Once upon a time there was a Scots band who made a joyous, punky racket – and then they grew up. Rough edges were sanded down to make them stadium friendly, the singer’s ego grew to mammoth proportions and everything that made them interesting was lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. But enough about Simple Minds. What about Idlewild?
If Simple Minds are the Scottish U2 – which they are, in Jim Kerr’s head at least – Idlewild are the Scottish REM: more angular than a bag of elbows, and too awkward to be truly mainstream. Despite the odd flirtation with Big Music – American English veers dangerously close to U2 territory – the rough edges remain.
So what’s changed over ten years – ten years! – of Idlewild records? Roddy Woomble no longer tries to crowbar his reading list into the lyrics, although the band is no less literary – particularly on the majestic In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction, which features poet Edwin Morgan intoning over surging guitars – and there’s more light and shade in the music. There’s even a noticeable folk influence – not folk in a bad-knitwear and fingers-in-ears sense, but in the REM sense of taking the odd melodic idea.
Songs no longer sound as if they’ve been recorded in a shed, but while the tunes come in shinier packages the non-chronological order makes it obvious that newer songs such as No Emotion (from the most recent album, Make Another World) are cut from the same cloth as When I Argue I See Shapes. However, the jumbled order – chosen by the band themselves – does Idlewild a disservice too, because it hides the real story of the band: over the years Idlewild have grown up and grown in confidence without ever growing dull.