After tabbing Do I Wanna Know? in January, I hope it’s not too soon to cover another Monkeys track: Fluorescent Adolescent
The biggest challenge here (after spelling the title) is the very rapid delivery of the verse melody. These bits are played with a long succession of hammer-ons and pull-offs. Make sure you pull-off downwards rather than straight off the string. That’ll give it an extra pluck to keep the notes sounding.
Other than that, it’s a fun song to blast through.
Starting off 2024 with a track from Arctic Monkeys’ last good album: Do I Wanna Know?
Intro: The funnest part of the song. The original is just single notes. But I’ve beefed it up for the uke with doubled notes and chords wherever I get the chance.
Verse: The melody is very rambling and conversational even before he does his club singer act on it. I thought I knew this song well, but it took a lot of work to get the timing somewhere near right. The biggest challenge of the song.
Pre-Chorus: The only thing to worry about here is a quick jump down the fretboard in bar 27. If you prefer, you can play the A-string, 2nd fret to the E-string, 7th fret. All you’re losing here is the open E-string ringing.
Chorus: Other than the “Crawling back to you,” part, it’s exactly the same as the intro.
Outro: A simple little riff to finish off.
Rumours of a new Arctic Monkeys album this year don’t seem to have come to fruition. So I’m doing one of their old songs in an attempt to The Secret a new album into existence.
The chord that really makes this progression is the F# (the major III chord in theory terms). In the key of D you’d expect to hear and F#m (which also crops up the progression). The Bb note in the F# chord doesn’t fit in the D major key so in creates loads of tension until it becomes more settled in the G chord. It’s a classic chord trick. You can hear the same move (I – III – IV) in the chorus of Tennesee Waltz.
Intro, Verses, Break and Solo: The intro starts with all down strums (eight per chord). Then I switch to this pattern (which you can hear in the video below):
The xs indicated strums muted with the fretting hand. If you want a simpler strum that doesn’t use muting here’s one that takes the rhythm from the intro solo:
Which sounds like this:
Chorus: The chorus is much more straightforward. It’s all down-strums. One each on all the Gs and As. Two on the D. And three on the Bm. The exception is the last chorus where it’s just one down-strum per chord (and don’t forget the lenthened Bm chord).
Middle: Eight fast down-strums per chord. Until the final F#-G-A move where you do two slower down-strums per chord.
Two little twiddles from the song. Both use the D major pentatonic include C# from the standard major scale.
Way back in 2007 the second ever chord post I did was Despair in the Departure Lounge. Since then there’s been a steady stream of request for more Monkeys which I’d always replied to with, “I’ll do another Monkeys tab when they go back to making good records.” Johnny called me out on that promise correctly pointing out that the new album is awesome.
So here’s a medley of most of the songs on the album:
One for the Road/Do I Wanna Know?/Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?/Arabella/Knee Socks/I Want It All/R U Mine?
The trickiest bits for the fretting are the two big leaps on the fretboard. There’s the big slide up in R U Mine? where it isn’t such a big deal if you don’t hit it exactly. The really hard one is the 8th fret in bar 5. Cut that 1st fret note before it really short to give yourself some time to get up.
The trickiest bits for the strumming hand are the palm muting (i.e. lightly resting the underside of your hand on the string at the bridge to muffle the strings). In One for the Road and Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High? I’m muting all the strings. In Do I Wanna Know? I’m trying my best to mute the C-string while letting the E- and A-strings ring. As you can hear in the video I don’t always pull it off. It’s hard to get right so there’s nothing wrong with playing this section without any muting at all.