Idlewild at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea: 'Traces of the old fires remain' | Review
When you grow up with a band, it can be easy to forget how long they’ve been a part of your life.
But looking around the room at Idlewild’s Wedge gig, you realise that it’s the same for many others in the close-to-sold-out audience.
The Scottish rock band first rose to national prominence at the tail end of Britpop’s dominance in the latter half of the ’90s, but their spiky-yet-melodic racket owed more to American punk acts than The Beatles.
I recall seeing the band back then, and they were wonderfully messy, manic affairs.
Over the years they’ve mellowed, becoming more REM than Fugazi, but traces of the old fires still remain.
They’re currently touring their 10th, self-titled, album, and by frontman Roddy Woomble’s reckoning, he tells us this is their ninth visit to Portsmouth, which “isn’t bad, because it’s a long way from Scotland!”
They open with the title track of 2005’s Make Another World, a fine slice of anthemic indie rock.
It’s followed by a new one – Like I Had Before, but it’s the next song – early single When I Argue I See Shapes, which takes things up a notch.
These days instead of throwing himself around, Woomble often cedes the middle ground of the stage to co-founder, guitarist Rod Jones, who bounds around throwing all kinds of shapes, while the vocalist retreats to the wings during instrumental passages.
But this is a band who know which side their bread is buttered on – besides the material drawn from the, admittedly excellent, new album, the 20-song setlist draws almost exclusively from the chart singles of their first decade.
And what a run of singles – You Held The World in Your Arms, American English, Modern Way of Letting Go, and the always beautiful (even with Woomble’s slightly dismissive intro) Love Steals Us From Loneliness – are all present and correct.
They close the main set with the epic The Remote Part/Scottish Fiction, before an energised encore of three of those punkier numbers – Paint Nothing, A Little Discourage and Film For The Future.
You can still see glimpses of those scrappy kids, but like those of us watching, they’ve grown up – and they’re growing into middle age with class.