PREVIEW
IDLEWILD
Friday, April 11
The Night Gallery
Rod Davis, one of the founding guitarists for Scottish punk band Idlewild, apologizes for delaying our interview by 20 minutes while the band’s tour manager searched for him frantically.
"I'm just at a rest stop having a burger," explains Davis.
Are Scotland’s renegade sons now so big that keeping track of them has become a full-time endeavour? Perhaps after a year of increasing popularity, it’s the simple pleasures, like eating a hamburger in peace, that mean the most. More likely, Davis is just tired after spending almost 12 months on the road in support of Idlewild's latest record, The Remote Part.
While North American audiences saw the album's release last month, it represents the better part of two years of musical history for the band. When it came time to record their third album, Idlewild teamed up with legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur), but after preliminary studio time and another U.S. tour, they returned home to axe the bulk of the songs they’d recorded.
"I think we always go into the studio a bit too early and record songs that aren't the best things we could write," says Davis. "Through the process of trial and error we realized that we could write better songs and realized where we were going with the record."
That new direction meant reworking the material and replacing Street with Dave Eringa, a producer they had worked with before. While they spent a mere six weeks in the studio, the end result proved to be their most successful album to date. An even split of classic Idlewild rockers and more intimate numbers, Davis says The Remote Part represents a natural evolution for the band.
"I think with this record we really just refined everything we had done with the last two records. We had the confidence to push things to the forefront and not worry about trying to be too cool."
Cool or not, the decision delivered a career best and enough chart action to bring them back across the pond. Big enough to be coming to Calgary, and not too big to bypass us altogether, Idlewild have achieved a precarious success. They opened for Coldplay last autumn, and they’ll spend this summer opening for Pearl Jam. This means the band has to be just as comfortable playing small venues on their own as they are playing to 4,000 people as an opening act.
"I think we're keen to play small clubs and pack them out," Davis assures me when I tell him how small The Night Gallery actually is. "In a bigger venue you have to concentrate a bit more to get the song across properly, otherwise people at the back of the venue who can't really see you are thinking ‘What the hell is this noise?’ In a small venue you can just go and have fun." |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.