Darren Aronofsky, the man who directed Requiem for a Dream, wanted to play Idles’ ‘Love Song’ as his first dance. His fiancé was like “get fucked”. When I met him on Jimmy Fallon’s show and he told me the story, I told him she had a point – I wouldn’t have it as my first dance either.
It was all very bizarre – he’s my favourite film director. We stayed in touch, and when he asked our band to do the soundtrack for his latest film Caught Stealing, it felt right. I felt like it should have been us – not in an arrogant way, but because the film is an allegory of someone running away from themselves which is something I’ve been writing about for five albums, since 2017’s Brutalism. It’s not a light film, but Idles has never been a light band.
Caught Stealing is set in New York in the 1990s so I wanted to put myself in that world, without Idles becoming a cover band. So I asked myself: what is it that built our band? What's in our DNA from the ‘90s? The answer was trip-hop, hip-hop, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy and Portishead.
If you listen to the soundtrack we wrote, you’ll hear that. ‘Cheerleader’ is almost a Chemical Brothers song, and ‘Run Rabbit Run’ has a funk break that could be on their 1997 album Dig Your Own Hole. ‘Coper’ could be on Portishead’s Dummy – it wouldn’t make the cut, but it’s in that world.
New York in the 1990s was fucking gnarly. It was a really dangerous and violent place – probably the most violent period in recent history, from what I’ve been told. This obviously affected the arts. There was a real subversiveness that ran across music and art, especially the zine culture and hardcore scene. The reason Idles is more popular in New York than London is, I think, because we resonate with that edge – I get recognised more in Brooklyn than I do in Bristol. Something fits.
I went to America for the first time when I was 16, in 1999 or 2000, just after this film is set. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in his prime and if you ask me he was a real piece of shit. He was focused on ‘cleaning up the city’, and in doing so forced out lots of drug addicts and homeless people, making them disappear.
But culturally the one thing that sticks out was the New York hardcore scene, which is something we completely align with: it’s a positive mental attitude with a violent edge. It’s the idea that life is painful and there’s nothing weak about seeking love, companionship and empathy.
They’re holding up a divisive flag in order to protect themselves, but what they don’t know is they’re burning their village to the ground
Our next album is all about togetherness and our philosophy of communion. It takes a village to bring up a child and it’s not just about the child: we’re all children and our emotional state is something we need to nurture.
Right now, all these people putting up Union Jacks and St George’s crosses are not thinking about community. That flag is not about the people in this country. It’s about self-loathing and a fear of everything that’s been stripped from them by a fascist government. They need someone to blame so they’re holding up a divisive flag in order to protect themselves, but what they don’t know is they’re burning their fucking village to the ground.
I thought recently about what my mum would say if she was still alive and seeing the Labour Party leaning more and more to the right. If she suddenly crawled from the grave and was like: “Can’t you remember how lucky we were when our NHS was working, before it was all sold off piece by piece? What do you mean, capitalism is so bad that there are billionaires sending idiots to space yet children are starving in a developed country? What do you mean, Israel is being allowed to annihilate a people?”
I think it’s important to illustrate how lucky we were and give people a sense of purpose in not going back to the past but working towards a state where we have something to be grateful for as a nation.
There’s nothing more dangerous to a fascist government than people getting in a room and celebrating each others’ differences
We have more in common than we realise. I recently played with the Gorillaz keyboardist Tarik Saeed, and he told me we were peers even though we’re from completely different backgrounds. He’s Arab Muslim and I’m Catholic Welsh, but we have everything in common because we have love and music. There’s nothing more dangerous to a fascist government than people getting in a room and celebrating each others’ differences. It’s a beautiful thing.
Damon Albarn is a brilliant man who’s cultivated something over many decades that celebrates difference and culture, which allows people to come inside and melt and be one thing. You see yourself in each other because music is a universal language. Yes, that’s a cliché but it’s true.
I keep saying on stage: don’t listen to the internet. You are seeing what the algorithms want you to see, which is a divisive narrative. The powers that be want you to be scared because scared people panic.
But you don’t need to panic because there are beautiful people everywhere and they all want love. They all have that inner child that needs to be nurtured and kept safe, and you can’t do that if you’re stuck on your phone seeing the world on fire.
It’s not too late to stop Israel’s death machine. It’s not too late to stop Reform’s death machine. There’s always time to stop and congregate, you’ve just got to keep trying.
Joe Talbot is a Welsh singer and vocalist of IDLES
