Ex-Arctic Monkeys bassist Andy Nicholson has revealed that his new photo book of the group made his former bandmates cry.
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Nicholson is set to release I Bet This Looks Good On Your Coffee Table – a 175-page collection of the former bassist’s candid moments taken of the band between 2005 and 2007.
The A4 hardback features the Sheffield band in cramped dressing rooms, on tour buses, in recording sessions and making their Saturday Night Live debut in 2006.
Speaking about his book to Radio X, Nicholson said: “We talk quite a lot. I sent them an early copy of the book and got some great replies. [Drummer] Matt [Helders] said it made him cry. [Guitarist] Jamie [Cook] weren’t far behind. I showed it Al[ex Turner] and some of the names that were suggested for the working titles, Al came up with a couple on them. He said, ‘Good job the music was good, because we didn’t look too good either.’”
After taking a three-week break from touring commitments in 2006, Nicholson was permanently replaced by Nick O’Malley – who had initially joined the Monkeys on a temporary basis.
Since then, he’s worked as a musician, DJ, record producer, and photographer – forming the band Mongrel, as well as briefly joining Reverend & The Makers, Lords of Flatbush and hip-hop collective Clubs & Spades, as well as producing for Toddla T, Swindle, Tom Prior and Terri Walker among others. He also performed under his Goldteeth moniker.
Asked what caused his departure, he told Radio X: “It was a difference of reasons. I had family stuff going on, they decided to take Nick on tour, came back, decided to keep Nick, so I wasn’t in there anymore.
“After a few years, maybe four, five years of us parting ways and not really talking a lot, we kind of started to link back up and started to have these serious grown up conversations and really rebuilt our friendship from there and everything’s been fine since then.”
Nicholson previously said in 2019 that he contemplated suicide as the following three years led him down a “dark” path.
“I was very close to not being here, do you know what I mean?” he said at the time. “And then managing to talk to people, and getting through it… time heals everything.”
Nicholson added: “I do remember watching them headline Glastonbury [2007] on television, and I was just sat at home on my own… just watching it. Just crying watching them headline. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
Speaking about his new book now, Nicholson said: “It’s kind of nice because within these photos, I think everybody but us four got to see what this band did and where it went from the outside and it was like, ‘Wow they’re doing this and they’re doing that, Saturday Night Live and [Later…with] Jools Holland and all these amazing things’. I think the photos are quite revealing as to how normal things really were.”
He added: “Looking back at these photos you actually get a bit of a grasp of how young we actually were. When you’re 19 you think you’re a grown up, when you’re 19 you’re a child. The positions we got put in as children really and still learning to be adults, moving forward and making big decisions were crazy, [it was a] crazy situation.”
There hasn’t been a new album from the Sheffield band since their last album, ‘The Car’ dropped at the end of 2022 and was given a glowing five-star review by NME, which described it as “a swashbuckling, strings-fuelled epic”.
