Interview taken from HermAphrodite #4?

They do have a lot of control over how they’re presented, and packaged.

Roddy - “Me and my friend do all the sleeve-art ourselves.”

And they are happy making this sort of music.

Roddy - “At the moment, definitely yeah.”

And eventually, they would like to work in their filmic background into what they’re doing.

Maybe direct their own videos. And possibly have some sort of projections onstage with them.

Roddy - “We’d maybe have some films behind us, when we had the money. But it’s maybe a bit early in our career for that - we have to start writing some more significant songs first... The songs we’re writing now are a lot more interesting, they used to have just three chords.”

Uh-huh ? Really ? I’d kind of been given the impression that when they started off they didn’t have any songs, that their sets were just one loud & long fluid mess of noise...

Roddy - “Everyone was just punching their instruments, and I just screamed over the top. It was just pure white noise, and our first gigs were just disasters like that. We’d always get pissed in the afternoon, and sober up by the evening so then we’d have hangovers by the time we played.”

It is still frenetic, their live performances - the band still abuse their instruments, Roddy still hurtles about and then curls up on the floor - but not quite so ear-splittingly terrifying.

Though he does feel that theirs was a good internship in the world of music, that it was a good way to learn. On your feet, as it were.

Roddy - “It makes it more exciting as well - there’s always some element of you’re not actually knowing what you’re doing but you pretend that you do. I think that the most exciting bands are bands like that. If you’re too competent at what you’re doing and you know how to write a song and find your sound... there’s too many bands like that, it’s not exciting.”

Though that doesn’t mean that Idlewild will necessarily lose an elemental excitement with their growing proficiency. Instead they will just finely tune it. It’s not quite a maturity that they’ve now reached in terms of their writing / composing skills, it’s more that their eyes have been opened wider and they can now better see what works and what doesn’t.

I try to explain to him how cool “Last Night I Missed All The Fireworks” would be if they changed it to ‘Last night I ate all the fireworks... weeeeee-phweeeeeeee’.

I try.

He grins, but... no. I think that that one appeals far more to me.

This is a song Roddy’s quite happy with in its original form, he’s just gonna leave it as it is.

And in a similar vein - whilst Idlewild are still proud of their initial releases, that’s more because of what they stood for than pure quality.

Roddy - “There are a few things which sound - to my ears anyway - a little bit cringeworthy. Like the first single. That’s a bit dodgy just because it’s so scrappy.”

And though you can find a re-recorded ( ‘double-speed’ ) version of ‘Self-Healer’ ( 1st single B-side ) nestled amongst the tracks on their mini-album, they don’t for the most part play the old stuff.

The band’s different now. Already, they’ve grown older.

In an interview with the NME at the end of last year, Roddy concluded ‘We’re not one of my favourite bands but we’re starting to sound OK... er, if you like that sort of thing’, which was his way of answering the journalist’s fishing for them to sing their own praises. He won’t. I just don’t think he’s that type of person. You’ll get no ‘best band in the world’ headline screamers out of him. Though he does like their music more, now. The newer stuff they’re finishing is more’n’more where he wants to be going.

Roddy - “I don’t want to be bragging. But I do like our stuff a lot, I do.”

And he’d very much like to see themselves play.

If I were him, I would too.

Actually, if I were in a band, I would want to see what I looked and sounded like onstage anyways. But them in particular, I can see how it would be quite nice for the band to be able to appreciate / look upon themselves up there from the external point of view.

me - “You do kind of get a bit ( pause ) freaky, onstage...”

Roddy - “Have you seen us before ?”

me - “Only on The Brats.”

Roddy ( shy grin ) - “My mum watched that - she just said I was going to do myself an injury. It was quite a scary concert that - we got a lot of stuff thrown at us by the heavy metal fans. But it was good.”

me - “Have you fallen off the stage doing this ?”

Roddy ( looks mournful ) - “Yeah.”

I reassure him that in the Cornerhouse, he will be fine. 20 cm. drop to the floor from the stage, maximum.

And then asking if before he goes onstage he actually needs to get into role;

me - “...given that you’re not quite on the floor screaming in a foetal position at the moment...?”

Roddy - “I do get asked that quite a lot. It’s that we’re all quite quiet, serene people... It’s just that when we go on we get really into it. There’s a real tension onstage, there’s always arguments - it’s quite sort of volatile music. But it’s not a performance, not like Elvis or Freddie Mercury, it’s just we go on and we get into it... It’s the only way we can get away with screaming in peoples’ faces.”

And get paid for it. And get away with it. Nice.

Last revised: 26/07/01