The album features re-recorded versions of both tracks from the band’s debut EP, Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys, as well as their first two hits. Andy Nicholson, the band’s bassist, quit the band shortly after the album’s release, hence this is the last Arctic Monkeys record featuring him. Arctic Monkeys, who formed in 2002, frequently gave away free demo CDs to fans at shows, leading to people uploading the band’s music to social networking sites. The band was in high demand from fans, the press, and the music industry as their popularity expanded. In late 2004, several of the album’s tracks were made available for free on the Internet, culminating in the unofficial Beneath the Boardwalk compilation. They Say I’m a Monkey is a collection of short stories by Djenar Maesa Ayu, a young Indonesian writer. Djenar transforms footnotes of metropolitan Jakarta life, as well as the interior lives of the city’s inhabitants, into stories that maintain both the charm and realism of the area in their narratives. Stories that will worm their way into the center of your conscience from the margins. When They Say I’m a Monkey was initially published in Bahasa Indonesia in 2002, it stunned readers with its liberal use of sex as a prominent subject in many of the stories and as a template for Djenar imagery.
