My Interview with Idlewild guitarist Rod Jones

With word of a hiatus spreading like wild fire through the Idlewild fan camp I got the “inside scoop” from guitarist Rod Jones before their recent gig at the HMV forum in London. As Roddy Woomble announces the break on stage later that night it’s clear that yes Idlewild will be taking a break after this tour of their most recent record ‘Post Electric Blues’ but by all means this is not the last we will hear from them. With the solo release from Rod Jones available now and a tenth anniversary release of 100 broken windows in the pipe line, the last orders bell has not yet tolled on Idlewild.

You offered fans a chance to have their name on the sleeve of Post Electric Blues and get their hands on a copy of the record as a pre-release but would you be tempted to go down the route so many other bands are now by offering free streaming and album downloads?
I’ve never really been into giving away music. Music’s a living, that’s how we eat and have somewhere to sleep and like anything I think people should be paid for what they do. Maybe it reeks of desperation a bit but then some people thought what we did reeked of desperation, some of us were worried about how it would look, me personally, I didn’t give a shit. The reasoning behind it was that I felt people didn’t really care about albums anymore, I wanted a way to get people to invest emotionally rather than financially. If you want an album now you can just push a button and get it, maybe you’ll listen to a couple of songs but then get distracted. It used to be that if there was a record you wanted to hear you waited and it was all about the anticipation, that’s not happening anymore.

You recently played a series of gigs showcasing each album in full, which was your favourite?
‘100 Broken Windows’ was always going to be the night that people went kind of crazy. It still baffles me that record, I don’t understand why it’s so popular, I don’t think it’s our best record. It wasn’t even the most successful, in fact it was one of the least. I like the our current record because it’s more about who I am now, when you listen back to a record you made ten or fifteen years ago it’s like looking back at school photographs of yourself and no one likes doing that. I think ‘The Remote Part’ was a good middle record for us, finding our sound and being confident with it for the first time, the lead up to that record was the biggest transition we ever made as a band.

A lot of young London bands are championing a low fi post-punk dissonant sound now, you’re not ever tempted to go back to that?
Well we’ve never followed any trends and that’s just not what we are now. No one wants to see guys in their early to mid thirties doing that kind of thing. I think we embrace melody a lot more now and dare I say it, traditional folk music. I enjoy going to see people who are accomplished musicians who can play rather than those who, well, can’t. I mean, I used to love that, bands that are really shambolic and there is still something I enjoy about watching that. Idlewild is now much more the sum of five parts. Roddy and I used to do a lot of the writing on our own but it’s all of us now so it’s a different sound completely. Roddy and I have both gone off and done solo albums and other things, we’re a lot more open to having suggestion from other members of the band, and we’re much more collaborative now within Idlewild. At the start it was one foot on the gas and go, if you had one idea you kind of just vomited it out but now a days you’ve got so many more ideas and experiences and other things to draw from its sometimes more confusing. As time goes on you become different people and experience different things, big things happen in your life and you live different places, as you change as a person it changes the music.

Are you playing any festivals this year? Are there any you really want to play?
Not really this year, the thing is, we’ve done all these small boutique festivals for the last few years, we’ve played almost every one of them so it’s not like we can go back and do any of those. With festivals like Glastonbury, there’s just so many bands out there that fill up the bill now, I’d love to play Glastonbury but I don’t think there’s much room for us. We’re not a huge band and it’s not like we’re doing a comeback, we’re just still around and that doesn’t excite festival bookers. If we broke up for five years and then came back we’d probably get offered loads of festivals, maybe we’ll do that. We are talking about what we’re going to do and whether we might take a break, not split the band up but maybe take a hiatus and do something else for a while. We’ll see how it goes, we never really plan anything. There’s the ‘100 Broken Windows’ ten year anniversary release coming up and we’ll probably play some shows for that but afterwards I think we’ll stop for a while. So other than a few select ‘100 Broken Windows’ shows, this is the last tour we’ll do for quite a while. It comes to a point where you need to take a break and give the people who keep coming back to the shows a break.

Pearl Jam personally chose Idlewild to support them on the North America leg of their 2003 tour, were you a fan of theirs already?
In all honesty I’m not a big Pearl Jam fan, having toured with them I have a lot of respect for them and I found myself liking what they did, it just wasn’t my kind of thing. I think they’re fantastic live and incredible people. The rest of the band love them and are big fans. When REM asked us to tour with them I was over the moon. It’s always nice to be asked by these kinds of people but there’s not many bands we would consider doing that with. If it was something we really liked it would be worth while. This album tour is finishing off all the places we feel we haven’t played for a while and places that we’ve never played, after this we’ll take some time off to do just something else. I think we could make another record, a few records maybe, I think we’ve still got that in us but we have to be realistic as to whether people still buy records. I’m sure there are, we’ve got a really loyal fan base but we would never do one really quickly and stick it out just for the sake of it.

What do you think of free music sites like Spotify?
I’m not a fan of any of those kinds of things. I think it’s great for bands to get their music out but it’s just getting clogged up with a sea of new music. Finding something good is like trying to find a needle in a pile of haystacks. It makes it hard for bands to be working musicians, you either have to be really successful or do it in your spare time. It makes it difficult for bands to make really good records because you can’t get the money or time to spend on a studio or time to develop as a band unless you can do it full time. The first year we were able to do this full time we came on leaps and bounds. We’re lucky that we’ve got such a loyal fan base and were able to do the pre order. It is difficult for everyone now though, even us. There are plus points to it but it’s a lot of hassle. With things like Facebook and worrying if you’ve got enough fans on there, you want to be able to just make a record and not worry about things like that but you can’t think like that anymore. Something will have to give eventually, there won’t be any bands making any good records because they won’t be able to afford to. When I download music I pay for it, I prefer to go buy it at a shop or if I buy it off the internet, I’ll pay for it and they’ll post me a real record.

Do you take a lot of influence from other artists you listen to?
I think the place you’re in effects you more than anything and the people you’re around. The effect of what we listened to was something that happened more in the early days. I went through a period when I loved not listening to music or try not to listen to music as much as possible and the band did that too, they locked themselves away for a few months. It does affect you in that everyone plagiarises and steals subconsciously, you just can’t help it. Things stick in your brain and you just automatically play it but the more music you listen to the less that becomes an issue because influence starts to come from so many different places.

You’re now signed to Cooking Vinyl, a smaller, more independent label. Why did you make the move from EMI?
When we left EMI it was a mutual thing. We’d got to the end of our contract, we’d been relatively successful and we’d done what we’d wanted to do. I think they hoped that each time we released a record it would be the one that broke the million and we always kind of knew that was never going happen. For the last record we released with them we spent a lot of money because we thought if it’s really successful they won’t mind and if not, who cares, we’re leaving anyway. So we did the only rock and roll thing we’ve ever done and recorded in L.A. I think after that we were sick of playing the major label game and I think they were fed up with the fact we weren’t Coldplay so we mutually parted ways.

Finally, have you ever seen the Oukast film also called ‘Idlewild’ and what did you make of that!?
I was actually living in L.A. at the time, I got to my favourite record shop and there was this poster outside. It didn’t know anything about the film, we’d had college football font logo sweatshirts that we were selling on tour and there was this poster with exactly the same font. It just said Idlewild and a picture and then the date so I saw this poster and thought, are we supposed to be playing a gig? That’s in two days time, have they kicked me out of the band? We did have a joke about it saying maybe we should sue them because we did pay for the name in America but we just said to them jokingly that maybe they could do us a free remix of one of our songs. Nothing really came of it but then again, I don’t think anything really came of that film either.

A few hours later I’m back at the forum with an underlying determination to take in as much of this Idlewild performance as I can, knowing that it might be the last one for some time. I don’t have to struggle to do so; they hold my attention from opening to close. The set is punctuated with obscure classics such as Captain from their earliest EP, some of these earlier tunes do seem to bemuse a subdued crowd but the band are giving it stacks and these tracks have not lost any of their original verve despite Idlewild's more recent folk influences. For the encore they kick into ‘Readers and Writers’, the first single from the new album and it certainly has a lot of weight behind it just like each track from ‘Post Electric Blues’ earlier in the set. The last tune of the night is ‘Scottish Fiction’ from ‘The Remote Part’. With Roddy’s on stage announcement of an Idlewild hiatus earlier in the set I get the impression that there are a lot of people in the room willing this tune not to end, me included