The raging return of Idles: ‘We’ve always used violence as part of our vocabulary’
Towards the end of Idles’ upcoming fourth album, Crawler, lead singer Joe Talbot comes to a euphoric realisation. “In spite of it all,” the 37-year-old howls, “life is beautiful.”
It’s an apt conclusion for a band who have endured personal tragedy and childhood trauma, and in just four years cemented their status as the face of British post-punk. Their debut album, Brutalism, burst forth with Talbot raging about rape culture (“Sexual violence doesn’t start and end with rape / It starts in our books and behind our school gates,” he shouts on fan favourite Mother), NHS funding and white privilege. Its follow-up Joy As an Act of Resistance swiped at toxic masculinity via similarly seething anthems and catapulted its creators to No 5 in the UK album chart. Last year’s Ultra Mono, a more diversified flurry of synths, pianos and hummed vocals, did even better, finding its way to No 1.
“That was a quiet week,” Talbot quips over Zoom; rare levity from an otherwise intense speaker. “It didn’t show that we were a great band; it showed we’ve got a great audience. We were embraced by a loving community who’ve built us up to the point where we can get No 1 in a lockdown. It’s not our achievement, it’s theirs.”
If all seems peachy in Idles’ world, pain preceded their ascendancy – and their new album illuminates that starkly. Where previous albums were, lyrically, “broad strokes” discussions of socio-political strife, Crawler is their first foray into true storytelling. “Normally,
I’m more of a painter,” Talbot says. “I illustrate ideas and set them out in front of an audience; this album has more of a narrative.”
Specifically, Crawler tells of the singer’s 15-year struggle with substance abuse. Talbot was born in 1984: the son of an artist father and a mother who worked for the Inland Revenue. His parents split when he was a baby. He remembers, at the age of 10, crying on his knees, imploring his mother to stop drinking. He started using substances at the age of 12, after her non-fatal heart attack. (He refuses to say which substances, because “I want to be able to get on planes.”) Four years later she had a stroke; after his stepfather died, Talbot became his mother’s carer until she too died while Idles were making Brutalism.
The nadir of Talbot’s substance abuse was when he crashed a car while high. “It should have been a turning point,” he says, “but it wasn’t.” It’s that collision that commences Crawler’s narrative. “I can see my spinal cord rip high,” Talbot sings darkly over the creeping synths of opener MTT 420 RR.
“A car crash is a violent image and we’ve always used violence – whether it’s the violence of joy, the violence of love or the violence of grief – as a part of our vocabulary as musicians,” he explains. “It’s important that I make sure people realise the unglamorous, violent nature of the cycle of alcoholism or drug abuse.”
The crash had existential repercussions for Talbot, who questioned the trajectory of his life. So, aptly, second track The Wheel – a return to the swaggering punk at Idles’ core – flashes back to the cycle that began his addictions: the journey from begging his mum to quit substances to using them himself just two years later. “And so it turns, again and again … ” the song repeats.
Despite the personal narrative at the heart of Crawler, it still integrates the political tirades that have defined Idles. The New Sensation is a subversive dance number highlighting the vigorous response music can provoke (“Shake it to the snare and get down to the kick / Shake your tiny tooshie like you don’t give a shit”); despite never mentioning him directly, it’s self-described as a reaction to Rishi Sunak. In October 2020 – in the midst of the pandemic – the chancellor was asked by ITN: “If [professional musicians] can’t earn enough money to live, is your message to them: ‘You’re gonna have to get another job’?” Sunak replied: “I can’t pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were at the beginning of this crisis.”
Even though he’s penned a song about him, Talbot seems oddly dispassionate about the politician. “If he were in front of me, I wouldn’t have a lot to say to Rishi; I’d have a lot of questions,” he says. “The point of turmoil in this country is political and I’m not a politician. It’s not Rishi Sunak I’m here to talk to. He’s smarter than I am. He’d win. It’s not me versus him; it’s us versus them.”
For some, blurred stances such as that can be Idles’ undoing. In February 2019, Sleaford Mods vocalist, Jason Williamson, decried the band’s politics as “cliched, patronising, insulting and mediocre”, while Fat White Family joined in five days later, posting: “The last thing our increasingly puritanical culture needs right now is a bunch of self-neutering middle-class boobs telling us to be nice to immigrants.” Talbot responded in an interview, telling the Observer: “I’m not virtue signalling …
I’m saying: this is what I believe in.” Today, he’s keen to avoid the feuds altogether. “I love everything and I am nothing,” is all he has to say.
Yet, in spite of it all, life is beautiful. In spring 2020, a sober Talbot and his wife had a daughter three years after the couple’s first child was stillborn. As an optimistic 2021 dawned, the singer and his bandmates worked in isolation to make Crawler the most eclectic album possible. It took being cut off from the rest of the world for the band to realise, in Talbot’s words, “we can do whatever we want!
“Moses Sumney, Thom Yorke, Nick Cave: not one of those persons has ever stood still long enough to be classed as something other than who they are. They’re the idea of idiosyncrasy. That’s something we wanted to use Ultra Mono as: an effigy of what we built ourselves as so we can burn it ourselves and move on.”
Following Crawler, Idles will resume their mission, Talbot states, “to be the best live band on the planet”. Ambition isn’t something he lacks. And after 15 years spent crawling to recovery, he is impatient to sprint to the top.