The Best Gig of the 21st Century

Why I am forever indebted to IDLES

Everyone who has ever loved music has periodically tackled the question as to their top LP, fave single, best gig. The problem is, always, that none of these can be answered purely objectively. Sure, quality is often self-evident, further established through consensus, but beyond that, it’s all about context. A favorite record has so much to do with when you heard it, and where, and who with, and whether you were in love at the time and that record spoke to you, or you were in heartbreak at the time and that record spoke to you, or whether the lyrics spoke plenty to you about other aspects of your life, and spoke to your friends about their lives too, and you all followed that group and there was something electric in the air when you used to go see them, and how do you bottle that and put it down in words for future generations?

Well, some of us are writers and it’s our job to do so. And in Teenage Blue, my second memoir, finished though yet to be published, I have fulfilled my calling, detailing some of the best shows from my British youth, including a couple that would probably rank as the greatest, and most inspirational, of my life, all of them explained through context. But that book is set in the 1980s, way back in the 20^th Century, at a period when my personality was still being formed and live music could have that kind of permanent influence on me. Is it possible for it to do the same in later life, once we are grown up and set in our ways?

The short answer: yes. There is one concert I keep coming back to. In the five years since, I have seen nothing more energizing, enervating, exciting. And try as I might, I can’t think of anything in the 19 years that preceded it this Century that was on that level either.¹ The show was IDLES, in Albany, in a club inside a bowling alley inside a shopping center. It took place on May 8, 2019, and here’s why and how it mattered.

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In 2018, I was introduced – both by KEXP in Seattle and a couple of UK-based friends, at almost exactly the same time - to IDLES (all caps) and shame (lower case). Both were and remain bands of British boys playing around with guitars. There’s nothing original in that, it’s all been done before, but both groups possessed an edge, an urgency, a lyrical depth, and that sense you sometimes get the moment you hear a band, which I always bring down to the two words Richie Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers carved into his arm in front of Steve Lamacq during a 1991 interview: 4 Real.

I loved what I heard by shame on their debut album Songs of Praise (and listening back to “One Rizla” and “Friction” right now, I still do) but watching a couple of in-concert clips, I didn’t get the same spark as I did from IDLES’ second album Joy As An Act Of Resistance. The title alone spoke volumes: by the time it was released we were over a year into Trump’s fake Presidency and paralyzed-Brexit Britain, and the temptation to get angry and shout and tear down the statues and erect the barricades was very very real, even in this 50-something. IDLES embraced all these emotions, but turned them into something more positive. To be joyous! in the face of fear, resentment, fury, prejudice, and hatred is not to ignore the weight of that boot stomping on your face forever, it is to offer the bravest and most profound of rebellions instead.

Yes, it looks like a weird-ass mosh pit: the sleeve to IDLES’ second album, Joy As An Act of Resistance.

            A lot of that album doesn’t necessarily sound joyous, not with titles like “I Am Scum,” “Samaritans,” and “Rottweiler.” Indeed, musically, IDLES operated then, and still largely do, on a very punk-influenced ethos of velocity and simplicity: the thudding rhythm section of Jon Beavis’ four-to-the-floor drums and Adam Devonshire’s horse-clopping bass, appended by harshly crunched chords from twin guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, with Joe Talbot’s somewhat tuneless roar over the top. There’s nothing in that description that suggests quality, let alone originality, and the band were not young even in 2018, having formed a decade earlier and released their first self-pressed record way back in 2012; rather, they were already battle-scarred survivors, with a litany of lost opportunities and addictions in their wake (and for singer Joe, a stillborn baby in 2017, the subject of Joy’s song “June”). But what rose instantly above their surface monochrome appeal was their refusal to give up – on their music, on their vision, on humanity in general.

There are many transcendent moments on Joy, musical and lyrical, with “Great,” “Love Song” and “Never Fight A Man With A Perm” being just three of the better examples. But IDLES’ values of compassion, empathy, inclusion, multi-culturalism and the like, came across most overtly on the single “Danny Nedelko,” named after a real-life Ukrainian immigrant friend of the band, the singer with the group Heavy Lungs. The song mentioned Freddie Mercury, Malala and Mo Farah as famous British immigrants alongside the “Nigerian mother of three” and the “Polish butcher” in a glorious two-fingered salute to the closed-minded, close-the-borders-behind-us so-called leaders of the so-called Free World. It also had something not all IDLES songs possess: a proper, semi-tuneful chorus:

“Fear leads to panic/panic leads to pain/pain leads to anger/anger leads to hate.”

IDLES were determined to avoid this fate, and they did so not only with “Danny Nedelko” the song, but the video too. Shot on the streets of their home city, the former slave port of Bristol, and starring an absolute star of a kid with a cast of colorful extras, it is the most positive advert for humanity, in all its glorious Quality Street variety. I am willing to go further and cite it as one of the greatest music videos ever made. If you haven’t seen it yet, take time to watch it now before you carry on reading.

            The group had already visited the States twice by the time I caught on to them, one a brief visit on the back of debut album Brutalism (which sounds somewhat like its title, and  would not have won me over in isolation), the other a decent tour upon the release of Joy As An Act of Rebellion, and their live reputation was by now preceding them. I therefore determined to be on the look-out for the announcement of further dates, for which I was likely going to have to move quickly, and probably plan a trip to NYC.

Instead, when a tour was announced, it included a show in the New York State capital of Albany – barely an hour from me – on a Wednesday night, neatly slotting in-between Rehearsal #9 and Dress Rehearsal of a Rock Academy show I was assisting on.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the Albany venue was so small it sold out its 100-or-so tickets before I even got wind of the date. In fact, the venue was so obscure that I’d never heard of it, though on a subsequent trip to Albany, I decided to check it out. It turned out to be the back room of a restaurant, used, if at all, for covers bands and comedy. The only reason I could figure IDLES were playing there was that they had asked their agent to book small club shows in secondary markets rather than give them a day off – the classic Peter Buck “never take a Monday night off between NYC and Boston when you can play Albany instead,”² except that this show was being sandwiched in-between Baltimore and NYC. It really did not make sense.

I leaned on all my contacts for a ticket, with no joy (though I encountered plenty resistance). But putting the word out often has positive repercussions, and the evening that I arrived in the UK for an Easter-time visit, while sitting in a cinema in West Norwood, South London, preparing to watch A Clockwork Orange on a big screen for the first time, in the very room in which a couple of the scenes had been filmed (the Nettleford Hall in case you’re wondering), an American acquaintance messaged me. The IDLES show had been moved to a larger venue; additional tickets had just gone on sale. While waiting for Alex and his droogs to kick in (literally) on the big screen, I purchased two tickets on my phone, as you do these days while on a different continent. I had no better understanding of the new venue they would be playing, the Jupiter Hall, than I did the previously assigned back room, but it was IDLES – and Fontaines D.C., the highly acclaimed Irish band -  and I was psyched to know I would be seeing them at all.

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            That is some of the context within which the show took place. But there is an important additional layer of context: the Rock Academy show I was assisting on. The theme was “90’s Prom,” and the set featured everyone from Hole, Radiohead, Foo Fighters and The Verve, to Ricky Martin and Britney Spears. It also featured Belle Biv Devoe’s “Poison,” a song that only features digital instruments. Our casts play real instruments.

My role at this point was still that of assistant director: the boss, Jason Bowman, had warned me that before I could be let loose on a cast, I would need to shadow him for a minimum of a year and accept the likelihood that I would not make the cut. So far, however, he had not dropped the guillotine.

            In fact, the opposite happened. As I drove to rehearsal 9, the day before the IDLES show, Jason called me to say that he had an invite for the premier of John Wick 2 in NYC that Thursday, and he really wanted to go. But it clashed with dress rehearsal: would I be okay handling that one on my own? Not any rehearsal: dress rehearsal.

            I didn’t ask whether this meant he had faith in me to do so; I had to make a calculated guess he’d already made that calculated decision. I said Yes.

Problem was, our show was not going well. This was a really wide range of material we were covering, and only some of it was coming together; the rest of it, not so much. As for “Poison,” it wasn’t coming together at all. The best I had to hope for was that the Tuesday rehearsal would see a turnaround and I could handle dress rehearsal with some confidence.

            Rehearsal #9 was a disaster: my own son, who was part of that show, readily admits it was a bad night. At the end of the evening it was left to Jason to read the students the riot act while simultaneously letting them know that I would be the poor schmuck expected to whip them into shape on Thursday.  

            I came home that Tuesday night despondent. I had to figure a game plan for the dress rehearsal, but the one evening I had free to do so was going to be spent in Albany. Strangely, I had yet to find someone to take the second ticket. My son Noel? He was with mom that week, it was a school night, and much as I wanted him to experience this incredible double-bill alongside me, I also wanted him to have his shit together for dress rehearsal: everyone had been sent home with strict instructions to spend Wednesday evening learning their songs like they should have done weeks ago. A late night for this 14-year-old was not a good idea.

            By Wednesday evening I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would be flying solo, which at least freed me up for the other activity in the calendar: the annual 5k running race up Platte Clove Road, the steepest hill in the Catskills. (It’s so steep that the road isn’t even maintained for 6 months of the winter.) It was, as ever, a wonderfully masochistic event, but it put me a little behind schedule for the show itself. Where and what was the Jupiter Hall, anyway?

            It turned out to be the rather grandiose name for another back room. This one inside a bowling alley. Inside the Crossgates Mall, one of those insanely large ex-urban mall complexes that were once uniquely American though may now be more common elsewhere on the planet. My experiences with Crossgates had been limited to Pottery Barn and the Apple Store. I had no idea where to find the bowling alley.

            That, of course, is what modern phones are for (as well as buying tickets from different continents), and I allowed mine to direct me to the club, by which time I figured Fontaines D.C. must be well into their set. Yet even as I stood upon the very space where my phone located the Jupiter Hall, there was no sign of a bowling alley. Pretty much everything else was closed; there weren’t people around to ask. I had figured most of the audience might already be inside, but inside where?

            It took a solid couple of minutes to realize that the venue must be in the same spot but on a different floor, and another five minutes to navigate the mall’s staircases and finally find it. Sure enough, I walked into a bowling alley. A nice one – it’s a big modern mega-mall after all – with a proper bar right in the middle. A handful of people were bowling. An equally small handful were sitting at the bar. But the night’s real action was obviously taking place elsewhere, behind that rope on the other side of the room.

            I made it into the “Hall,” seeing no one to give my extra ticket to, noted that the room was heaving if not quite sold out (I’d guesstimate 5-700 people there all told), andthat the audience was properly all ages and happily grooving to Fontaines D.C.. I just had time to take a picture of the young group before they left the stage.

            Oh well. It couldn’t be helped, and I was still here for what I came for, which was no longer just a live set by a band that had excited me more than any other new(ish) act in a few years, but a live set that I hoped would reinvigorate my faith in the format. I needed a reason to leave the room on a musical high, to be able to face my first solo dress rehearsal with confidence. Quite simply, I needed a reason to believe.

            What I experienced over the 90 minutes of the subsequent IDLES set was all that and more. The best I can do by comparison is to hark back to what I felt at the time: “This is the closest I will ever get to seeing the MC5 in their heyday.” The same way footage of that quintet shows twin guitarists Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith in constant movement so frenetic it sometimes looks sped up, so IDLES’ Bowen and Kiernan - sporting long hair and loud (fluorescent!) clothing that would have been quite at home in Detroit Rock City back in 1970, with Bowen going as far as to wear retro-stars-and-stripes trousers/pants - refused to stay still, not so much flanking the equally energetic Joe Talbot as encircling him. From the moment they took the stage to the moment they left it, IDLES performed the way every audience wants every rock ‘n’ roll band to perform – as if their lives depended upon it, but without cutting the words “4 Real” into their arms to prove it.

            The audience responded in turn. From the first chords of Joy’s opening song “Colossus,” the bulk of the main standing area was one heaving mass of a mosh pit. And, justifying IDLES’ evident desire for an all-ages show, it was a mostly teenage mosh pit, with more than its fair share of females. This is the scene two minutes in:

            And this is The MC5 in 1970. (NB: I’m not arguing that one band is better or more important historically; I am just comparing the visual thrill of them both.)

I have never been so tempted in all of the 21^st Century to join a mosh pit. Ultimately, knowing that this youthful crowd did not need a 50-something trying to prove his credentials by crashing their own righteous party, I compromised, and stood next to it instead. For the rest of the night, I could literally feel the heat of the pits’ sweating young bodies, could metaphorically inhale the energy they brought to the band. It was the perfect reciprocal relationship: the audience energy fed off the group energy, and the group energy fed off that of the audience. The air was electric in a way I had not experienced in years, and I wasn’t the only one coming to this conclusion: as well as all these kids, IDLES (and Fontaines D.C.) had drawn a fair number of wizened old veterans like myself who had must also have sensed this could be a show to take them back to their youth. Quite a few were, also just like me, standing alongside the mosh pit, doing everything in their powers to resist jumping in, joyously.

            It would have been understandable if this youthful audience had been drawn to the occasion – and the mosh pit – purely on novelty factor. A British/Irish double-bill all-ages show at the bowling alley and the headliners play punk? Let’s do it! But every one of them seemed to know every word of every song – including the almost equal percentage of the set drawn from Brutalism. And when IDLES decided to get their “hit” out of the way good and early, sure enough, they sang along to every word of “Danny Nedelko”’s chorus, including the “Unity!” that ends each verse and the spelling out of C.O.M.M.U.N.I.T.Y in the mid-section, as led here – mid-audience - by Bowen, standing on the audience’s outstretched palms. It was that kind of night.

            Later it was Kiernan’s turn to join that mosh pit: the IDLES set was not short of professional schtick. But it was all in the name of inclusion, and the crowd was thoroughly on board with that concept: they cheered Talbot’s insistence to keep the mosh-pit female-friendly, and they applauded his intro the song “Mother” and sang along to that one as well. For all that I had come in the hope of seeing a great live show, I left with my faith in American youth – this kind of American youth - riding high also.

            Actually, I left feeling like one of them. Like I was, to quote that Buzzcocks song, “Sixteen Again.” That night in May 2019, the back room of a bowling alley single-handedly brought me back to my youth, to all those nights spent jumping around to The Jam and so many other groups, to that age when life is timeless and days are long, and you’re never never never gonna work for someone. I left Albany after the 11pm finish on a cloud, reinvigorated about everything: the power of live music, the youth of America, my British roots, our collective power to reject prejudice and hate, and the possibility of making the world a better place, however shit it feels at times. I also left there knowing I had just seen a show I would be talking about for years to come, a show of such relentless power and intensity and joyous resistance that I would be unlikely to ever experience something similar again.

            Less than 18 hours after it concluded, I was sat in front of that young Rock Academy cast. None had heard of IDLES, or if they had, they didn’t know the music. (Other than my own son, of course, who seemed okay with not having joined me.) So I told them what I’d witnessed, and what I had concluded: that not only was this the greatest live show I’d seen in a decade or more, but it had reinstated my faith in them, the kids in front of me. Live music is everything, and we were therefore going to put everything we had into putting on as good a live show that next night as any of us ever had done.

I had been worried ever since getting that phone call that I might find it hard to exert authority on my own on this first, all-important occasion, but that wasn’t necessarily needed: I just had to exert the enthusiasm that had been coursing through my veins since the previous night, share it with this particular group of young talent, reinforce that we all had in us to deliver what was expected of us, and keep them working. We worked hard that evening. And then some.

            And come the next two nights, they delivered. The shows were great. I came to learn that Rehearsal #9 is often a shitshow, that it does tend to come together two nights later at dress rehearsal if so, but in my five years of hands-on experience, it’s never been quite such a close call. To be clear, the IDLES show would have been just as incredible and memorable and invigorating without being sandwiched between those two rehearsals, but if I hadn’t witnessed it that night I most needed it, I don’t know I could have merely bluffed the belief and enthusiasm that was needed for the kids.

Why not make the last video of the post a bunch of kids playing “Creep”? Maybe one day in the future, Noel’s kids (that’s him on the right) will be playing “Danny Nedelko” in a similar show.

           

Indeed, all these years later and my opinion of that night opinion hasn’t changed. That gigs in that bowling alley back room remain one of the most thrilling gigs of my life, and watching my videos back for the first time in over four years to write about it only confirms as much.

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            I have not, however, seen IDLES again. I seriously entertained the possibility of driving down to D.C. (Washington D.C., not Fontaines D.C.) at the end of that same weekend to catch another gig on the east coast, though it would have cost an arm and a leg and there was the small matter of the fact that I was moving house that day! I then somehow missed IDLES’ next go round, at Terminal 5 in October. (I was in a new relationship, probably just wasn’t paying attention, and hate that venue with enough passion that I might have skipped it.) Then Covid hit, and IDLES released a disappointing third album, Ultra Mono, and I was in Colombia when they returned to New York eventually, in late 2021. I was more taken with fourth album. 2022’s Crawler, which the group approached as something of a song cycle about addiction, but I wasn’t quick enough to get tickets for the Kings Theater in Brooklyn before it sold out.  

            Finally, last summer, IDLES went out on the Re:SET Festival with LCD Soundsystem, and having a friend in the latter’s touring camp, Noel and I took a road trip to Boston for the outdoor show at a racetrack on June 17. It rained the whole drive there. When we arrived at the venue, it was pouring even harder, the gates had not opened, and it had just been announced that the opening two acts – including IDLES – had already been canceled. The rain got worse. And worse. Wisely, we took the T into town. My touring party friend soon texted to say the whole event was off; we took our sweet time going back to the race-track.

It was already late into the evening and we were halfway back to Kingston when Noel took over the driving, and I looked at my phone and saw that IDLES, being IDLES and a bunch of determined motherfuckers who don’t like letting their audience down, had managed to secure a room that would host them for a consolation gig starting at midnight. It was all I could do not to turn the car around, but it would have meant finding a hotel in the middle of an expensive city at the last minute, super late at night, and a Saturday night at that. After some consultation, we kept going, back to our destination an hour south of Albany. I’m still not sure that was the right decision.

            One result of that tour was a collaboration between IDLES and LCD on the former’s recent song “Dancer,” the first teaser from the imminent fifth album TANGK, and one that shows a necessary willingness to experiment and embrace some new instrumentation. Subsequent “single” “Grace” shows similar promise, especially with its chorus “Love is the thing,” and I am therefore excited that TANGK may yet represent a real progression. In preparation, IDLES have announced an entire year’s worth of tour dates; these days, the group are European festival headliners, big leaguers. Still, as of yet, a New York concert has not been listed. Part of me wants it to stay that away, because I know that Jupiter Hall - the club inside the bowling alley inside the Crossgates Mall outside the city of Albany - cannot be beat. But part of me wants to risk it all the same, to see if the only band this century to leave me feeling Sixteen Again can leave me feeling that way. Again.

1. The one exception might have been James, a band I have seen dozens of times and who I love as much as any group on earth, but who have rarely proved transcendent in concert. However, in Auckland, New Zealand, on November 9, 2016, they took to the stage just two hours after Tr*mp had been confirmed as the USA’s next President. Tim Booth, like me, is an expat, and the band has a deep love for the States. They took to the stage with rare fury and performed the most intense show I’ve ever seen from them, offering incredible comfort at a moment when I most needed it.

2. At a Minus 5/Baseball Project show in a basement venue in Albany back in the early 2000s, and yes on a Monday night, Peter Buck explained to me in person that he’d insisted on this filler booking, and that although the $500 fee wouldn’t cover the group’s expenses, he expected to double that with merch sales. Sure enough, he spent the 20 minutes between sets at the merch table, essentially insisting on a purchase with every request to sign an R.E.M. album, and confirmed to me later that they’d reached their financial goal as a result. R.E.M., he had told me back when I wrote the biography on the band, never took tour support, because they made sure from day one to never spent more on touring than they earned.