners’ medal out of Paolo Maldini’s hands, and young men could team up pastel coloured polo shirts with gigantic collars and bootcut jeans and nobody would blink.
Anyway, the nostalgia should be coursing back for you now. Do you remember the cover of the single? Of course you do, you remember it all, and you especially remember the trainee checkout girl looking very vaguely distant and melancholy in her green cardi and ludicrous white shirt.
Seriously, what is it with those collars?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BA7HquwQD1O/?taken-by=jessie_may_cuffe
Jessie May Cuffe, then 16-years-old, was on a night out in Liverpool when her life (kinda, but not really) changed forever, and she became the face of the Arctic Monkeys’ single that took the country by storm.
“I had snuck out with my mates to Liverpool aged 16, we were in a bar called Bumper when the design company took a snap of me and asked for my contact details,” she explained to Radio X.
Now 29, this is what she looks like now, free from the strains of a supermarket checkout.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi0DYbajVZ3/?taken-by=jessie_may_cuffe
“I first met the band at the Ritz in Manchester, at the time they were just typical 19, 20-year-old lads winding me up and moaning at me for playing the single over and over again through their speakers because they were sick of hearing it” she told Radio X.
You see? Even the band didn’t rate it.
