Vacuum cleaners, coffee pots, electricity meters – how can a song populated with the determinedly ordinary things of life be so romantic? Somehow, the Arctic Monkeys ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ performs this trick!
Part of the answer is nostalgia – it transports the listener back to an England that is not quite the England of today. ‘Setting lotion’ conjures the old-fashioned image of women sitting with their hair in rollers under the hood dryers of the local hairdressers:
A time (the 1970’s) when the Ford Cortina (another lyrical reference) was Britain’s most popular car. When the ‘leccy meter’, (Northern slang for those old meters that measured your electricity consumption) unless fed with money, always threatened to run out.
And yet, it skilfully avoids sentimentality through humour: ‘If you like your coffee hot / Let me be your coffee pot’. Just one of many favourite lines.
