JOE
TALBOT OF IDLES
The smoke of music with the sound of a combustion machine and the taste of burnt tires is blown from the mouth of a theatre into hundreds of faces below. It’s a scene like an uncorked tube of some caustic cocktail held in the crowd’s hands above their own heads. The source of it – held in the theatre’s teeth – is Joe Talbot. He breathes in the noise folded around his band IDLES to SCREAM OUT I’D DIE FOR THE CAUSE – WHAT ELSE COULD YOUR LUNGS BE FOR. You could find this a bit confrontational if not flat out combative and dreadful. There are a lot of doubts. What’s this racket? What’s the cause? Who wants to die for it? I want to demonstrate that this creative and these anxieties are not meant to cause fear or to threaten but instead to demand and celebrate love for the entire human.
Joe
Talbot – a Welshman born in 1984 – has crafted five studio albums and taken
several international tours since the 2009 formation of IDLES in Bristol as
their main creative machine. He claims much like the earliest ZBOYS that the
first half of their career was uncreative and idle: "It took us a long time to get
productive because we didn't know what the fuck we were whatsoever, we were
fucking awful for a long time." It was a time of creative failure and lack of
direction. He found a form of external motivation in the deaths of two loved
ones of whom he was a caretaker. The first fruitful album – Brutalism –
for the band was fueled with the death of Joe’s mother 2015. The second – Joy
as an Act of Resistance – came after the death of his newborn in 2017. The two
most recent albums – 2020 and 2021 – are without bereavement and includes friends
from within the scene. This could mean Joe has found a more intrinsic motivation
and new articulative morals – causes – that reach from the selflove of Television
and I’m Scum to the demand for basics human dues in Ne Touche Pas
Moi. These four most recent albums –
released in twos from 2016 to 2021 – have earned them a five-out-of-thirteen
award record - two for live acts and one for best record and even one for best music
video. Joe has also taken on other mediums. These include an art exhibit of his
own work to escort the release of Joy as an Act of Resistance and an article of intimate
thanks for the National Health Service in Crack. It’s hard to describe
how hard both the music and morals are in such a short format. There are nuances
and entire architectures of value that I haven’t touched on. Joe Talbot tackles
– and I mean tackles – the vacant foundations of those who resist the
movement toward what’s next. I could not endorse the more and ask that the reader
have a listen or two – whether a observation or a dance or a workout there’s
love here. I’m serious.
SOURCES
https://open.spotify.com/artist/75mafsNqNE1WSEVxIKuY5C?si=1v_0kyYxSKKOgofzNgdu4A
Idles
review – shout their name from the rooftops | Indie | The Guardian
Brute
Force: The Contrary World Of IDLES | Features | Clash Magazine (clashmusic.com)
The Quietus |
Features | Escape Velocity | Stendhal Syndrome: Idles Interviewed
A
Love Letter to the NHS, by IDLES' Joe Talbot (crackmagazine.net)
I have listened to IDLES for a while now and I had no idea about the failures they went through early in their career and the deep loss that Joe went through and used to inform his creativity before reading this post. I also really connected to the point you made about how, while music may come across as abrasive, it can really be understood not only along the lines of loving yourself but also in connection to caring for our fellow human beings through the causes that Joe advocates for both within and outside of the music itself.
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