For their latest album, IDLES dived into tape-looping as the basis for entire songs. As they go on tour, they’ve got to figure out how to make it happen live. For guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, that means their pedalboards have grown larger than ever before... but their amps have actually shrunk.
The album, titled Tangk, is the band’s most ambitious recording to date. Where 2021’s Crawler was led by guitar-synth sounds, this time around they used the studio as an instrument. Mark Bowen – known to all by his surname – explains that this was the plan from the get-go.
“We wanted the music and the songwriting to be guided by production,” he says. “There were a lot of production techniques incorporated into the songwriting. This isn’t a standard IDLES album, where we are able to play the songs and then record them. It was more like we had recordings, and then we’re trying to reproduce that live.”
That’s not a straightforward task. It was producer Nigel Godrich, famed for his work with Radiohead, who encouraged the band to build this album around tape loops.
“The first thing Nigel wanted us to get into was understanding tape loops,” Bowen recalls. “He just gets you to play, and he’ll take bits and bobs and snapshots. Sometimes that’s a means to create texture that then you can write a song based off. Sometimes, as with the track Gratitude, it’s the basis for the whole song.
“Jon [Beavis, drummer] played this 6/8 pattern. Then, I played this riff that was like three fives and then a three, so it joined up with him every 18 beats. Dev [bassist Adam Devonshire] plays in 4/4. Basically every 18 beats it kind of lines up and then falls out and lines up. That was something I was interested in with the tape. It sparks creativity.”
That industrious approach doesn’t mesh easily with IDLES’ live ethos. As Bowen says: “We didn’t want to lose the essence of what an IDLES show is, which is me and Lee jumping around and dancing and interacting with the audience. That’s why we’re using a lot of expression pedals, so that we can control the ebbs and flows and the dynamics of these soundscapes, but we don’t need to be sat twiddling knobs. We can do it with our feet.”
In 2021, Bowen told us about the Crawler Machine, a hand-and-foot operated pedalboard designed to reproduce that album’s synth sounds.
“On Crawler, I’d been using a lot of pedals as a form of production, a lot of the Moogerfooger synth pedals as well as reverbs, filters and looping,” he explains. “What has come out of the Crawler Machine is Tangk, because I’ve learnt the possibilities of what to do with the Crawler Machine within the songwriting.”
Titling their new album, IDLES coined the word Tangk as an onomatopoeic description of the way they attack their guitars – kind of the indie-rock equivalent of ‘djent’. That tangk sound comes from clearer guitar tones.
“We both embraced the possibility of clean instruments, rather than being this sh*tshow of gain stage that we’ve had in the past,” Bowen reveals. “I’ve now got a Vox AC30 back in the running. I prefer the AC15 for recording, so on the album it’s mostly that. I mean, we were working with Nigel Godrich. He’s got lots of very interesting Voxes.”
Lee Kiernan, meanwhile, has found a more obscure favourite. “I found the Peavey Deuce, an amp that I love so much that you can’t find anywhere. It’s already become a problem. We’ll just see how it goes,” he shrugs. “They have a solid-state preamp with a valve power amp. That’s why you get such a good clean sound out of it. If you add gain into the preamp you get that weird solid state sound. But if you let the preamp be clean and push volume into the tubes, you get this huge, full-bodied sound.”
Guitar-wise, Bowen says the album is “99 per cent” his baritone Strat, while Lee continues to rely on his Fender Esquire and Mustang.
“Live, I’ve started using a Tele Deluxe for a couple of songs which sounds amazing, one of the new Fender Professional IIs,” Lee says. “For my baritone, me and Gavin [Maxwell, guitar tech] just mash together one of my old Tele bodies and a baritone neck, and it sounds amazing. Anyone who wants to get a baritone, just get a neck and strap it on!”
Says Bowen: “The other thing we’ve gotten into is stock pickups. We used to always be about finding the sickest custom pickup, but we always went too hot. On things like the baritone and Lee’s Esquire and Mustang, it’s all stock. Again, embracing the clean. We’ve also embraced the jangly, the twang. We’re not in a rush to run everything super hot and destroy stuff anymore.”
Destroying stuff, he admits, has become a habit. “I keep blowing things up! So I need things that are very dependable and findable.” When TG expresses incredulity that an AC30 was the most dependable amp they could find, Lee laughs. “Well, it’s very findable,” he says, “so that’s fine!” Bowen agrees, adding, “You could put word out and I reckon someone in the audience would have one at their gaff!”
The magic of tape loops is in their analog unpredictability. As Bowen explains: “There’s something about the repetition and then the wrongness. The best bit of a loop is the bad joins in the tape loops.”
Somehow, IDLES have to translate this to a stage. “We didn’t want to rely on backing tracks at all,” he says. “IDLES shows have always had a huge element of danger to them. We’re always teetering on the edge of it just not working, and that is why it works, if that makes sense.
“A lot of bands when they get to this point, they either get tons of people in, or it all becomes reliant on MIDI clock and everything’s running through your computer. Our shows rely on everything happening live, which makes it chaotic.
“Whenever you come to do certain things live, it just doesn’t quite translate without the essence of the tape,” he continues. “One of the cool things about using the tape loop is that you get it feeling a bit like a drum machine, even though it’s live, because you’ve got the repetition. We’ve had to look at ways round that so it’s not just Jon Beavis playing a drum machine, which no one wants. It’s the same for guitars.”
To recreate analog loops, flawless digital sounds are no good. Bowen has turned to the Electro-Harmonix 95000, although EHX might be less than flattered by his reasoning: “It’s kinda crap! It’s not bad, but it definitely does something that tape would do – makes it wonky.”
His longtime favourite the ZVex Lo-Fi Loop Junky also makes regular appearances. “It takes something that could be a bit clean, and makes it dusty and weird and old,” he enthuses. “The strings that you hear on the song Gospel came through super clean. We used the Lo-Fi Junky to make them sound like we sampled them.”
Both guitarists admit they are still finding their way with live looping. “We have about an 80 per cent success rate, I’d say,” ventures Lee, although Bowen thinks this is generous.
“There’s a big learning curve with using live loops,” he says. “I’ve got a failsafe. You find your little bits that are going to be loops, and some of them are pre-recorded, and some of them are things that you can’t play live. I’ll have either an outrageous, squealy thing locked and looped, or something really motorik and mechanical.
“You’ll have something that you can go to that you can rely on so that it doesn’t sound awful. There’s something about these loops, it really relies upon it not being bang on. So as you gain in confidence with it, it evolves and becomes less and less reliant upon the failsafe mode. You start to play things a bit more and loop things a bit differently.”
Lee says with a laugh, “I guess the most frequent thought on stage these days is, ‘Oh my god, I’m nailing it!’ And then immediately, ‘Oh my dear Lord, what am I doing?’” His pedalboard has grown, too.
“I just wanted it to be able to do more. I used to have one expression pedal. I’ve now got three and a piano expression, which is plugged into a tremolo to create a more of a spring tremolo. Because it’s got a spring in it, when you press down on it, it pulls itself back up slowly.
“The tremolo can fluctuate in a different way, rather than having a resistance. There’s a granular delay on my board that I didn’t used to have, because they scare me, but this one seemed to make sense. The expressions add more effect level or reverb or whatever. One of them’s on the granular delay, and it just speeds up and slows it down.”
While the synth sounds on Crawler were produced without the aid of a keyboard, Tangk saw Bowen trying a Prophet synth, which informed their guitar parts. As Lee says: “When you play guitar your whole life, it’s very difficult to change voicings on one, you get so caught up in playing the same chord shapes.
“Your hand just falls on a chord, and you start noodling around something you’ve been doing for forever. It helped a lot that Bowen sat down at the piano and moved his fingers around in ways that you don’t do on guitar.”
Lee’s really good at finding a chord that has something that sticks out a little bit. When I do it, I find it just doesn’t fit on guitar
“This is a taste thing,” Bowen says, “but often, adding sevenths and ninths to chords on guitar doesn’t fit our style of music. Lee’s always done it. Lee’s really good at finding a chord that has something that sticks out a little bit. When I do it, I find it just doesn’t fit on guitar, but it will somehow make sense in my head if I do it with keys.”
Lee shows us an example, an overdub he plays on Dancer, fretting the 15th fret of the G string and 13th fret of the high E, leaving the B string open. “That’s a great example of Lee reacting to stuff,” Bowen says.
“The chorus to Dancer started off as big organ chords. It wasn’t great. Nigel Godrich was like, ‘Let’s do something Television-y and bounce off each other’. So I played baritone, this Pixies-y bouncy part that was kinda wack but fits, and Lee came up with the reaction chord.
“Lee is just really good at finding the sound, or the shape that fits what’s happening. That will either be as a reaction to stuff that I’ve written or within what I’ve done. I’ll show stuff and he’d be like, ‘You need to do this bit.’ Then he’ll find the sound. That’s where our roles have become more defined. I’ll do the essence of the song first, and then Lee will either react and add or react in and fit in.”
Bowen reveals another secret: “On this album, we didn’t really tune our guitars. We’d tune to the track. Nigel wouldn’t allow us to use tuners. We’d go, ‘I’ll just tune that.’ And he’s like, ‘No, listen to what you’re playing.’ So it wouldn’t be like a strict 440hz across the across the strings.”
Bowen mentions Nick Cave’s Jubilee Street and the Chili Peppers’ Scar Tissue as classic recordings that sound better for the fact their guitars were tuned by ear to compensate for the guitar’s infamously approximate intonation.
The gear, though, is only part of the challenge. “I guess the other big difference is that the songs are really f*cking hard!” laughs Bowen. “Whereas before, an IDLES gig was all easy-peasy stuff, but it’s all about feeling, we’ve now got many moving parts. That’s very enjoyable. Playing Tangk songs, there’s a lot more focusing on each other. We all find these little grooves and pockets to lock into. It’s fun!”
- Tangk is out now via Partisan.
