The Arctic Monkeys story is so good that it feels like it was written to be told. Four school friends from High Green – a suburb in the north of Sheffield that is not anyone’s idea of a music industry origin point – who learned to play in a garage, started gigging in Sheffield pubs and clubs, and distributed their demo recordings not through any label machinery but by burning CDs at home and handing them out at gigs. By the time they signed to a record label they were already famous, which in 2005 was genuinely unprecedented.

High Green is where Sheffield becomes Barnsley. It sits on the northern edge of the city, past Hillsborough, past the Wednesday ground, in the territory that’s more South Yorkshire than Sheffield-metropolitan-identity. Alex Turner grew up here with Jamie Cook. They met Nick O’Malley and Andy Nicholson through the Sheffield scene. The band formed around 2002, when Turner was fifteen.

The Boardwalk on Snig Hill was where they first played properly, and where the CD-at-gigs strategy began. The story goes that the band burned their early recordings onto CD-Rs and handed them to people who came to see them. Those people copied them. The copies spread. By late 2004, before any commercial release, the band’s songs were circulating across Sheffield and then, via the early internet, across Britain. NME was asking what was happening in Sheffield before the label had signed anything.

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not came out in January 2006. It became the fastest-selling debut album in British music history at that point. The songs were about nights out in Sheffield – taxis, bouncers, girls in the queue outside Corporation, the specific geography of West Street and the Boardwalk – written in an idiom that was simultaneously completely local and completely universal. Alex Turner’s lyric writing had found a voice that nobody had used before in British rock: literate, observational, rooted in a specific place without being parochial, funny without deflating itself.

The subsequent career is well documented: the stylistic evolution across six albums, the Glastonbury headliners, the LA period, AM, the return to Sheffield in the music if not always in residence. Turner has remained the band’s primary voice and the voice has remained recognisably his – the Sheffield vowels and working-class intelligence visible even through the layers of artistic reinvention.

What the Arctic Monkeys represent for Sheffield is complicated. The city claims them with total sincerity – and they were genuinely formed here, of here, by the specifics of this city. But the band also outgrew the local claim quickly and has spent most of its career operating in an international register that makes the High Green origin point feel distant. Sheffield holds on to it anyway. They are the best thing this city has produced in music in the last fifty years, and Sheffield knows what that means coming from a city that produced the Human League, Pulp, and Richard Hawley.