Idles at the Lisbon Coliseum: a rock rally in the name of love
“What the hell room,” I wrote yesterday afternoon, on the Idles’ Facebook fan group, or bassist Adam Devonshire, as a caption for a photo taken of the stage the band would climb to hours later. It is undoubtedly a beautiful room, our Coliseu dos Recreios, and it becomes even more so when, like this Friday, it is filled with people and emotion. Before the Idles took their places on a stage dipped in darkness, perceptible through spontaneous clapping and little of the affection reserved for the bands of the first part, he felt in the air. After years in which they surrender to the wait and more were two steps of surrender in wait and more were close to the steps of surrender, arms reaching out to hearts surrendering to the storm. Tonight, as on the best nights, the public left home to love, and the Idles were the perfect vessel for that generosity.
When a concert at the Coliseu de Lisboa is announced for the first time, the quintet with Joe Talbot and Mark Bowen, by Joe Talbot and Mark Bowen, they will take over as helmsmen of the band, as they explained in the interview with the band, as they will explain in the interview with “Ultra Mono”, their 2020 album. Exercise later and the two boys from Bristol return to Portugal, where they have already been happy four times, with another long duration to present: “Crawler”, edited last year and happy with reinvention , combining the weight that characterizes a band with a subtle exploration of textures and some electronic brushstrokes. Perhaps for more rounds, however, it was the first of the first two clubs, “Brutalism” (2017) and especially “Joy As An Act of Resistance” (2018), which introduced the Bristol group to the world, which sounded like more infallible this Friday will be.
After the concert, going up Avenida da Liberdade, we heard a couple simultaneously saying the ‘appearance’ of the same song, ‘Mother’, one of the hymns of “Brutalism”, in the statement: “I won’t be in ecstasy”, she . “I lost my voice on this one!”, he countered. It was without a doubt one of the highlights of the concert, as you would expect from a song that brings together all the strengths of the Idles: sumo, message, energy and some humor, all concentrated in three and a half minutes of & release. Another incredible moment for the audience, who started singing the lyrics before Joe Talbot himself, was ‘Never Fight A Man with a Perm’, the anticipated classic “Joy…” and one of the funniest earthquakes in recent years. On the slide leading up to, then, the most well-known person and informed days would mind staying at that moment.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the concert when a lot of us go back to the concert, the Portuguese, until the one that only had a concert for two years, the Portuguese: what I only said, there were fans and not Spaniards, “colossus”, petardo that opens “Joy as An Act of Resistance” and who, between threat and explosion, has been the opening honors for most of the concerts on this tour. “It’s coming”, Joe Talbot, and suddenly his voice becomes many, in a stage-audience union that will last throughout the night. Wearing the caged vocalist’s skin, the Welshman will proceed to the ‘splitting of the waters’ (splitting the crowd of spectators into two halves) for the celebration of the second half of ‘Colossus’, with tirades such as ‘I put homophobes in coffins’ to be sung at the top of your lungs. It’s silly, it’s gross, it’s beautiful. And it’s also chaos, especially in front of the stage, where mosh and crowdsurfing are accentuated, in a long-awaited release.
In the interviews they have given to promote “Crawler”, the Idles guarantee that its predecessor, “Ultra Mono”, received with some coldness by the critics, is on purpose. The band, they say, wanted to build an extended portrait of themselves in order to move away from it and follow a new path. Communication trick or not, the truth is that, on stage, the songs of “Ultra Mono” have taken a bath of aggression and blackness that only they look good. It is the case of ‘Mr. Motivator’, which makes the Colosseum floor shake with the sound of a thousand ‘kicks’, or ‘Grounds’, whose phrase “do you hear that thunder?” it sounds more and more like the sound of the Idles, a storm flown by a helicopter (Adam Devonshire’s bass) and the guitars or the sharps, or their replacements, by Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan. Back there, steady and stiff as a metronome, drummer John Beavis safely transports this noisy love song through roads as diverse as the serene ‘Beachland Ballroom’, a kind of punk-soul ballad dedicated by Joe Talbot to the bands from the first part , Witch Fever and Bambara, or like the thunderous ‘Divide and Conquer’ and ‘War’, which need no explanation.
Beating his chest, pointing at the sky (or the ceiling of the Coliseum) and twirling the microphone wire frantically, Joe Talbot may not be, like himself, the most gifted vocalist in the world, but he can handle the brutes remarkably well. of a concert with 20 songs almost all shouted, many of them in a cathartic way. This is the case with one of the tracks on “Crawler”, ‘The Wheel’, which he dedicates to his mother. In this lyric, Joe Talbot goes back to the times when, as a child, he begged his mother to stop drinking, to later reflect on how addiction is a cycle (the “wheel” of the title) that perpetuates itself in families.
Sad stories in songs that we can shake our heads to are one of the specialties of the Idles, as we can see right away, with the delirious ‘Television’, but their arsenal also includes beautiful quasi-ballads like ‘Hymns’, by “ Ultra Mono”, or the hilarious ‘Love Song’, which devolved into an itinerant karaoke moment. Midway through the song “I wrote a love song ’cause you’re so adorable/I carried a watermelon, wanna be vulnerable”, Joe Talbot began to scroll through a set that went through ‘(I’ve Had) The Time’. of My Life’, from the movie “Dirty Dancing”; ‘Linger’ by the Cranberries or ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by Mariah Carey. Meanwhile, his ‘special envoys’, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, roamed the audience, with the second of the guitarists going up to the stands, where he gently declined a beer offered to him.
It’s the more ‘clownesque’ side of the Idles who, while someone lost a shoe that avoids flying in front of the stage, went full speed ahead to ‘I’m Scum’, which Joe Talbot sang stoically with a boy (presumably member of your team) piggybacking. This was also the song in which the age of part of the audience was unraveled, when the band ordered the audience to crouch for a few complaints and many around us if they were the back, the knees and the fatigue of a week of work.
With the doors closed more or less carefully, however, two songs: the ones that burn with a bang at the door of the Coliseum. First there was a theme “about love, about empathy and about the incredibleness of our immigrants”, or courage, ‘Danny Nedelko’, one of the first hits of the Idles and is a pretext for us to see, with emotion, the Coliseum screaming the name of the friend Ukrainian band. It was here that voadora is noble of the capital more if the peace of a real rally at least once, with flying doves and making less of a crutch from the capital at times The exclamation point for was drawn with ‘Rottweiler’, “an anti-fascist song ”, introduced the band, before parting – no encore, no tape, with all the noise and intent in the world.
Exactly two years ago, we couldn’t resist peeking at home, there were 78 infected with covid in Portugal and the government ordered schools and clubs to close; also suspended football championships, in this country where football is king. On March 12, 2022, the world is an increasingly strange place, but in the midst of chaos we can already dance and receive the anarchic embrace of the Idles. You are always very welcome.
Alignment:
1. Colossus
2. Car accident
3. Mr motivator
4. Land
5. Mother
6. Medicines
7. Divide and conquer
8. Beachland Ballroom
9. Never fight a man with a perm
10. Crawl!
11. 1049 Gotho
12. The Wheel
13. Television
14. An Anthem
15. War
16. Wizz
17. Song of love
18. I am scum
19. Danny Nedelko
20. Rottweiler