Idlewild headline Crewe venue

Apr 14 2010 by Will Harris, Crewe Chronicle

SCOTTISH rockers Idlewild head for The Box in Crewe on Saturday for what is arguably the venue’s highest profile gig yet.

Their visit to the Pedley Street club comes on the back of last year’s massively successful seventh album Post Electric Blues.

Initially, the band’s sound obeyed the conventions of 90s British indie-punk guitar music.

However, unlike many of their contemporaries, it developed over time from an edgy and angular sound – once described by the NME as ‘the sound of a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs’ – to the sweeping intelligent rock displayed on The Remote Part and Warnings/Promises.

The expectation this time was for Idlewild to make a weighty album which crystallised all their most extreme emotions, but the result is an indie-rock album of bombast, flecked with 70s synths and brass.

Frontman Roddy Woomble says: “Album opener Younger Than America was the first track we wrote for the album. The idea for the lyrics came from a spate watching Westerns – simple stories of justice and courage set at the ‘frontier’.

“After we’d written the song I thought the record might turn into a American sounding piece of classic rock, but it didn’t turn out that way really, especially after writing Readers and Writers.

“The record went in whatever direction it chose to, but I wanted to have a more off-the-cuff feel to the record, with the words especially.”

This is Idlewild refreshed and re-energised – confidence back in place and as hungry as ever, melding Woomble’s hugely poetic lyrical talent with raucous guitar lines and the kind of all-round musicianship that comes from performing together for more than a decade. The band really began to turn heads with their 2000 release 100 Broken Windows and by 2002 had the industry at their feet with anthemic tracks such as American English and You Held The World In Your Arms, from their The Remote Part album.

The following 2005 offering Warnings/Promises maintained their standing, but subsequent work saw the band begin a slight decline.

Now with Post Electric Blues, they are back and ready to take on the world once more, promising a lengthy stay on the scene.

“I guess we’ve never really fitted into anything,” said Woomble.

“When we got our punk rock guitars out everyone was talking about acoustic guitars and vice-versa. But I don’t really know what the rush is. I really love bands with long careers.

“I feel like we’ve only just started and I’m hoping we’ve got another 20 good years left in us yet.”

The band will be supported by fellow Scottish anti-folk band Sparrow And The Workshop.

Entry is £15 in advance and £17 on the door.ŠDoors open at 8pm and tickets are available from www.theboxcrewe.co.uk.