Thursday, March 17, 2022

Joe Talbot of IDLES - Get Mad and Be Kind!

 

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)

Meet IDLES, Punk's Most Savage Good Boys (vice.com)

1 comment:

  1. 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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