Are Idles a band, or a movement?

In the way that The Clash were just a band, Idles are just a band. Just a band. But not just a band, but a way of being. Unlike many other bands, it feels like Idles are a band that don’t just make noise, but that there is somehow a purpose, a higher calling, and a need to create. To make music. To make sense of this madness that is Brexitland, 2019.

Instead of being a band because Daddy Was In The Police, Idles are a band born of love and necessity. Having existed in various part time forms for at least nine years, and only recently becoming a major, full time touring entity, Idles have come into this world the hard way. From years of working minimum wage job, or being dentists, working shifts, getting up and getting the bus to town five days a week, 48 weeks a year, Idles are a band that have lived the life they sing about, and know it.

Now though, on the back of a colossal sophomore album – “Joy As An Act of Resistance” – the band have managed, somehow to capture in 12 songs the spirit of the age ; the joy, the resistance, the call to action, and the confusion of these times.

The show isn’t a show as such ; there’s no showmanship, but there is a honesty. The band existed too long, and meant too much, and didn’t make enough money for too long, to be anything but a labour of love. Now there’s three shows at the Camden Electric Ballroom, in a row, each of which doesn’t feel like a normal “gig”. It doesn’t feel like just a bunch of people going to see a band on a Friday night. It feels like something happening.

It feels like someone made this infamous bit of graffiti, and made it real. You’re Not Strangers If You Like The Same Band. We’re all friends – people who seem to feel the same way about the world, who perhaps feel a bit lost in a world of madness – united by a common voice that speaks to us and for us, but not to us.

The venue is very crowded. The atmosphere is electric. In fact, there is nothing tonight reminds me of more – in terms of the crowd and the spirit – than Morrissey’s first solo tour in 1991. A very long time ago, when many people were very different. But that sense of tension/release, of cleansing, of finding music that helped make sense of the world.. that is there.

Idles open with “Colossus”. There’s a sense of a coiled snake waiting to pounce. When Joe Talbot sings I was done in by the weekend – the weekend lasted 20 years, there’s that moment of decoding ; the moment where he wasn’t referring to a literal weekend, but the sense of an extended adolescence, that of never quite growing up that sometimes lasts a whole lifetime. Lyrically the songs may seem minimal but they are precise and intone the multiple meanings through repetition. There’s a paused, poignant line – “I am my fathers son / his shadow weighs a ton” and I feel every ounce of that ton : my father was a role model, and he taught me in many ways who not to be. That shadow weighs a ton.

The room goes quiet, and a shouted “1-2!”. And everything explodes. And even though the music itself is abrasive, loud, brutal, it’s a kind of tender brutal. The kind that reminds me of frantic sex with tenderness in the heart of it. In fact that we’re not shouting at each other, but with each other, together in a chant and a refutation, in a joyous celebration of the fact that we are here, we are now, and we are resisting what we are told to think, what we are told to feel, and what we are told to believe. Humans are smarter and more complicated than we are given credit for. There’s a sense of unity in all of this, that all of this energy is going into a common direction.

“Never Fight A Man With A Perm” is next. It’s a silly, and serious song at the same time ; the coiled riff and the tense, claustrophobic lyrics remind me of growing up in cheap, desperate streets in poor suburbs – the threat of violence never more than a minute away, fuelled by the simmering rage that comes from not ever having enough money. I can name pubs that this song is practically the National Anthem for, and you probably can too. If anything, this song for me is the sound of my Eighties Birmingham childhood, and the sound of concrete, leather, and Ford Capris. I know that world still exists – I see it everyday in the headlines. Anyone who think that this is the sound of the something that doesn’t exist anymore needs to step outside the gates and smell the lager.

From the lyrical theme of a drunken night out, the band then slip easily into “Faith In The City”, the sound of the morning after, and perhaps also a job. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but all of the songs sound like articulate fragments of the often boring, hard life we have to live. I’m lefty, I’m soft, I’m minimum wage job… I’M SCUM.

And unless you’re double barrelled, and wearing two monocles, that’s probably what the populist politicians think of you. What they think of us. Potted plants. But we are different. And in the following songs, there’s “Great” (possibly the most immediately vital song refuting small minded Little England), alongside the inclusive, group hug that is “Danny Nedelko”.

The great thing is that almost all of these songs sound like timeless anthems that could have come from any time in history, but also could only have existed now, could only have meant what they mean now. “Danny Nedelko” is not only musically vital, but there’s something wonderful about a broad range of humans of many ages all in a loud room shouting “COMMUNITY!”. We are better than fighting amongst ourselves.

The band also break down barriers off stage : both Lee and Bobo on guitars frequently wander into the crowd, and there’s no sense that the band are on stage performing to us, but a sense that they are perhaps ringleaders or conductors of a room sized orchestra. The rest of the set is equally riotous, equally as passionate, equally vital, a directed, unified shout of resistance. It’s a short, exciting 90 minutes that seems to go in the blink of an eye – over, before it began – and then they are suddenly in the last seconds of “Rottweiler”, the crowd are still bouncing up and down like children full of sugar, singing every word, as the sound turns into feedback, turns into an echo, turns into tinnitus, turns into a memory. It wasn’t just a gig. This was something far better than that – it was a cathartic, joyful celebration of all that is good in humanity in a world that is an often terrible exploration of the worst my species can offer. We all, I think, came out of it feeling more hopeful, better, happier. The best art makes life seem a better place to be.

It’s fitting the last word that came off the stage was a word that sums up the band overall : “UNITY!”

Colossus
Never Fight A Man With A Perm
Mother
Faith In the City
I’m Scum
Great
Queens
Danny Nedelko
Divide & Conquer
1049 Gotho
Love Song
Benzocaine
Samaritans
Television
White Privilege
Where’s My Ice Cream?
All I Want For Christmas Is You
Well Done
Rottweiler