As the 2010s dawned, Joe Talbot and his IDLES bandmates would often attend London shows by bands who, in his words, “looked good, but were acting bored.”
“I couldn’t stand paying to go see beautiful people who think they’re better than us,” he recalls from his side of the video call screen. “The music we loved had turned into a soundtrack for models on coke. That’s when we decided to launch a project that would be full of passion and resolution.”
Resolution, or purposein English: the word will come back as a leitmotif during this interview given by Talbot from backstage at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, on whose stage he was expected a few hours later.
IDLES have never been short of passion, with the Bristol outfit having loaded their first four albums — Brutalism (2017), Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018), Ultra Mono (2020) and Crawler (2021) — anti-monarchy harangues, homilies extolling the revolutionary power of empathy, and virtuous eructations against the homophobes, racists and misogynists who spread their hatred online or in Parliament. Ideas that Joe Talbot embodies on stage with the uncompromising petulance of a whirling dervish, a hooligan or a preacher.
“During a show, I’m like in the middle of a flow of beauty, love and violence, which allows me to drift away from cognition and simply feel things for two hours,” he explains, running one of his tattooed hands through his peroxide blond hair.
PHOTO OLI SCARFF, ARCHIVES AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
IDLES on stage at Glastonbury Festival last June
“But when I say violence, I don’t mean a fist in the face. I mean the stroke of a painter’s brush, the sound of a guitar, the way you hit a piano key. I mean the kind of violence that makes you want to squeeze a baby’s little cheeks and tell them how much you love them. And that’s what I get to do to our audience every night.”
The power of love
While he has always drawn on his personal life to write his lyrics that sometimes border on preaching, Joe Talbot seems to have embraced his vulnerability even more on TangkIDLES’ fifth album released last February, the result of a collaboration with Nigel Godrich, director ofOK Computer by Radiohead. By opening its sound more than ever to other music, the quintet with punk roots celebrates the regenerative power of love and dance.
Read our review » Tangk : L“love conquers all”
“There was a lot of dancing in my eulogy for my mother,” Talbot says of his mother’s death in 2015, after years of caring for her, from a stroke that left her disabled when he was just 16.
The firebrand Mother (2017), his homage to the self-denial of a mother Courage who wore herself out at work in order to feed her offspring, remains one of the main keystones of IDLES’ work, the cry of a completely proletarian rage.
Every time I dance, I dance in the face of all my traumas, I dance in the face of death. My mother was my first dance partner and she is always a little there, with me, every time my body lets itself be caught up in the purity of free movement.
Joe Talbot
More gratitude, less shit
This time, it is rather his daughter’s passion that Talbot venerates. Gift Horseone of the most galvanizing extracts of Tangkin which he thanks her for telling him the truth when he threatens to wander (“She talks to me straight when I’m doing wrong”). A song that the one who inspired it would regularly ask her dad for, in the car.
So this is not the soundtrack of The Snow Queen Who rules the Talbot household? “Oh, but we listen to that too!” he exclaims. “It goes from Taylor Swift to Carly Rae Jepsen to Elton John to IDLES.”
At 40, after a life long lived under the insistent shadow of various abuses, Joe Talbot says he has never been so healthy. And the word “gratitude” in his mouth is suddenly cleansed of all that may be adulterated.
His secret? There are five. “Exercise, sobriety, staying away from toxic people, not doing things I don’t want to do, and resting when I need to.” Smirk. Very English smile. “Basically, I choose to say no to shit.”
September 21 and 22 at MTELUS
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