By Kieron JH – The Reasonable Adjustment
Let’s take a detour. Not down the usual rabbit holes of governance failures, rights violations, or institutional let-downs – though don’t worry, we’ll get back to that. Today, we’re stepping into the velvet-draped world of The Last Shadow Puppets, the musical collaboration between Alex Turner and Miles Kane.
Why? Because they are the patron saints of doing things your own way. Because they represent what happens when you take your legacy, tear it into strips, and weave it into something that doesn’t beg for approval – it dares you to look closer.
Their debut album, The Age of the Understatement (2008), was many things: grandiose, theatrical, a swaggering nod to 60s baroque pop, and, frankly, weirdly out of time. Picture a dusty Western filtered through a French art film. Now add sharp suits, a string section, and two men who refused to apologise for sounding like nothing else around.
More Than a Side Project
It’s tempting to call TLSP a side project. But that would be a massive understatement. This wasn’t a vanity record – it was a sandbox where Alex Turner began shedding the skin of the Arctic Monkeys frontman he was pigeonholed into. Gone were the fast-talking tales of taxis and chip shops. In came cinema. Ambiguity. Lounge crooners. Vulnerability dressed in swagger.
Listen closely, and you’ll hear the early echoes of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino – the Monkeys’ 2018 surprise curveball that baffled casual listeners and delighted the cultists. Some would say TLSP was the prototype. Both records are preoccupied with fictional worlds, self-aware performance, and frontmen who lean into character work like they’re auditioning for a noir reboot of Cabaret.
They’re not twins – more like creative cousins. TLSP is cinematic pop noir. Tranquility Base is sci-fi jazz lounge. But the creative DNA is unmistakable. Turner’s lyrical abstraction. The art deco melancholy. The refusal to sound like anyone but himself – even when it costs him radio play.
Art in the Age of Underestimation
So why talk about this here, on a site that usually deals in complaints, compliance, and calling out nonsense?
Because TLSP reminds us that stepping outside of what’s expected is a form of resistance. That building strange, stylish, sincere things in the shadows is still progress – even if no one gets it right away. It’s a lesson in autonomy. In subverting the polished template someone else says you need. Sound familiar?
That’s the entire ethos of The Reasonable Adjustment. Some systems – and people – would rather we all fit the same mould. Same CVs. Same rules. Same narrative arcs. But like Turner and Kane, we’re here to make something else. Something not everyone will understand. Something bold, a little off-key, and entirely ours.
Final Act
The Last Shadow Puppets may not be trending. They may never play stadiums (although they definitely should!) But they carved out a world – velvet-lined, cryptic, hauntingly cool – and they invited us in. And just like those of us building strange things from overlooked places, they did it not to fit in, but to get free.
So here’s to the outsiders in velvet suits. The crooners with a past. The shadow puppets who turned the lights back on themselves. And here’s to every one of us who’s ever been shoved aside and told we were just a shadow of something better.
We’re not. We’re the puppeteers now.
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