When you get to a certain age, things begin to change. Your body, your mind, your tastes for all sorts of things. You discover that sprouts aren’t the food of the devil. That you can’t have 8 pints of beer and be fine in the morning. That you can’t eat and drink whatever you like and remain svelte and lean without joining the gym or running a few miles every day, and that, actually staying in on a Saturday night, with the cat on your lap, listening to the Blind Faith album is actually one of the most enjoyable things you can imagine.
When you are in your late teens and early twenties, you like to go out, you like things loud and brash, and colourful and new. As you get older, you slow down, become introspective, discover the quieter things in life, settle down and buy lots of brown and beige clothes.
I can remember when Idlewild appeared on the pages of NME and Melody Maker in the late 90’s. ‘Film for the Future’ was the first thing I heard. It was exciting, loud, thrashy, angry and the album it appears on, “Hope is Important”, was the same. I discovered the mini-LP “Captain” and that was even more urgent and furious. Possibly a bit too furious. The dark, grainy footage of gigs that their music videos consisted of looked like a riot, and not in a good way. Well maybe a good way, but that would depend on your point of view about riots. I didn’t mind a mosh pit but the crowd surfers did become irritating and the circle pits where kids beat the crap out of each other were ridiculous.
This week Idlewild released “Everything Ever Written”. 20 years since Roddy, Colin and Rob first got together and made a racket in Edinburgh, the in between has changed them, almost unrecognisably. Roddy used to scream down the microphone, now his careful, Scottish lilt binds the considered, accompaniment that once was the thunderous roar of punk guitars and bass.
The album still has its moments, opener ‘Collect Yourself’ rolls in on a faded, scuzzy guitar arpeggio, drifts into feedback and then a massive blast of guitar and bass smacks you in the face as the song kicks into a riff of bagpipe sounding guitar. Generally though, the folk music that Roddy has embraced since their hiatus in 2009 influences everything, with the addition of instrumentalists playing bass hooks and Hammond organ that lifts this record to a new level.
In the same period, I have changed. Idlewild opened a number of doors for me, and punk kicked the hinges off. From your usual American bands like Green Day, Offspring to more obscure stuff like The Vandals, NOFX and Me, First and the Gimme Gimmes and even British punk like Snuff, I even dipped a toe into Nu and old Metal, like Tool, Rage against the Machine, Perfect Circle and Limp Bizkit (in fairness, Significant Other is actually pretty good). Those records have been relegated to a box that is rarely opened. The mellowing effect of age has seen the tides change and I’m far more partial to the folk scene Roddy has immersed himself in. Acoustic guitar and piano features far more than they did back in my college and Uni days and the same can be said for Idlewild.
If you bought the new record through the Pledge Music site, you will have received a live album of a gig they did as part of their acoustic tour of the Highlands last year. All harmony and string soaked interpretations of their hits encompassing ‘Little Discourage’ and ‘The Quiet Crown’ through ‘You held the world in you arms’ and ‘American English’ to cuts from the new record in ‘Every Little means Trust’, ‘So many things to decide’ and ‘Nothing I can do about it’, it feels like you are being taken on a journey of the past 17 years but in a retrospective vision of that time clothed in the modern day style. It’s Idlewild today looking back at the Idlewild of yesterday.
If anything, it’s better this way. The 17 to 21 year old me might disagree with the 33 year old typing this, but this morning, this older and chubbier me followed this live recording with the latest Beck and Laura Marling. The younger me may well have put Terrorvision or Symposium on his Walkman. Although I have both of these bands on my Ipod still.
As I’ve changed, so have Idlewild. This album perfectly encapsulates the echo of the those early releases, keeps the anthemic, epic sprawling rock of ‘The Remote Part’ and arrives in the present with the new band members and new Idlewild. They are still fond of a distortion pedal, where the aforementioned album opener hits you like a tonne of bricks, they have 'Another Planet' which harks back to the good old days of writing a perfect 3 minute pop song like they used to. However, they have created a patchwork of instruments and influences across the four sides of vinyl I'm listening to, there's the organ, strings, brass, piano and apparently a filing cabinet on "Like a Clown".
There is some sublime song writing on this record, the break has reinvigorated the band and the addition of Andrew Mitchell and Luciano Rossi has given them a new dynamic.
In a recent interview, they said that the name was perfectly vague and meaningless to meet the tradition of Idlewild. If it is unintended then it serendipitous. This is Idlewild in a nut shell. Everything they’ve ever written.
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