Idlewild’s third album finds Scots with a new voice

In search of appreciation we took the Idlewild’s third album ‘The Remote Part’ on the road to find out how it actually fares. So, in the sunny-with-showers Joycean city (Dublin), we find that Idlewild is a fine disc and an assured progression from ‘100 Broken Windows’… The sophomore album was a bit of a transitional period it seems as the Roddy Woomble’s group proves with this album.

The creation of which didn’t go smoothly: the disc was originally recorded with Stephen Street producing (he of The Smiths and Blur fame) but things weren’t going the desired way. After sudden American interest that resulted in a couple of tours, the band found itself in a New York Studio with Lenny Kaye (former rock-scribe and Patti Smith’s collaborator) for six days and, Woomble explain, “He did in a sense open our minds and our attitudes to the songs we were writing. He sat us down and made me reconsider how to go about writing words. Try and phrase things so they actually make sense! Again, hardly a radical concept, but when someone like Lenny Kaye’s presenting it to you, it suddenly made a lot of sense.”

Well, thanks Roddy, couldn’t have phrased it better ourselves. To finish the story of recording, the aftermath of Kaye-encounter was to write another 20 songs and then engage Dave Eringa to do the final version of the album. And it is a collection that recalls certain moments that have already earmarked the band’s career: REM, Sonic Youth, The Smiths (the previous hit, ‘You Held The World In Your Arms’), The Stone Roses (‘American English’), Husker Dü/Bob Mould on ‘(I Am) What I’m Not’ and a touch of Fugazi… And then, there is ‘A Modern Way Of Letting Go’, the rock-most the band’s ever done!

All these comparisons are not finger-pointing plagiarism but songs in the spirit of their influences. This is Idlewild from the intro to the closing ‘In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction’, featuring Edwin Morgan (Glasgow’s 82-year-old poet laureate) discussing what it means to be Scottish these days. (Well, if I may add a morsel of a thought – it means the same as being any other nationality, i.e. waving national flag at football matches.)

As Roddy concludes, “The album’s purely populist. It’s not necessarily this, or that, it’s just available - to everyone. It’s not negative, it’s not positive, it just throws up doubts which exist in everything, and it’s this balance of nothing and something that we've been striving towards for a long time; And with this record I think we've got to a point where we can see that divide, and embrace that divide.”

It is interesting to find a lyric-quote, ‘At home he feels like a tourist/ He fills his head with culture/ He gives himself an ulcer’, from the underground-legends Gang Of Four’s ‘At Home He’s A Tourist’ on the official press biography. If that’s their ambition, I can’t wait!

Therefore, ‘The Remote Part’ goes down nicely with several Guinnessi.