Lee Kiernan is a real nice guy, but you should think twice before lending him your electric guitar. Chaos is a guiding principle when he’s on stage with IDLES. Plus, he admits he’s occasionally dabbled in misadventures with a soldering iron. It’s amaing his pink Mustang is still standing.
“I broke it, fixed it, broke it, fixed it so many times; changed things so many times,” he says. “I created my own weird wiring inside and it broke again. I took it to our tech Gavin Maxwell and he had to reinstall wires I’d put in for no reason to make it work again – we still don’t know why!”
Despite that, Fender did lend Kiernan a guitar when they enlisted him and bandmate Mark Bowen to test the Player II Modified series. It’s a range of classic Fender instruments, pre-modded in the factory. Kiernan put the new Floyd-equipped HSS Strat through its paces.
“It’s really solid,” he reports. “It feels good to play. It feels like a Fender but with more – and isn’t that the point with modding a Fender? You feel Fender, but you can do more.”
An HSS Strat with a Floyd turned him onto Jackson guitars, which is why he packs a Soloist in his arsenal. We didn’t have him down as a typical Superstrat player; but this unorthodoxy, he explains, is part of a sensibility that shapes IDLES’ sound in radical ways.
Certain instruments can be more important in stimulating an idea that can be executed elsewhere. Is that what happened with your Soloist?
“It works both ways – what the guitar does, what the pedals do. There’s the bit in the Gift Horse middle-eight, where my idea was to do divebomb drops. But every time I did it the Floyd Rose just didn’t hold consistently. It got a bit wobbly, a bit out of tune, because you’re human and you’re bending strings.
“Bowen was like, ‘Why don’t you do dive-bombs with the [DigiTech] Whammy?’ So the idea was born from the guitar but transferred to the pedals.”
In music there’s tension between what you can do manually and the sound in your head.
“That’s a common problem, I find: trying to make a sound that’s physically impossible to play without the pedalboard.”
Justin Norvell, Fender’s head of product, says his team talk about guitars as pedal platforms. Is that something you look for?
“I don’t think about whether the guitar can take the pedals well. I think about what the guitar can hit into the pedals. I pick it up, hit it, and see what it does. Then, if it does one thing, then how can it do this?
“That’s where the Modified series is actually so helpful – you have a guitar that has a few options like these modified switches and these different pickups. The point of modifying guitars is that you want different.”
What we understand as great tone doesn’t always work for IDLES. It’s the sum of the parts. Last year’s album Tangk sounds beautiful, hi-fi, fully realized – but it’s made from some lo-fi elements.
“Nothing’s right or wrong. Sometimes I do want that nice, soft tone palette. But I don’t want a guitar that, the moment I play it, sounds like the blues. Sometimes I want a guitar to sound truly horrendous.
“My pink Mustang with the mid-boost pickups from Creamery is terrible! But the pickups are so amazing. It creates so much violence. For most people, that’s not a good guitar.”
Are you handy with a soldering iron?
“I used to be. I used to fix all our guitars.”
With guitar design, so long as the hardware is on-point, you can mess with everything else.
“Exactly. So having a Floyd Rose on a Strat, how is that not fun!? Having parallel or series switching, changing the sound of the pickups with one switch – that’s perfect. It’s an amazing learning space.
“I didn’t really know what running anything in parallel or series meant. I didn’t understand that differently rated pots did so much; that if you put Strat pots onto a Tele that it makes a wild difference. You just play with it and see what happens. And then you find out, ‘Oh, I’ve made that sound terrible! – put that back!’”
I don’t want a battery in my guitar. They’re a liability. I don’t want something that relies on something else to function
What’s your dream IDLES guitar?
“I just love Esquires. I love the ergonomics of them. Sometimes you only have one pickup, but if you move the dial all the way to the top it’ll do some sort of mid-boost to it, but inactively. It would sound really fat all of a sudden, but with no battery.
“I don’t want a battery in my guitar. They’re a liability. I don’t want something that relies on something else to function; and that, again, is one of the things I love about Fenders: they’re reliable.”
You specialize in guitar sounds that I don’t even recognize as guitar.
“We’re always trying to push into place where it doesn’t sound like a guitar, but it behaves like one. It doesn’t have to sound like a synth. It’s fun to make it happen on a guitar; you can still perform and play.”
Can I ask about some of your rhythmic influences? On Jungle, specifically, it’s like a Bo Diddley feel.
“Yeah, that’s Bowen. He loves all that. He loves getting into surf rock rhythms and Dick Dale. On Meds, there’s a really big Dick Dale moment. Jungle was [vocalist] Joe Talbot. He and Bowen are the rhythmic forces in the band; they love to push our palettes. We love changing the style of what we can be.”
You recorded Tangk to tape. Is that the closest you can get to a live feel?
“Absolutely. But also the guitars were slightly out of tune, and we always played to what the guitars were at the time. If you had to put anything on top, you had to tune to the take, not to your pedalboard.
“It didn’t feel perfect – and I think that is the point. When you’re playing live you’re not always perfectly in tune. You just can’t be. You’re moving around. You’re hitting the guitar. That’s what’s real about live energy. When everything’s perfect it just doesn’t feel real.”
- The Player II Modified Series is out now. See Fender.com for more info.
