Interview
Interview
Idlewild: “As you get older, you become so much more comfortable with yourself”
Roddy Woomble of Idlewild reflects on the hits and near-misses of indie's most enduring band
“Everyone thought we were going to be this enormous, arena-filling band, but that didn’t happen” Idlewild’s frontman Roddy Woomble says with an air of mild resignation. “I’m not bitter in any way. I understand why the spotlight moves on. We just didn’t connect to a huge audience the way U2 did, or REM did with ‘Losing My Religion’.”
When you consider the quality of songs in Idlewild’s arsenal – songs such as ‘You Held the World In Your Arms’, ‘Love Steals Us From Loneliness’ and ‘American English’, not to mention a raft of critically acclaimed albums – it is hard not to feel a little mystified as to why the stars hadn’t aligned more favourably when it comes to the masses.
“It’s about these connecting songs,” offers Woomble. “You only need a few of them. That’s all it takes. They ripple through and suddenly you’re playing in stadiums. I realised we would never have that. We had lots of good songs, and we have lots of really dedicated fans, but we just didn’t have that song that would crossover. Take these Oasis gigs,” he continues. “It’s the first two records that are selling a million tickets around the world.”
If he sounds fussed in print, in person Woomble strikes you as unburdened by any care about reaching such levels of ubiquity. He’s “very content” with his lot in life these days, creatively fulfilled, and grateful for the fans that have stuck with him and his band. He’s merely fascinated by the way these things work.
We’re speaking late into the evening on the week his band release their first album in six years, the eponymously titled and rather brilliant, Idlewild. It is also the day after guitarist Rod Jones’ wedding. Woomble admits to feeling a little delicate, so appears on Zoom with a glass of water by his side. Having recently become a father for a second time, he says he finds doing interviews easier at night once his daughter has gone to bed (and, presumably, it has the benefit of allowing his hangover to abate on this occasion, too).
To these ears, Idlewild is a distillation of everything that has made this Scottish band such an alluring proposition for thirty-plus years. Across ten tracks, it tugs tastefully at the corners of their history without consigning them to the past, coalescing all their musical leanings and spinning it into something new. The songwriting is sharp. A word that Woomble uses recurringly is “succinct”(“We wanted to express ourselves in this way; for this to be ‘half an hour of Idlewild’,” he explains).
Prior to its recording, the band did something they’ve rarely done in three decades: they listened to their catalogue. “We were thinking about what was good about [this or] that,” Woomble admits, “and we tried to bring a little of that into the new material.”
He is keen to stress that this wasn’t purely an exercise in nostalgia. As much as they wanted the album to be a “celebration” of who Idlewild have been, it’s also a “reflection of who we are now”, as he puts it.
Echoes of the group’s early work can be detected in the catchy, rugged chug of ‘Make It Happen’ and ‘Stay Out of Place’, while Woomble hears shades of The Remote Part in the evocative surge of ‘It’s Not the First Time’ and the band’s more recent material in ‘The Mirror Still’ and ‘End With Sunrise’.
Formed in Edinburgh three decades ago, Idlewild arrived as Britpop’s dying embers flickered, sounding like a firecracker set off in a library. Woomble’s emetic screams mimicked a wracked soul stubbing their toes on the corner of a sofa ad infinitum, and these guttural, Pixies-esque howls added a vitality that juxtaposed sweetly with the band’s more melodic passages.
This was the terrain they followed on 1997 debut single, ‘Queen of the Troubled Teens’ and its follow-up, ‘Chandelier’. So, too, the fan-favourite mini-album Captain. By the time their debut record, Hope Is Important, landed towards the end of ‘98, tracks such as ‘When I Argue I See Shapes’ and ‘A Film For the Future’ were showcasing a sophistication that was already elevating them above the pack.
2000’s 100 Broken Windows saw the group step up another level again. The combination of Woomble’s idiosyncratic lyrics and a batch of hook-heavy, A-grade guitar tunes led to some quarters labelling them the “punk-rock Smiths”. “We got that [tag] quite a lot, especially in American magazines,” reflects the frontman. “That was a big compliment. I love both punk-rock and The Smiths.”
Idlewild possessed a shaggy alt-rock poet all of their own in Woomble. Someone whose words danced intuitively between abstraction and philosophy, like a preternaturally wise, yet inscrutable, Scottish sage. On their second album, American novelist and poet Gertrude Stein (‘Roseability’) sat side by side with a withering critique of postmodernism (‘These Wooden Ideas’).
“I was reading ‘Tender Buttons’ by Gertrude Stein and ‘Teach Yourself Postmodernism’,” he offers, speaking of 100 Broken Windows’ recording sessions. “I remember there was this section in ‘Roseability’ with nothing in it, so I suggested we do some call-and-response thing.” Woomble spontaneously filled the space with the now-indelible line, ‘Gertrude Stein says that’s enough’. The rest, as they say, is Idlewild history.
“It ended up being a really catchy bit that people punch their fists in the air to!” he says fondly. “I love the fact that around that time I was unselfconscious in the way that, if I was reading a book by Gertrude Stein or on postmodernism, I would put it in a song. I wouldn’t really do that now. I would be more guarded.”
Thoughts return to The Smiths. “No one wrote, or writes, lyrics like Morrissey,” he remarks enthusiastically. “Something like ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ is an anthemic song, but it’s so weird when you think about the words. Morrissey’s persona onstage and the way he sang…I can’t think of a better British frontman. Every member of The Smiths brought something indispensable. They’re one of my favourite British bands of all time.”
Idlewild’s commercial apogee would be – and thus far, remain – 2002’s The Remote Part. It was an album that incorporated a smoother sound and expanded the group’s musical vocabulary. This was pursued to greater ends on its somewhat underrated follow-up, 2005’s Warnings/Promises.
It was around this time they had a series of support stints for heritage acts The Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, U2 and REM. The latter, a band for whom their love is well documented. Woomble and co must have revelled in being in their space? “We had a few beers with [guitarist] Peter Buck, and we hung around a wee bit, but bands at that level tend to do their own thing most of the time. [REM bassist] Mike Mills did play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ with us onstage one night, though” he adds, wincing slightly at the memory.
The story goes that Idlewild drummer Colin Newton had to skip the tour due to the impending birth of his son. Their friend, Les Nuby from Alabama, picked up his sticks and filled his spot.
“REM were like, ‘What the hell is a Scottish band doing with a guy from Alabama?’,” Woomble laughs. “They jokingly said that we were going to play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. And it ended up becoming a reality. Mike Mills joined us on piano. The crowd loved it, but I absolutely murdered the song,” he says shaking his head. Me singing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ in front of 20,000 people?! Luckily, it was before people were filming things on their phone all the time!”
It’s not just phone technology that’s changed dramatically during Idlewild’s lifetime. The music industry has gone through massive, sweeping changes. There’s been CDs’ decline, the rise of streaming and the grenade that is social media.
Between 2010 and 2015, Idlewild went on hiatus. When they returned, the cultural shift was felt keenly, and they went insular. The band operated in their “own little universe” from 2015’s Everything Ever Written until now. “Now that we’re signed to V2, we’ve got a PR and a radio plugger: all things we haven’t had for 20 years. We’ve even got songs on the radio! It’s quite weird, but in a nice way. Then again, our motto has always been ‘aim low’!” he quips.
Listening back to their old work prior to making Idlewild, Woomble was struck by the privilege a recorded artist has in being able to listen to their younger self at different stages of life (“It’s a remarkable thing,” he marvels). He also felt a sense of pride hearing all his band’s material. Two favourites emerged.
“100 Broken Windows has a freshness to it. When you put it on, it still feels vibrant,” he remarks. “That’s because it was made by excited 22-year-olds who were pumped that they could make music all the time. It was just an amazing time.
“I’d also pick out Warnings/Promises. We were quite a popular band at that point, signed to a major label. We thought we needed to really use the budget we were given by exploring different kinds of songwriting and not worry if people liked it.
“Those two moments were really important for us, and me, personally.”
It all begs the question: where is Roddy Woomble today? “As you get older, you become so much more comfortable with yourself. I don’t analyse things too much anymore,” he shares.
“Yes, everyone loves getting nice reviews, but I’ve made enough records to have people say horrible things too. When I was younger, I was really sensitive to that, but all that matters to me now is if I feel I’ve done something good and worthwhile, there’s connection between us as a band musically, and the fans are responding to it.”
Ten albums in, Idlewild have managed the unexpected: they’ve recaptured their early magic and paired it to the wisdom of a life lived and a creative life shared. They have always had a knack for combining grace and chaos like few others. It may be a little too early to tell, but the signs are pointing toward the present having all the qualities for a third important moment, if not chapter, in the Idlewild story.
Photo by Andrew Benge/Redferns
