IDOLS FOR IDLES

IDOLS FOR IDLES

Shopping for the records that created the mosaic of TANGK

Fred Pessaro

Funkadelic playsets. A rare Cramps flyer. An oversize bus-shelter Hüsker Dü poster. These are the sorts of things that appear in every record store around the world, but what separates the good from the great is the excellent curation and stock.

Go into any record store and everyone knows the expensive shit is on the wall or behind the register or in that special crate on the checkout counter. So as CREEM walked through the incredible Academy Records Annex in Brooklyn, waiting for the guys in IDLES to pick out LPs that influenced their recent banger TANGK, we wholly and honestly expected a stack of whopper price tags considering the wildly eclectic nature of their music.

Instead, as CREEM sat down with each member of the band, we got varying styles with similarly variant price tags featuring names from several different periods in music. Proof positive that eclectic listening habits lead to eclectic music. So what did each of the IDLES guys choose, and why? Head below for a full discussion on it all, and what little they do agree to listen to together.

LEE KIERNAN, guitar

Dire Straits, Love Over Gold

So Dire Straits, huh?

Dire Straits is one of the bands that have influenced me my entire life, probably forever. When it comes to writing around an album, I don’t listen to albums like everyone else does. It saturates me so much to the point that when I listen to my modern albums, all I want to do is make their songs. So when it comes to around that time period, I listen to all my favorite old albums. This album, Love Over Gold, by Dire Straits has been one of my favorite albums for my entire life.

Wow. How did you come to it? I came to Dire Straits through my dad.

Well, that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t. My dad listened to Phil Collins, Paul McCartney and Wings, and the Beatles. So if we’d gone on holiday when we were younger, that’s always what was on. And my mom would listen to Motown, so we’d have Diana Ross and the Supremes always on at home. But yeah, I think Dire Straits just happened to me—I heard it and I got obsessed. One of the first times we were in New York, we did a radio session and I played this amp called a Peavey Deuce. And the first thing I did was turn my nose up. But then I played on it and I was absolutely blown away. It’s one of the most incredible amps I’ve ever heard in my life. So then I actually did some research on the amp, and it is actually the amp of Dire Straits.

So actually, for this album, I searched high and low for the exact amp that I used in New York, the exact model. And I finally found it. And when we were writing, that’s what I used primarily throughout the whole process.

What do you like about it?

It’s the clean tone, which is Dire Straits. The lowend response on it is incredible. Throughout the history of our albums we play in a higher register, but for some reason, as we went on, me and Bowen seem to just keep falling down the register bill until we’re probably just going to the sub-octave for the next one. [Laughs]

It sounds really good down there. So that’s why I used it. I mean, other than that, this album, the first two tracks are “Telegraph Road’’ and “Private Investigations”—I have spent years in our live shows sneaking the solos from those two songs into our set.

This album is a bit more emotive, and I am notoriously a guy all about my feelings rather than thinking—if I think, I overthink, then everything becomes overthought. And I feel a lot. I didn’t know how to use it before, but I think it’s actually my tool for what I love or what I have to feel something in order to be on board with it. It has to hit me. Otherwise, I struggle and I have no thoughts.

This album has always made me feel safe or loved. Or if I’m having a bad day, this is what goes on. So we can be spending days writing and it can come to arguments. It can come to just a higher day trying to figure things out. And then when I go home I can put this on and be like, it’s all good. Everything’s all right.

What’s really interesting to me is that you described Dire Straits as emotive, but as a vocalist, Mark Knopfler is the most monotone singer that I can think of.

As a singer, he’s not emotive—not at all! But that’s the point. So he’s a drone, but his guitar is his emotion. It’s almost like with his vocal, he’s setting a baseline and then bounces off it. God, even it’s not on this record, but I mean, both those two songs I just talked about are all about the emotion of the music, not what he’s saying. He’s a talk singer. So the music has to do the job.

ADAM DEVONSHIRE, bass

Pixies, Surfer Rosa

For the record, this was one of the bands that Joe had repeatedly referenced, which is kind of weird in the record that we’ve made because we sounded like the Pixies probably more than on any other record that we’ve made, but not TANGK. But this is one of the references, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa. You can hear it in the chorus of “Dancer.” Joe was trying to write a kind of Pixies-esque melody for the chorus. So that was definitely in our mindset. They’re just an incredible band.

When I was younger, I never had an older brother or sister, and my mom wasn’t really into cool music or anything. I used to read a lot of the NME and Melody Maker and stuff like that when I was growing up. They were just one of the bands that all the other bands would reference and just be like, oh, we are influenced by the Pixies. I bought Surfer Rosa and Doolittle and just instantly fell in love. They’re an incredible band.

I remember I bought a day ticket just to go to see them at Reading, and I think I took so many ecstasy pills that I was so high that I missed them. I was just off my face for the entirety of the set. But I kind of came back around for “Where Is My Mind,” ironically. That’s about the first time I remember watching them live. Classic band.

Later on, we did a show with Frank Black in Cardiff, was it? Yeah. Think we were all a bit too nervous to go and meet him, to be honest.

JON BEAVIS, drums

Broadcast, Tender Buttons Lee Moses, How Much Longer Must I Wait? Singles & Rarities, 1965-1972

Broadcast’s Tender Buttons was one. Whenever I go into the new album cycle, it’s about not listening to loads of music, otherwise I’m just going to end up replicating that. Broadcast was put towards me either by Joe or Bowen. It definitely helped me with TANGK because it was an album where there were a lot of synths being used and intricate guitar parts and loads of space. So for us, that was a new evolution of our band.

But then I’ve also got Al Green. So I remember the first practice when Joe had an idea for Roy and he was like, “You’re going to love this one—I want you to play, like, a funk soul beat." That’s my background. So that was a lot of fun.

I feel like everyone of a certain age comes to Al Green because of Pulp Fiction and “Let’s Stay Together” or maybe even Cypress Hill and “Hits From the Bong."

I mean, I can’t remember when I first heard it, but I was into jazz and funk and all this kind of stuff before I joined these guys. I was a jazz and funk drummer. And it was nice to try to explore the kind of style of drummer that I was with these guys and watch some music with them.

What’s the last one? Lee Moses?

Lee Moses, yeah. I was looking for Bill Withers or anything that is of similar ilk—that kind of tight, really subtle drum beats that are so recognizable.

MARK BOWEN, guitar

Pauline Oliveros, The Well & the Gentle Aphex Twin,.../ Care Because You Do

So this is Pauline Oliveros, who is—I guess you would call her an avant-garde composer. She’s an accordion player and responsible for this concept of deep listening. It’s also the name of a band that she plays with, the Deep Listening Band, and it’s a spontaneous kind of music where everyone’s listening to what each other is playing and then reacting. That had a big impact on me on this album because what I wanted was more kind of harmonic information and more melodic information. We needed to push Joe to sing more...

Time out. What is the difference between deep listening and improv as a concept?

I feel like improv is often a very selfish act. As a musician, you’re reacting to what’s around you with your own kind of goal. Deep listening for me is more about a service to what is going on. It’s all about aligning with the initial intention and then responding with that. I feel like improv does that as well—there’s a lot of rules. Often you’re sticking to the same time signature, things like that, whereas you can hear something in what someone else is doing and hear it differently. So that was a big thing for me on this album—more of that harmonic information. It’s just a more interesting way of approach because it doesn’t mean that everything has to line up. There are different time signatures playing at the same time and loops are caught wrong, and you’re hearing them converge in different places. And then there’s also lots of different chords created by instruments kind of colliding at different points.

Our previous albums, we’d written all the stuff we rehearsed within an inch of our lives, and we’d just play the tracks three times and we wouldn’t give it any more time. It was like, that’s it, that was the recording process. This time was much different.

Next, we have this bona fide classic here... Aphex Twin is a big inspiration. It’s that thing about that line between music that you can enjoy and music that is an experimentation, where you have fun as the creator. And I think that he has so much fun with his listeners because he kind of taunts them by having stuff that is vaguely unlistenable sometimes. And then especially on this album, “The Waxen Pith" is stunningly beautiful, and then “Wax the Nip"— both anagrams of Aphex Twin— is experimental and plays with rhythms. Yeah, I love it. You can immediately tell you’re listening to an Aphex Twin song, and he can release anything and people will have a hunger to absorb it.

JOE TALBOT, vocals

Marlon Williams, Make Way for Love

Make Way for Love by Marlon Williams is a record that I was listening to a lot. My friend Stu put me onto him when I stayed at his house, and it blew me away. He’s got a stunning voice, kind of a Jeff Buckley-esque kind of beautiful voice. And I just think his songwriting is great. He did a track with Aldous Harding and they did a duet and it’s mind-blowing.

I made a huge playlist for my daughter for bedtime, and it’s all mellow music; it’s a huge part of my vernacular, something that I’m really into. It’s something I realized that I’m not vocal about in interviews and shit because it’s not in the music, but it’s a huge part of my personality. I’m half introvert, half extrovert. It’s the way I am in my parenting. I wanted to start portraying that in music because I think it’s a huge facet of love and everything that I’m about.

Is there a unifying record between all of you guys?

JB: We're all pretty different. BOLUS + Arrows [by the Walkmen] is a good one for everyone—the moment I think of that record, I think of us all in the van, in the Black Forest? That’s a great record. We are all so different in music taste. This is why it works.

What about more basic stuff? Black Sabbath, the Stones, Thin Lizzy...

MB: It’s too hard, man. Some of us like the Stones, I can say definitely that only some of us like Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy. We really are sort of all so, so different. If we agree on anything, it might be newer stuff like Protomartyr.... We can all agree on them. I think that the thing is we all come from very, very different backgrounds, music, and I think that that is one of our strong points is that we kind of just collide over new stuff. Maybe Thee Oh Sees or Protomartyr...

JT: Yeah. And we like celebrating our differences. And that’s what Bristol’s all about, celebrating difference. That’s why trip-hop happened. It was a sound clash of different cultures just colliding in a beautiful way and having these parties and building sound systems around people, celebrating each other’s differences. So I think if it was going to be a record that got us all together, it would have to be something different.

Maybe Gilla Band? The record that we all connected on was Holding Hands With Jamie, and there’s just bands every now and again that come about and transform the landscape of music. And I think Gilla Band, they’re a band’s band because every band is suddenly inspired by what they did—so idiosyncratic and you can see where they come from, that techno trance background in Dublin and shit. And they’ve just come through and made some original sound that everyone’s inspired by.

Clearly your influences are all over the place. What do you think it is that draws you together as a band?

JT: It’s love, 100 percent. Okay. It’s love. That’s the only reason we’re still together, because love, all the facets of love is what keeps us. Patience, honesty, commitment, grace, kindness. I’ve been a real piece of work sometimes, and they carry me through it. They help me through it. And then that’s what’s on the records is us maintaining and flourishing. And it feels like that—we got through it, and documenting that means we’ve just got these mirrors to hold up and build on and transgress. Every album is just going to be different and better because it’s our moment, whatever was before isn’t important anymore. We play it live and we love it, but what we’re making is always going to be the best album for us because we’re in it and we’re in it for each other.