Idles’ Joe Talbot and Mark Bowen on bringing nuance to the mosh pit

“I’ve been sober for two years,” says Joe Talbot, a man of many tattoos and an unwavering intensity. Then he corrects himself. “Well, I’m not sober now.” Then he corrects himself again; at this precise moment he is drinking mineral water in an audiophile bar. “I’m not heavily into anything, I’m just occasionally having a beer now, but I don’t think I’m going to be sober again. Unless, fingers crossed, I have to.”

Talbot’s sobriety or otherwise is a fairly central matter for Idles, the rock band in which he is the singer. Partly because, he accepts, his addictions can make him behave monstrously to his bandmates — “I’ve been a real piece of shit to a lot of people over the last 20 years”. And partly because they are the thread running through Idles’ new album, Crawler, and have been present on their previous three albums, lurking in the background of their raging songs.

Those records saw the British band rise from the DIY scene — a movement associated with underground punk, although they insist they have never been a punk-rock band — to become one of the breakthrough acts of recent years, an unlikely state of affairs for a band who can sometimes feel like they are furiously pummelling you around the head, musically and lyrically.

Crawler is different, though. It has a subtlety its predecessors eschewed; while you are unlikely to mistake it for, say, Joni Mitchell — it’s still a pretty ferocious record — it is a much more unsettled and unsettling affair, more concerned with looking up than charging head-down into the mosh pit.

This time, Idles are concerned with changing textures and tones: “MTT 420 RR” is anxious, foreboding post-punk; “Progress” sounds as though it was crumbling even as it was being recorded; “The Wheel” is built on a rockabilly rhythm. It’s all recognisably Idles — there are still songs that churn intensely around Bowen and Lee Kiernan’s minimal yet huge riffs — but a more varied, less single-minded Idles. It even has a bona fide soul song, “The Beachland Ballroom”, albeit one in which you can again hear Talbot’s addictions fighting him: “If you see me down on my knees, please do not think that I’m praying,” he sings.

Although Talbot is the singer, this is the first Idles album on which he actually sings — previously he has roared and shouted and screamed — which brings in light and shade where there was none before. Given that Idles have sometimes been criticised for lacking nuance — it being hard to achieve when lyrics are being barked at the audience — it seems remarkable he had not done so before.

“You’re the first person to ask why I didn’t sing before,” Talbot says. “I don’t know why.”

“I know I would have stopped you before, because of the identity of the band,” says Mark Bowen, one of Idles’ two guitarists and their other main songwriter (he is also a former NHS prison dentist). “I knew Joe was strongest in that barking role. What we were trying to do with the blunt instrumentation is that everything about it was barking” — he means ferocious, not crazy — “and I wanted him to fit in with it as well.”

It has come as a relief to Talbot to be a little more subtle. “I wasn’t allowing people to hear the nuance. I wasn’t allowing myself to hear the nuance,” he observes. “The whole point of this album was that I was just reflecting on the last 15 years of recovery spirals, and instead of making myself feel shame for all these mistakes, just looking at the whole journey and where I’ve got to with patience and kindness.”

We were distilling Idles down into this zenith form. Now we almost see it as a caricature of the band

Without the pandemic, perhaps, Idles would not have been able to take their musical step sideways. Talbot and Bowen explain how they felt they had exhausted the original idea for the band with last year’s UItra Mono album. “We were distilling Idles down into this zenith form,” says Bowen. “Now we almost see it as a caricature of the band.”

With the group scattered by lockdowns, Talbot and Bowen could develop songs for Crawler that might otherwise have been rejected early on. Without the 250-show touring cycle that would normally have followed the release of Ultra Mono, they were able to reassess why Idles existed. “It helped us deal with some home truths . . . ” says Bowen. Ultra Mono, he says, showed them how important it was “never to repeat ourselves”.

Hanging over all this, of course, is Talbot. Last year, before Ultra Mono was released, Bowen told me that had Talbot just been his friend, they would no longer be friends. Had Talbot just been his bandmate, they would no longer be bandmates. The two things provided just enough emotional cement to hold them together. Since then, Talbot says fatherhood has calmed him and he has been living a better, healthier, more considered life. There has been therapy, exercise, all the things you’re meant to do.

“But he’s definitely not less volatile,” Bowen says. “He’s never going to be.”

‘Crawler’ is released by Partisan on November 12

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