Idles guitarist Mark Bowen says he enjoys the challenge of the band being “underdogs” at music events and sees the shows as opportunities to increase their fan base.
The Bristol-based rockers are set to play their second weekend at the Coachella festival in southern California, a gig that was postponed due to the pandemic. The band were just hitting their stride at the end of 2019, having played Glastonbury in June for the first time and being Brit nominated for best breakthrough act.
Now, with restrictions all but lifted, the band – Bowen, Joe Talbot, Lee Kiernan, Adam Devonshire and Jon Beavis – have returned to the road. Bowen said the band were “very grateful” to be in the position to play the festival again, and had used the interim time to “knuckle down” and produce more material.
“It’s pretty wonderful,” he said. “We’re very grateful that we were in a position at the start of lockdown that we knew we would be able to come back. We knew we had been booked to play Coachella and likely we would be booked to play again.
“So we knuckled down and worked hard and released two albums in the interim. To be able to play those albums live anywhere after the last two years is pretty great.” Idles released their third studio album Ultra Mono in September 2020 and Crawler in November 2021, both to critical acclaim.
Located in the Colorado desert, the Coachella festival has taken place this year over two weekends in April. Bowen, who also works as a dentist, said his experience of the festival so far had been “cool and chaotic” and that playing there had been a “harder task than playing your standard rock festival”.
“I think we’re certainly the underdogs when it comes to culture,” he said. “Coachella is such a wide palette of the music industry, it certainly has a lot of hip hop, a lot of dance, a lot of pop and we kind of skirt along the sides of those things and within the rock kind of realm. So it’s a harder task than playing your standard rock festival or your indie festival… but we enjoy it, we enjoy that challenge.
“One of my favourite things at the festival is to pick up members of the crowd that are maybe experiencing your band for the first time and trying to win them over and horrify them in equal measure. It’s kind of the Idles way.”
The band appreciates that every venue and live show can be different, Bowen says. “For us it’s more just about being the best live band we possibly can be and trying to be one of the best live bands in the world every time we go onstage.”
“If we’re playing a festival, where we are not the kind of popular music at that festival, then that’s an opportunity to win people over and gain more fans. And if we’re playing a festival where it’s lots of our fans in attendance, then we’ve got an opportunity to blow their minds."
Despite the high tempo and energetic performances of their raw, Tory-bashing songs, Bowen says that offstage the band try to look after themselves to make sure they are “firing on all cylinders” the moment they step on again. “Our tours aren’t particularly crazy anymore. We kind of keep our head low,” he says. “We have crazy times like yeah but, like, our shows are sick.
“We’re a sensible band, we try look after ourselves these days. Some of us are sober. Some of us aren’t. For us the most important thing is that we’re ready to fire on all cylinders whenever we perform.”
The more toned-down approach applies to the guitarist himself too, who has been known to play shows in only his underwear, a practice he says he “doesn’t really do anymore.” Following their romp in the desert and the end of the US tour, Idles are due to return to the UK for another slot at Worthy Farm and a special charity hometown gig for War Child in Bristol. The band also have their eyes set on producing a new record, though Bowen cannot give any details or timeline, saying there is more “knuckling down” to be done.
“What we’ve got to do is find the album, finish writing it and record it and then we’ll know when the timeline is a lot more clearly. But at the minute it’s knuckle down and write and work out what it is.”
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