Idles guitarist Mark Bowen is walking across the venue’s ceiling. Held aloft by the crowd, the topless musician turns himself partly upside down to take advantage of the Academy’s low-hanging architecture.
This is not behaviour you would expect from a dentist. By night, though, the NHS’s mutton-chopped Bowen is often to be found wearing only his pants, one of two prancing guitarists in a rowdy, shouty outfit playing the final night of a sold-out UK tour. (“For the last fucking time, we’re not a punk band,” Idles’ singer Joe Talbot claimed at a recent gig in Manchester.)
Earlier this year, the Bristol outfit’s independently released second album charted at No 5; it has now sold more than 25,000 copies, according to the label – an exciting amount for a furious record about Brexit and loving yourself. Earlier this month, Idles won Q’s best breakthrough act – an award they split with Goat Girl, because this year’s field was of such high quality. The band are off to Europe next and to Australia in January, where venues are being upgraded to satisfy demand. You suspect every night on an Idles tour is a messy celebration – not for nothing is their second album named Joy As An Act of Resistance – but somehow, the normal rules banning crowd-surfing are suspended tonight. Everyone goes a little nuts.
Within moments of the deathwatch beetle percussion and end-of-days bassline that begins Colossus, the place is a sauna. The low ceiling helps, of course, but Idles also know how to create an atmosphere: hellish red lamps, searchlights and the way Colossus builds and builds owe something to the menace of old post-hardcore bands such as the Jesus Lizard or Swans, the song pivoting into a raucous punkoid thrash. Frontman Talbot might disavow the punk label, but the band’s higher gear certainly sends beer arcing upwards and creates a vortex in the centre of the room. And what does the band’s bug-eyed, bearded lead growler do with the tumble dryer of testosterone churning before him? He lectures it about not touching anyone without their consent. “I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” he mutters darkly.
On one level, Idles are an olly-olly-olly affair: a direct band with a lot of route-one music that climaxes in massed shouted choruses. For all the gruff machismo of their transmission, though, all human life is in their songs: frustration and hard-won self-knowledge and frailty and grief and love. Take Danny Nedelko, another song off Joy. Delivered as a terrace chant – “Danny Nedel-koh-oh!” – it is, notionally, about Talbot’s friend who happens to play in the support band Heavy Lungs, rather than right-back for Bristol Rovers.
Nedelko runs on stage from the wings. “My blood brother is an immigrant,” howls Talbot, crushing Nedelko in a man-hug. The song, meanwhile, goes on to detail a number of Talbot’s other blood brothers: “a Nigerian mother of three”, “Malala”, “a Polish butcher” and “Mo Farah”. It’s a rallying cry for community, against those who would whip up hate and fear. The band played it on Later… With Jools Holland last month, a landmark performance that saw guitarist Bowen lie across Holland’s piano before kicking the host off the ivories for a tinkle, and exposed Idles’ right-side-of-history ramalama to a much wider audience. The most obvious fellow travellers with Idles are Sleaford Mods – to the point where Talbot actually shouts, “I’m a Sleaford Mod!” during I’m Scum – but there is a hollering sense of common purpose to Idles’ songs that provides comfort, where Sleaford Mods’ scabrous intelligence supplies less.
Tonight, we get most of Joy and choice cuts of Idles’ backstory. Born in Exeter (where “nothing ever happens, over and over again”), Talbot has lived a few lifetimes in his 33 years: he started out from humble beginnings, as I’m Scum declares: “Council house and violent, sleeping under sirens.” He had repeated surgery for a club foot; Catholicism figured, as it does with the Hold Steady, another punk-derived band with an emphasis on community.
Circular riffs introduce the heroically sludgy, low-slung Divide and Conquer, off the band’s debut, Brutalism (2017), written in the wake of Talbot’s mother’s death; her ashes ended up in a number of copies of the album. When Talbot was 16, Christine had a stroke and – an only child – he became her primary carer when his stepfather died a couple of years later. As Talbot tells it, he didn’t always do the greatest of jobs looking after her, but NHS cuts contributed to her death.
“A loved one perished at the hand of the baron-hearted right,” snarls Talbot. You hear it “barren-hearted”, but you suspect Talbot had robber barons in mind too when he spelled it that way. We’re in Oxford, alma mater of the Tory elite, where lines such as “A heathen/ From Eton/ With a bag of Michael Keaton,” are particularly apposite (Keaton starred in a 1988 film about cocaine addiction called Clean and Sober).
Talbot was once an even angrier person, which is, you suspect, really just a hurting person in a male body. The song Samaritans lists a number of pat phrases used to stifle male emotion. “Socks up/ Don’t cry/ Drink up/ Don’t whine,” glowers Talbot, before ending the song with one of the band’s occasional pop culture references. “I kissed a boy and I liked it!” he hollers. Katy Perry isn’t the only Easter egg; Danny Nedelko contains a tiny aside Pavement fans might recognise as a nod to their song Stereo.
As though Talbot hadn’t been through enough, he and his partner lost their baby as Joy As An Act of Resistance was being made, unleashing yet more anguish. Talbot mentions his daughter in the intro to Television; Brutalism’s Mother, meanwhile, pays tribute to his own mother’s long working hours, and nods to Margaret Atwood.
The end comes with the band’s two guitarists trying to outdo each other with feedback. But the gig climaxes in an act of communion a few songs previously, when a dozen people clamber up on stage to dance and Heavy Lungs rush on to throw roses into the crowd. Prowling the stage, hitting himself with his mic, Talbot comes across as an aggro merchant – it’s one of his “masks of masculinity” – but he is a geyser of emotion, much of it positive. He tells the crowd if they’re headed for the merch stall, to buy Heavy Lungs T-shirts, not Idles ones. Every song is dedicated either to a specific person, or to the backroom staff who keep the tour going. The band’s Twitter feed features an end-of-tour haiku. “Last show in UK/ To everyone who has come/ Want to hug you all,” it goes. There is succour here in Idles’ sweat lodge.
