Where I Belong: Finding Myself at IDLES
By Will Ingman
To properly describe the IDLES show at House of Blues on October 12th, you have to start at the end. Raw-voiced and sweaty, IDLES frontman Joe Talbot spits out the final few lines of “Rottweiler”, the closing track on 2018’s Joy As An Act of Resistance, and offers a brief but heartfelt “thank you” to opening band Gustaf, who have long since joined the on-stage fracas, beating on spare drum pieces, screaming into extra microphones, or just dancing. Talbot does not say the final line of the song - “unity!” - because he does not have to. The scene on stage says it for him.
With a final nod to the crowd, Talbot grabs a water bottle from sidestage and vanishes behind an amplifier stack. Guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan fill the space left by Talbot, kicking their effects pedals, playing them like synthesizers, all while bellowing into microphones of their own. Bassist Adam Devonshire, faithful and unfaltering, picks the same quarter-note riff he opened the song with, and the speaker cabinets behind him shake the floor. Eventually, the “song” falls apart completely - Kiernan’s guitar is thrown to the ground and shattered into pieces, which Gustaf bassist Tine Hill hurls into the crowd. Bowen’s shoulder-length hair is matted with sweat and stuck to his beard. My ears are ringing. My calves are on fire. I can’t feel my jaw. This is the best show I’ve ever been to.
Almost four full hours before I nearly passed out from dehydration in the pit, I stood by myself, hands in my pockets, Ultra Mono playing in my broken AirPods, waiting in a block-long line for House of Blues to open its doors. In a simple black cargo jacket and grey jeans, I felt underdressed. I wasn’t wearing the spikes-and-studs, mohawks-and-leather uniform, there weren’t any patches sewn into my jacket, and my pitiful attempt at a mullet paled in comparison to the people around me. Something felt wrong. This was my scene - but it didn’t feel like it. Everybody here was so much cooler than me. They probably didn’t have to memorize song lyrics while waiting for doors. They probably didn’t change outfits three times before leaving because outfits one and two didn’t “look punk enough.” So I stood there, by myself, in line on Lansdowne Street, underdressed and insecure, and waited to be let inside.
When the venue finally opened its doors, I discovered that my early arrival had been rewarded with a coveted spot along the stage barricade. I’ll admit I was hesitant to take it. The barricade at a concert is a very special thing. It’s an all-access pass to the pit, an opportunity to take professional-quality concert photos, and a raffle ticket for setlists, water bottles, guitar picks, and other post-show detritus all at once. It’s a place you belong, not a space you occupy. And I did not belong — I thought. But the people on the barricade, by and large, weren’t crust-punks, or death-rockers, or mods, or skins. Most of them looked pretty normal. Maybe they didn’t have time to go home and pick out the perfect outfit. Some of them probably went straight from work to the show. But they all cared enough to get there early, and that made them authentic enough to stand where they were standing. Sharper than any Etsy steel spike, sturdier than any steel-toe, that commitment was an expression of punk rock spirit, and I was just as committed as anybody else on that barricade.
After a nail-biting hour of small talk, Twitter scrolling, and pre-show group pictures, the stage lights dropped, and IDLES’s opener of choice stepped out on stage in three-inch platform boots. Carrying short-scale basses, disassembled flutes, and road cases with rubber chickens and coffee cans, there was something immediately eye-catching about Gustaf. The blue-and-red fringed checkerprint pants, the sequin holographic jacket: Gustaf dressed like thrift-store funk put through a blender and they wore it proudly. Even with music as loud as their outfits, the band themselves seemed shy, soft-spoken, almost afraid of the crowd. It was pretty easy to see why; we were afraid of the same things. Gustaf wanted this crowd to accept them.
Over the course of their 45-minute set, the inherent charm and wit at the heart of
Gustaf’s music was allowed to take center stage. They tapped into the irreverence and humor of songs like “Dog”, a three-minute saunter about falling back in love with an ex-partner’s puppy. With every in-between song joke, every platform-boot high kick, every honk of percussionist Tarra Thiessen’s rubber chicken, Gustaf got closer to winning the crowd over. There was something very genuine about their self-described “weird punk”, something that made up for the lack of all-black clothing or smashed guitars. They were wholly committed, going out on stage with every intention of delivering the strangest, most energetic performance they could muster, which earned them the right to share a stage with IDLES. When vocalist Lydia Gammill, originally from a suburb outside of Boston, summoned her dad Jim from the crowd for her band’s closer “Happy”, the crowd didn’t hesitate to chant this 70-year-old man’s name. Nobody blinked — this was just par-for-the-course Gustaf by this point. All their eccentricities, their twinkling staccato guitar lines and coffee-can percussion only brought the crowd further into their camp. If punk rock is rebellion, then Gustaf were The Stooges. If punk rock is compassion, then Gustaf was Black Flag. If punk rock is authenticity, then Gustaf were the Dead Kennedys. I was enraptured by them, and that captivation made me belong.
Now, there’s something important to mention before this next section. I am not a dancer. I do not mosh. I’ve never crowdsurfed, and you wouldn’t catch me dead in a circle pit. And in a crowd of decently-drunk 30-year-olds, I felt like a human pinball when people started moving. Additionally, I had pulled a muscle in my neck a handful of hours before the show, so my one reliable dance move —move your head in time with the drummer and shift from side to side— was totally off the table. It didn’t present a significant issue during Gustaf’s set, because no one was moshing to a song like “Liquid Frown”, but I knew in my heart of hearts that when IDLES got going, I was in for it. So when Gustaf left the stage, and their vice-grip on the crowd’s hearts and minds loosened, I took a moment to gauge where I stood in relation to the people around me.
The pattern was mostly the same, if not better. More people meant more people who looked like me, who felt like punks but didn’t look like them. Plus, I noticed a very peculiar phenomenon: a lot of the old-heads, the ones who made me feel like a Hot Topic mannequin when I looked at them, weren’t on the floor with me. They were lining the mezzanine, overpriced beers in hand, looking down at us. That’s not very hardcore, I thought to myself, with newfound confidence and something to prove. Maybe they’re the posers, and I’m the real punk. I had turned my self-doubt outward in an attempt to justify it, because something had to be wrong in order for something else to be right. Somebody had to be a poser. There had to be conflict, because that’s what punk is about. It’s about conflict — right?
The stage lights dropped for a second time, and IDLES calmly took up their instruments. Suddenly, all of my posturing and peacocking meant nothing. When Joe Talbot paused during the band’s six-minute opener “Colossus”, when he dropped to one knee and asked, “Why don’t we split this crowd in two?”, I was worthless again. Baby’s first Wall of Death. I locked arms with a total stranger, staring someone else down as we waited for Jon Beavis to signal us with two bashes of his snare drum. What if I lost my footing? What if I tripped, and ate concrete while the rest of the crowd kept moving? Would anybody pick me up?
I didn’t have time to ask myself these questions. Two snare hits, and suddenly the room was spinning. I felt the blood go to my head, my feet moved on cue, and I was practically swallowed by a mass of chaos and violence as the second verse of “Colossus” reached its roaring, anthemic climax. My elbows went up reflexively as the ebb and flow of the crowd sent someone twice my size flying at me. My knees buckled, but something behind me wouldn’t let me fall. A total stranger, a perfect stranger, pressed their shoulder to my back and kept me on my feet. They shifted their weight, and now I was the pinball. The same person who nearly took me out almost hit the floor, and another perfect stranger kept them off it. That’s who I was in the audience with. Not posers, not punks, but perfect strangers. They didn’t know the first thing about me, but every single one of them would have picked me up if I went down.
It wasn’t just the people in the crowd, either. When a woman in the front row was knocked unconscious as they started the song “Grounds”, they completely shut it down to make sure security could get to her. Between songs, Talbot thanked the crowd for “making [him] feel safe to express [him]self.” Every bit of crowd banter was a declaration of his love and admiration for us, something I can only pray this piece reciprocates to the magnitude Talbot and IDLES deserve. And when a 12-year-old named Max from the South Shore asked to join them on stage for “Danny Nedelko”, their brotherhood anthem for Talbot’s friend and frontman of the band Heavy Lungs, they welcomed him on-stage with an extra microphone. Just like with Jim, there wasn’t a moment of questioning or doubt from the audience. Max belonged on that stage, he deserved the microphone handed to him by Talbot, and he earned that first shot of whiskey the bartender unfortunately refused to give him, despite the band’s protestations. No one looked down on him for forgetting a word here or there, because Max was a goddamn rockstar. Nobody lamented him for stage-diving feet first, because they knew he’d never done it before. The audience accepted him as the punkest punk in the room as soon as he stepped onto that stage. No studs, no leather, no torn-and-tattered band shirt from the ‘90s, but Max had so much heart, and so much passion, he might as well have been Iggy Pop the way this crowd of mods and moshers chanted his name, even after he disappeared back into the crowd. Max from the South Shore didn’t steal the show that night, he was the show. Every single thing about that concert can be encapsulated in the four minutes he spent on stage: the energy, the compassion, the acceptance.
So when Joe Talbot offered up that famous phrase once more, and the crowd split down the middle for “Never Fight a Man With a Perm”, I charged into that pit, ready for a perfect stranger to knock me down, and for another perfect stranger to keep me on my feet. Sure, there was conflict. Punk is about conflict. But that night, it was about rebellion, and compassion, and authenticity, and so much more. Punk is about Max, about knowing you belong somewhere even if you think you don’t. It’s about chaos, and the peace you find in the lull in between songs. It’s about Joy as an Act of Resistance. It’s about that word Joe Talbot didn’t need to say - “unity.”