WEST COUNTRY HARDCORE PUNKERS IDLES CHAOS-BLAST THE FORCES OF REACTION
IT’S NOON, and Joe Talbot is in the bath. Yesterday, his band – Bristolian brutalists Idles – caught a transatlantic red-eye home to appear on Later… With Jools Holland; within 48 hours they’ll be in Atlanta, rejoining their briefly-interrupted US tour. Not that you’ll hear Talbot moaning about their workload. He’s still buzzing off how Idles’ dispatches from austerity Britain – withering snapshots of toxic masculinity and fullthroated celebrations of diversity – have translated across the globe. “There’s a general consensus of disillusionment and panic and unease all over the place,” he reports. “The same shit’s happening in Greece, in America, in Spain – the polarisation of politics and economics. And they’re appreciating the violence of our tone, and our positive, mindful message.” Formed in 2012, Idles didn’t begin to locate their “collective artistic language” until second EP, 2015’s Meat (“Bristol allows you to make mistakes, and keep trying,” Talbot says). By 2017 debut album Brutalism, however, the group had become “this vehicle to exorcise our demons, to change our lives for the better. We’d come off-stage just wanting to play another fucking show. I pity those pop acts singing other people’s songs over a backing track – they’re missing out on one of the greatest feelings in the world: playing music you really believe in, that catharsis of saying what you mean.” The things Idles say and mean are often political, but Talbot’s songs don’t deal in polemic, preferring brass knuckle wit (yelling, “You look like a walking thyroid/You’re not a man you’re a gland” at a macho thug on Never Fight A Man With A Perm) and abundant humanity. Danny Nedelko, off new album Joy As An Act Of Resistance, is a gleeful terrace-chant celebration of immigrants, including Talbot’s “blood brother”, the titular Ukrainian frontman of Bristol band Heavy Lungs. People can make their political debates against immigration, Talbot says, “but when you strip it down to a human, a family, it’s a bit harder to spew your stats and not look like a cunt.” While making Joy… Talbot’s counsellor advised him to “be as vulnerable as possible”. Talbot’s emotions were particularly raw; his daughter Agatha had been stillborn that summer, an experience revisited on the powerful, affecting June. “I thought it was indulgent,” Talbot says, “but Mark [Bowen, guitarist] said, ‘You’re laying yourself bare – that’s the whole point.’ Losing my daughter was the hardest thing I’ve ever faced. June is me falling backwards, and the band catching me. They’ve been one hundred per cent behind me, and it’s beautiful.” A band on a mission, Talbot describes Idles as “a Trojan horse. We can’t just play to people who already agree with us. People are sat watching Ant & Dec, but we’re ready to change the narrative. We want to get our foot in the door of the populace, instead of preaching to the choir. Otherwise,” he warns, letting a little more hot water into his bath, “we’re just at the mercy of Facebook algorithms.”
“Laying yourself bare – that’s the whole point.” MARK BOWEN