Chaotic, exhausting, emotionally overwhelming: no band seems more emblematic of our malfunctioning times than Idles. The Bristol-based rabble-rousers have attracted a fiercely loyal fanbase, and a Mercury nomination for their 2018 second album Joy as an Act of Resistance, thanks to scuzzy but scythe-sharp songs that fuse aggression with compassion. The five-piece may unashamedly wear their hearts on their sleeves but their songs give the sense the band would instantly roll them up to batter anyone threatening the NHS.
This short winter tour is nominally in support of A Beautiful Thing, their live album recorded at Le Bataclan in Paris last year. But it also seems like an opportunity for a communal, cathartic release after a punishing year. “Is everyone registered to vote?” shouts singer Joe Talbot, and the response is the sort of bloodcurdling chorus of avid yowls you might expect at an Iron Maiden gig.
Talbot, with the remnants of a hot-pink dye job in his hair, crackles with the aggro energy that usually precedes a scuffle in a pub car park. As the doom-laden Colossus builds to its thrashy climax, he stomps across the stage. But Talbot can be playful, too. He brings a Pythonesque silly walk to the clamorous Never Fight a Man With a Perm and during the stadium-chant skiffle of I’m Scum – the “dirty, rotten, filthy scum” chorus echoed back by the throng – he crams his mic into his mouth to perform a hands-free mini burlesque.
It is a sweaty, snotty, supercharged experience. Other band members get in on the performative action, too, with guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan periodically launching themselves on crowdsurfing excursions, reclining bed-of-nails-style on an eager forest of arms. Amid the bedlam, they also debut a new song – suggesting a third Idles album will arrive in 2020 – that swaps their usual ramshackle deportment for something that sounds more like tight funk.
After Talbot’s heartfelt rendition of the blackly comic Love Song, bassist Adam Devonshire and drummer Jon Beavis keep the beat going so their band-mates can bawl some other soppy classics on top. Bowen manages a few lines from Enrique Iglesias’s Hero. Talbot throws in crooning fragments of Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red, before leading the crowd in a surprisingly lusty version of Linger by the Cranberries. Later, he instigates more mass singalongs to Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You and even Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. (“Now that is pop,” he says, emphatically.)
This sporadic karaoke adds a loosey-goosey Christmas party feel to their otherwise headlong 100-minute set. After augmenting their guitar lineup with press-ganged members of the Hull band Life, Idles top it off with Rottweiler, their snarling song denouncing the rightwing press. For the first gig of a tour, it is a towering performance. But the fact that their hometown show in Bristol falls on the election date of 12 December suggests the closing night will be something exceptional too.
• At the Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow, on 3 December (sold-out). Then touring the UK until 31 December.
