How Chris McClure ended up appearing on the cover of Arctic Monkeys' debut album

23 January 2026, 10:00 | Updated: 23 January 2026, 16:51

He's the mystery man on the cover of Arctic Monkeys' classic debut Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not. But who was Chris McClure, and why that particular photo?

John Kennedy turns back the clock to January 2006, when he was joined by Alex Turner and Matt Helders to talk through Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in full! Listen on Global Player here.

Remember this famous face? A man taking a drag on his ciggy sat in front of a curtain. Kind of looks like a photo booth snap taken on a big night out.

It is, of course, the cover of Arctic Monkeys’ debut album Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not, released twenty years ago on 23rd January 2006. The image pretty much sums up the lyrical content of that generation-defining record.

The man is one Chris McClure, the brother of Jon McClure, of Reverend And The Makers fame - and he's a pretty legendary character himself.

"Chris was around all the time," original Monkeys bassist Andy Nicholson told Radio X in November 2025. "He was a beautiful human from the first time I met him, until today. He was around, he was a friend of ours.

"Before he was on the cover, we were like, 'We need a guitar tech'. He was like, 'I'll do it! I'll come on tour'. He didn't know how to tune a guitar, he didn't know how to do anything.

"Once we got a guitar tech, he was like, 'I'll sell merch! Then he's leaving merch stand to come and stand at the side of stage and watch. 'They're stealing all these T shirts Chris, what's happening?"

When the Monkeys launched Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in January 2006, Alex Turner and Matt Helders told Radio X's John Kennedy that the process of creating the artwork for this most important of debut albums was quite long-winded.

In fact, as Helders remembered, they almost gave up before they even started, pitching a type of idea that would eventually be used for their fourth album, Suck It And See: "Were just gonna have a blank thing, weren't we?"

Turner added: "We were on tour, so that was quite a long process because it was like - I don't know - being sat in hotel rooms in Japan at three at morning, talking to them about this picture on page three of the artwork or whatever.

"They found this old passport picture from like 60s of this bloke and he had a cigarette. We said, will you will try and do something like that? We were struggling again, like we were for a title for an album."

Luckily, Andy Nicholson was a keen photographer and was documenting the rise of Arctic Monkeys from an insider's point of view. He'd already taken a spontaneous snap of their pal Chris McClure sitting and smoking in the Sheffield venue The Boardwalk.

"I took a photo of Chris and he's smoking this cigarette," said Andy told Radio X's Dan O'Connell, "and that was like a year before the album came out. I just remember saying look, I've got this picture. why don't we just get Chris to do that?"

The shot was taken late one night at the Korova Bar in Liverpool by photographer Alexandra Wolkowicz.

McClure, who also fronted the Sheffield band The Violet May, told the Guardian about the shoot in 2016: “They said: ‘Go out and get drunk – come back after midnight.’ They gave us a wad of cash, literally hundreds of pounds. We were young and made the most of it.“

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"When I arrived back it was gone 2am. There was a venue below the bar and we did the pictures there, just me sat on a stool. They gave me more whisky and I threw up half way through. Everything was blurry.”

Once the album was out, Chris knew that his fame was assured. “That Monday, my phone never stopped,” he recalled. “It was bonkers, like being dipped into fame. Everyone in the world wanted to know who I was.”

"It came back as a bit of an issue," recalled Helders, on the fact that McClure was pictured in the act of smoking, but the photo made it to the cover despite any objections. As Turner said, "It were only the people that actually smoked themselves that were okay about it. Which was funny, I thought."

As Andy Nicholson says: "Chris is very much a very beautiful normal person that really embodied what we were trying to say about the album. He embodied it all."

Andy Nicholson's Arctic Monkeys photo book, I Bet This Looks Good On Your Coffee Table, is available here.

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