Alex Turner uses his Steinway Vertegrand in his Los Angeles home’s extra bedroom he converted into a home studio, dubbed “Lunar Surface.” Turner stated in various interviews that this instrument that he received from Arctic Monkeys Manager, Ian McAndrew, for his 30th birthday and was the main inspiration for the bands 6th studio album, “Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino.”

A quote from an interview with Rolling Stone gives more context to Turner’s use of the Piano, “ Turner started writing the new album in 2016, up the hill in his home studio, sitting at a Steinway Vertegrand piano that his manager bought him as a birthday present. Turner, who’s long admired the stylistic shape-shiftings of John Lennon and David Bowie, wanted to do something that sounded nothing like the last Monkeys record – the platinum-certified AM, full of snaking guitar riffs and heavy grooves. Having never written on a piano before, he thought the Vertegrand might shake loose a new sound, and he was right: “The places my fingers would naturally fall on the piano” lent themselves, he says, to chords, progressions and “jazz turns” that “suggested to me this idea of a lounge-y character, which never would have occurred to me had I been playing a guitar. They reminded me of things my father used to play on the piano.” Other influences, he said, included Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, Dion’s Born to Be With You and the jazzy score that François de Roubaix composed for Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 post-gangster classic Le Samourai.”

There are many articles about how the bands 6th album came about, “Alex Turner never took to the piano as a kid. After a couple years of lessons, all he could really play was a jazzy vamp he’d improvise, more for comic relief than anything else. He certainly never embraced the instrument the way he later did the guitar - an immediate fixation when he got his first one as a teenager. But that all changed in early 2016, when a friend gave Turner a beautiful Steinway Vertegrand for his 30th birthday. “I arrived back off holiday and it was sitting there,” he says, gesturing toward the piano. “I just love that thing and I’d come and sit at it and while away me days in here. The addition of the piano to this room was definitely a huge part of the making of this album, because that suddenly became the centre of it.”

Continued, “You can hear what he means right from the outset: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Arctic Monkeys’ sixth studio album, opens with “Star Treatment,” an elegantly seductive musical monologue you just couldn’t put across the same way with a guitar. Listen and you can picture Turner sitting there - on a Hollywood hilltop, in a shockingly small room, all things considered, at the Steinway, Mexican beer and a guilty half-pack of smokes poised nearby, as the words begin to tumble out: “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase, miles away from any half-useful imaginary highway.”

The Model K or "Vertegrand" is an upright piano introduced in 1903 by Steinway & Sons. It is the oldest essentially unchanged upright piano design currently in mass production. Although production was interrupted from about 1939 until its reappearance in 1982, the structural design has remained essentially the same for well over a century.

Pictured is Alex playing his Vertegrand in 2016 in his Los Angeles home. The studio has been described, “The core ideas for Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino took root in LA in the early months of 2017, as Turner began recording demos in his modest home studio - which had been drummer Matt Helders’ bedroom when the lads first moved to LA in 2012, but has transformed into a kind of creative nerve centre. On one side of the room, there’s the Steinway, a drum set, a couple of vintage organs, a few guitars. On the other, a workspace littered with cardboard cutouts and Exacto blades - the result of countless hours Turner spent designing and constructing the elaborate architectural model you see on the cover of the album. “I don’t know what happened there,” the singer admits. “I got a bit obsessed.” He’s even started crafting a model of the stage design for Arctic Monkeys’ upcoming tour.”

https://strangedaysindeed9.tumblr.com/post/173095506060/arctic-monkeys-tranquility-base-hotel-casino

(Arctic Monkeys Start Over) https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/arctic-monkeys-start-over-628863/

Ringo played the final chord in A Day In A Life.