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Idlewild.
From their initial quasi-success with the track Roseability
a few years ago, Idlewild came to prominence with their last
album, 'The Remote Part', featuring a handful of big, stadium
rock tracks such as You Held The World In Your Arms and
The Modern Way Of Letting Go. This album catapulted them
to the big stage, touring across Britain with Coldplay just
after the release of 'A Rush Of Blood To The Head', playing
sold out stadia. Then they hopped on a plane, came down to our
side of the planet, and played to less than two hundred people
at the Enigma Bar.
"It felt amazing, actually," declares guitarist Rod Jones. "We'd been playing to sheds full of people and although some people were aware of our band and liked maybe one or two songs, it can be quite soul-destroying to play night in night out to a shed full of people who don't want to see you. It happens in a lot of support tours, to be honest: you know you'll make probably a bunch of fans by the end of it, but it can be a lot more gratifying to play a club of 200 people who are there to see you rather than 20,000 people who are yawning."
It was one of the best shows I've ever seen in my life. But after that, Idlewild went quiet - very quiet.
"We toured that record longer than any record we'd done before, but also we were basically putting a new band together. Obviously Gavin [Fox] joined and Allan [Stewart] became a full member, so when we started writing the record we spent a lot of time getting used to writing together, working out what everybody's role was and how we were going to work together."
Judging by the results on their new album, 'Warnings/Promises', it seems to have worked out perfectly.
"Well, we're a lot happier, for a start. As well as being happier, you've got five people in a band who all have opinions and all have ideas and want to be involved, [so] it's a much better situation. At the same time, it took a long time to work out how to use that situation the best, because you do have five people who disagree with each other all the time, so it took four of five months of just writing songs and playing together to realise, you know, how to do it. So we did write an entire record of songs that could have been on the last album while we were feeling our way."
That's funny - didn't they do that exact same thing in the making of 'The Remote Part'?
"It happens with every record, to be honest," he sighs. "It just happened a bit slower this time. We were just getting to know the new band that we were. We wrote a bunch of songs, got impatient, and then we went and recorded them straight away. Then we realised that maybe they weren't ready, or maybe we weren't ready, and we did that again on this record; and we've done it on every record. I think we're impatient people, you write a bunch of songs and at the time you're happy with them, and you think, 'I don't want to sit around with these songs,' so we do that. And I think although it can be frustrating for everybody else involved, and I'm sure the label would rather we didn't waste time in the studio, it's kind of a process of trial and error that seems to work in our band. It seems that we have to do that to work out what we're doing!"
Finally, Jones lets me in on the other side of Idlewild, a side which we may see more of in the near future.
"We ended up doing a tour in Britain to start this record, just acoustically. I think that surprised a lot of people. We didn't just play the songs on acoustic guitars, we kind of worked them out as folk songs. And we've kinda almost been accepted into the folk fold in Britain, we're playing Cambridge folk festival in the summer. It surprised people that we can actually do that. If we don't feel like being a loud rock band, we can pick up acoustic guitars and play soft folk songs for an hour. It's a real asset to the band that we can do that, I think."
Ben Revi
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Idlewild play at Fowlers Live on Sun 29 May with Special Patrol.
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