Idles’ Joe Talbot is determined to find End Of The Road’s inner punk. “Part the crowd into two halves,” he insists, envisioning a wall of death. “Come on, move your picnic chairs and wine racks…”
It may be comfortably appointed, but EOTR can still rock out. A balmy Friday begins in understandably muted tones, with Arizona-via-Portland singer Kassi Valazza delivering beautifully vaporous country songs about sunken galleons and rising rivers; even “Rapture”, about a friend with “a fascination for lighting things on fire” smoulders sweetly.
And out on the Piano Stage in the psychedelic woodlands, Gruff Rhys and Bill Ryder-Jones – kinsmen in luscious Welsh-language folk pop and upcoming co-headliner tourmates – come together for a laid-back fifteen minutes, swapping songs like campfire compadres.
Bill’s “If Tomorrow Starts Without Me” sets the chamber pop tone, while Gruff’s “Bad Friend” unravels a flamenco pop tale of comradely inconstancy and Welsh caravan holidays, stuttered out in dislocated chunks. They close with a Parisian folk showtune about death’s endless black, somehow lifted into a hymnal sing-along. A magical pairing indeed.
By the time Sleater-Kinney take to the main Woods stage, however, EOTR’s punk gander is up. “We’ve got eleven albums so we’re playing as many songs as we can in an hour,” says Carrie Brownstein, although they focus largely on this year’s Little Rope, a record attacking the grief of Brownstein losing her mother in a car accident in 2022.
Brownstein thrashes and bounces her way through the set, punching the air as “The Center Won’t Hold” reaches its buzz-rock climax and swinging her guitar wildly through an intense, primal “Jumpers”. Corin Tucker is her grounding foil, her vocals slipping easily between Blondie-style new wave sass on the gutter-crawling go-go of “Oh!” and the big ballad bellow of a Bonnie Tyler on “Untidy Creature”. Virulent art-punk and riot-rock abounds, but Brownstein steals the set with her expertly crafted grunge pop ditty “Modern Girl” – a lyric numbed and frustrated by consumerism and modern media, hooked to a tune determined to escape all that.
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Idles, closing the Woods stage, are less about escapism and more about delving deep and fearlessly into humanity’s ills. A screeching noise intro calms into the brooding heartbeat pulse and austere piano of “IDEA 01”, as Talbot sketches out a scene of debt-riddled broken home life; then the sort of clanging guitars and red lights that usually accompany cinematic basement torture surgery strike up for “Colossus”, an attack on toxic masculinity that seems to want to sweat itself clean of testosterone.
As the set gradually accelerates to their natural state of feral punk and air-raid glam, with guitarist Mark Bowen skipping across the stage in a full Widow Twanky panto dress and Talbot jogging on the spot or swinging his mic around like a gym-addicted Roger Daltrey, they manage to construct a darkly dynamic world of their own.
And a righteous one, no matter what their much-discussed class status. Talbot ends several songs with a cry of “Viva Palestina!” and leads the crowd in “the new national anthem”, a chant of “Fuck the king!”
“Mother” outlines a wage struggle that has few class boundaries now, and the abattoir blues of “Car Crash” dissects the selfishness and self-importance of those who escape it. “I’m Scum” is introduced as a celebration of the insults Talbot suffered as a younger man, a compulsive punk brawl of a song declaring “this snowflake’s an avalanche” and proudly reclaiming the slur of “dirty rotten filthy scum” (“I’d rather be a scumbag surrounded by you people than not a scumbag, surrounded by them,” he says). And once society is put to rights, some raw flesh is exposed. “The Wheel” revisits the heartbreaking details of Talbot’s mother’s death, while “The Beachland Ballroom”, resembling a slow-dance with a psychopath, is a desperate roar from Talbot’s heart.
As a once-tumbledown punk affair, Idles have evolved a flab-free 90-minute journey of a headline set, culminating in one of rock’s more visceral and punchy closing ten minutes or so. Talbot prances around the stage to “Never Fight A Man With A Perm” and their LCD Soundsystem collaboration “Dancing”.
“Danny Nedelko” – a pro-immigration knees-up anthem Talbot calls “a smile in the face of the fascist pricks who don’t know how lucky they are” – barrels jubilantly by, their best song by far. And they finish with a frenzied rampage through the anti-fascist “Rottweiler” that ends with Bowen singing “All I Want For Christmas Is You” over the drum solo and leading a chant of “Ceasefire now!” The wine racks don’t stand a chance.
