"We've never really fitted in..." - Roddy Woomble
"A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape." - Mark Twain
Roddy Woomble, vocals; Rod Jones, guitar; Colin Newton, drums; Allan Stewart , guitar and Gareth Russell, bass.
When the coke-shrivelled testicles of Brit-pop were still in full-swing, Idlewild were dropping out of art school & ingesting Fugazi, Superchunk & all those small bands on American indierock labels. A few gigs, a few 7” singles & then in 1998 they released their 'Captain' mini album via the Deceptive label (home to Elastica) before signing to Food Records (home to Blur). Then, when every new British band from Coldplay to Badly Drawn Boy trotted around with an acoustic guitar, they delivered their debut full-length of erratic punk rock, 'Hope Is Important'. 2000 saw the release of "100 Broken Windows" & just when it seemed like their time to crossover with "The Remote Part" in 2002, the yanks with their bloated Nu Metal and skinny-jeaned New York cool hijacked the agenda & Idlewild were lost at sea making melodic rock with Scottish accents. Then, when rock-with regional accents (Arctic Monkeys, Lily, Nash, et al.) was all the rage, their front man moved to New York and took time out to make traditional folk albums ('My Secret Is My Silence', 'Ballad of the Books' and 'Before the Ruin') -which maybe is but probably isn't quite as Great Jones Street as it sounds. In the years since their inception, Idlewild may never have been the fashionable flash in the pan people wanted them to be but then, who wants to 'fit in' anyway? Unlike most modern bands they've been able to develop into the tamed beast that purrs like James Dean's Harley. They’ve toured & toured, found fans, picked up gold and silver sales discs, scored top 10 singles, released a Best Of and a B-Sides collection, not to mention finding themselves atop various year-end lists either of side of Atlantic, across Europe, in Japan and pretty much everywhere else in the known universe (approx.).
Meanwhile, front man, Roddy Woomble, moved from New York to the Isle of Mull & spent time writing a regular column for a hill-walking & backpacking magazine. It might not sound like a perfect storm but put it altogether & you have a great British rock band, in a very interesting place during these peculiar times. 2005 saw the release of "Warnings/Promise" followed by ‘Make Another World’ via the Sequel imprint of Sanctuary & in 2009, whilst digital divas and earnest bearded American men in plaid shirts were running amok, Idlewild released 'Post-Electric Blues' via a mix of fan funding & Cooking Vinyl. An indie-rock album of Boss-like bombast, flecked with 70s synths & dashes of brass. Written & recorded in a small practice room in Fife, it's an album that leaps from Fleetwood Mac epic folk/rock/pop peaks into joyous Loch-side sing-alongs. Lyrically, the punk-rock sloganeering of their earlier work has become a mixture of poignant observational small-world imagery & universal ponderneering. 'PEB' might not be a quintessentially Scottish album but at times a few of the distortion pedals sound like they're set to 'bagpipe' & was an album made to play live, as Roddy explains: "Most bands now make their living through concerts, & we're no exception, so records have to be tailored that way. With 'The Remote Part’ & 'Warnings...' we were writing songs that would sound good on the radio (and live, but the radio was more important - so we were told). There are a million new bands on the radio waves, or digital waves, now so it's more important to us how we will sound good through a PA system in a club and that we can play and sing it all!" Bringing things full circle, Roddy concludes: "I guess we've never really fitted into anything. When we got our punk rock guitars out everyone was talking about acoustic guitars & vice-versa.
The nearly men, the underdogs, never as big as they should have been. "These things come up all the time but..." he takes a pause to sip some tea "...I don't really know what the rush is. I really love artists with long careers. I feel like we've only just started and I'm hoping we've got another 30 or 40 years left in us."
2010 sees the 10 year anniversary of the release of 100 Broken Windows & there is a
special edition release with a bonus disc of demos, session tracks & unreleased songs
together with some extra photos. There’s even some shows in the US & the UK to support the release.
(Adapted from a biog by Sean Adams)
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
