Profile: Alex Turner and Alexa Chung
The rock star and his TV presenter girlfriend are the couple of the moment – but they’re too cool to lose their heads
Every era has a celebrity couple, a pair who simply by being together exemplify the times far more than any single personality. For the postwar 1950s think Burton and Taylor with their heady, studio-spun glamour; for the millennium it has to be Posh and Becks, with their tireless endorsements, endless photo-calls and faux-majesty (remember the purple thrones?). Now that the collapse of capitalism seems to be heralding in a more austere moment, surely the celebrity couple of the moment are not Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin or Arky Busson and Uma Thurman (both too smug), but Alexa Chung and Alex Turner.
They’re careful, measured, hip without being tacky, ultra-fashionable without ever being overdone – perhaps for contemporary youth icons we should look no further than the fashion model turned youth-television fixture and her rock-star boyfriend. They are both still in their early twenties, but it’s said that they stay in if they have a heavy workload the next morning, never dally with the hard stuff and have an interest in literary fiction.
Chung has even stated that she wants to be a role model for British youth by keeping her clothes on. Turner is the vocalist, lyricist and lead guitarist of Arctic Monkeys, a band whose authentic “band-ness” and careful rejection of a mediated profile means a position about as far from the productions of Simon Cowell as possible. Weirdly, they have kept their voguish standing while acting positively normally. For the under25s, Turner and Chung are the ultimate in cool. For the mid-lifers, their level-headedness and sanity are to be marvelled at.
Chung, the youngest of four children, grew up in middle-class Hampshire, where she rode her pony and played the recorder. She says she was an ugly child with “massive ears and big teeth” who was “incredibly scrawny. I used to wear three pairs of tights to school to try to make my legs look fatter”. Her naturally slim figure and striking Anglo-Chinese features (her mother is English and her graphic designer father three-quarters Chinese) meant she was discovered by a model agency in the comedy tent at Reading Festival, aged 16. Was she always determined to flaunt her beauty, like Keira Knightley, ordering an agent at the age of four? Of course not. She says she accepted the scout’s offer only to get one-up over her brothers, who always teased her for looking like a boy. Anyway, the scouting paid off.
From the start she appeared on the cover of teeny publications such as Elle Girl and in countless campaigns that helped to shift products such as Fanta and Tampax. She was not a latterday Brooke Shields for Calvin Klein, but something much more down to earth. Amid the dross of high-street advertising, Chung displayed an enviably commercial pragmatism about how her career was shaping up. “I was never too precious about the faces I pulled,” she says. “I did loads of teen magazines and rubbish high-street campaigns.”
Armed with three A-levels, she got a place at King’s College London to read English but dumped academia to be a full-time model. Four years later she had the presence of mind to quit modelling, citing low self-esteem as the reason. Shortly afterwards she got a job hosting the Saturday morning Channel 4 music show Popworld, where she raised the bar by being more than just a skinny clotheshorse introducing bands. “We were encouraged to be quite nasty to interviewees,” she says.
After she corrected an American singer’s grammar on air, her cultish status rose, although it is fair to say that it plummeted in the United States. “About 10,000 American kids left comments [on YouTube] saying, ‘Oh my God, who does she think she is? I hate the English.’ Which is amusing,” she said about the incident.
Can you see Kate Moss doing that? Not likely. Yet in some way Chung and Turner do seem to represent a younger, fresher version of the doomed liaison between Moss and her former boyfriend Pete Doherty. Friends say that Chung is more realistic and a lot less ego-centric than Queen Kate and her troubled ex-swain. They also seem far less anxious to walk on the wild side, less desperate for the celebrity treatment, the appearances in the glossies and, one has to say, the drugs. Perhaps the car-crash relationship of Kate’n’Pete had to take place in order to inform the careful behaviour of Alex’n’Alexa.
Not that Chung seems all that bothered. Her future probably will not be one of tabloid-fuelled high-fashion iconography. The woman who helped Paul McCartney to write a song about shoes on Popworld certainly does not appear to quiver with excitement about being on almost every “well-dressed” list this year. And you can’t imagine her charging off to Las Vegas à la Peaches Geldof and getting in the papers via a schlock wedding moment.
Although she was always confident that she would eventually break through from the dread grip of Fanta adverts (“I always felt like something was going to happen, that I would be plucked out”), she clearly loathed being a model, with venom. She was forever worried about looking overweight and friends say she found the pressure of the industry difficult to cope with. The nadir, apparently, was when she was sent to Finland and had to sit on top of a giant loo roll in a pair of suspenders.
Although Chung seems to have the knack of seeing dross for what it is, she has not always had the best advice for subsequent career moves on the box (such as co-hosting Ben Elton’s dire series Get a Grip). Now, however, she is regarded as so cool that she can probably override these glitches. Plus, she has got a new fashion show this autumn (Frock Me! with the hip designer Henry Holland) and laughs at the “It girl” label, which of course is the only proper reaction for the truly cool.
Turner seems ideally matched to Chung since he is, if anything, a good few notches more diffident about fame than she is. The phenomenally successful Arctic Monkeys chose not to attend the 2007 Brit awards but filmed two acceptance speeches instead, in which they dressed up as the cast of The Wizard of Oz and members of the Village People.
Turner and his mates hardly ever give interviews and tend not to flaunt themselves all over the covers of magazines. Arctic Monkeys famously achieved sell-out status via word of mouth and fans sharing demos of their songs on the internet, not by some ghastly promotional tour or, even worse, a reality TV show. They started the proper way, having been given guitars for Christmas, and their success gave hope to thousands of teenage boys that you could actually still make it from practising in your bedroom.
Yet Turner has been likened to Morrissey, Paul Weller, even Bob Dylan, as the poetic “spokesman for a generation”, and his descriptions of life in Sheffield, detailed and funny, have been hailed as poetry by Simon Armitage.
Together, Turner and Chung cut a refreshingly different image – a pair who while having a fair amount of glam and fun seem to be usefully focused on not screwing up their jobs and almost middle-aged in their carefulness. He won’t go to the fashion parties she goes to because of the paparazzi outside. She gives him Graham Greene to read.
Interestingly, Turner even seems quite happy to break away from the brand that brought him success: his latest project is not a new Monkeys album but a new band, the Last Shadow Puppets. The band consists of Turner and his mate Miles Kane, who is also in the Arctic Monkeys-influenced band the Rascals. This year the duo released their first album, The Age of the Understatement, and they have been touring with a 16-piece orchestra.
“Understated” might be quite a good way of summing up the singer and his beautiful girlfriend. While he strays away from the vehicle that brought him fame, she has the confidence to do so, too. Beneath that fashionably messy hair one suspects there lurks a well-honed set of brain cells in Chung, which by now are possibly getting a bit bored with their remit of rag trade and razzmatazz. Chung recently completed a documentary, The Devil Wears Primark, in which she investigated the gruesome reality of cheap fashion by going undercover in Indian sweatshops. Turning over the fashion world with a secret camera – now that’s something one would never expect from Moss and her cronies.
Wow! Just WOW! This girl is so amazing, fun and natural
Clemence and Alexa are my two girl crushes! 
