Arctic Monkeys top album

British band Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not has been voted as the best album of 2006 in a poll conducted by music magazine NME.

The Sheffield group’s frontman Alex Turner admitted he was surprised by the album’s success, despite being heavily tipped in the run-up to its release at the beginning of the year.

"We’d been up and down playing those songs and everyone had gone pretty barmy, but I didn’t think that they were going to buy a CD," NME quoted him as saying.

"I just thought they were out and having a laugh, and I didn’t think it meant we were ultimately going to make this big album.

When we finished we were so proud that we’d made a record, it seemed secondary that it were a good one," he added. The album’s success owed much to the popularity of their first two singles, I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor and When the Sun Goes Down, which both topped the UK singles charts.

The album was closely followed by Muse’s Black Holes And Revelations. Previous winners of the NME poll in recent years have included Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut and Elephant by White Stripes. — ANI