Walk On The Idlewild Side

Idlewild’s Irish bassist Gavin Fox has had a chaotic last two years, but it has also been the best 24 months of his life, from supporting his boyhood heroes Pearl Jam across America, to recording the new Idlewild album, Warnings/Promises in Los Angeles with legendary producer Tony Hoffer.

Upon joining the Scottish five-piece on leaving leaving Irish rockers Turn in January 2003, Fox soon found himself in the middle of a mammoth tour around Australia and America, before hooking up with Pearl Jam for a six-week jaunt around the US, which was something of a dream come true for the Dubliner.
“Myself and my pals, the first thing we all heard on MTV when we were kids was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Then we started buying Soundgarden records, Pearl Jam records, Alice In Chains. I suppose I was around 12 or 13 when the whole grunge thing started. I had pictures of Pearl Jam on my wall,” he recalls.
“I remember we were being asked whether we wanted to go on tour with Coldplay again or to tour with Pearl Jam. I was like ‘I know I’m only the new boy but we’re fucking going on tour with Pearl Jam.' It was incredible. But very different from what I thought it would be. How long ago was Ten released? You forget that these guys are all around 40 and it’s a totally different Pearl Jam now, but a far more interesting band as well. But it was like we all had a dad each on tour,” he laughs. “But seriously, it was probably the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ll never forget it.”
It was only when they settled down to write Warnings/Promises that Fox “really started feeling part of it and didn’t feel like the new boy any more”. Album written, Idlewild promptly relocated to Los Angeles for three months, (“It’s amazing what warm weather can do for your frame of mind”) where they rented a big house in the Hollywood Hills, which even had its own swimming pool: “We had barbecues on the weekend and we’d invite a load of bands around who were in LA.”
That all sounds very Counting Crows?
“It’s more Motley Crue,” Fox quickfires with a laugh, “but without the heroin and the blow jobs.”
So did he indulge in any celebrity spotting in LA?
“Myself and Roddy went out for breakfast one morning in this place he’d heard about and Meg Ryan came in,” he laughs. “Roddy’s a bit shy but I was like ‘Jesus Roddy, there’s Meg Ryan. Look at the lips on her: they’re massive’. And he was going ‘Shut the fuck up’. I was going, ‘Sure she watched us from the side of the stage when we supported Pearl Jam. She probably remembers us’ and Roddy said, ‘No she probably doesn’t. Now shut the fuck up’. I was totally like Paddy on Holiday.”
They did spot some well-known faces on the way to and from the recording studio, according to Gavin, but “the cool people I met wouldn’t be A-list celebrities”.
“We went out one night and hung out with (producer) Nigel Godrich, who was just a sweetheart,” Fox recalls. “We also met great bands like Modest Mouse, The Shins, Hot Hot Heat, who were all out there at the same time, so they’d come around to our house for parties, jumping into the pool and going night-swimming. It was just really good fun.”
Fox admits to being concerned that “the people who love to jump about and go crazy might be a bit ‘What the fuck is this? Have they turned into a bunch of grandads?’”, but this writer doesn’t think he has anything to worry about. Tracks like ‘El Capitan’ and the storming ‘I Want A Warning’ rock like proverbial motherfuckers. Gavin is particularly proud of the latter song.
“That was a song myself and Colin wrote when everyone went down to the shops one day,” he remembers. “I definitely thought we needed something pretty rocking on the album so I was fighting for that to go on the record but other people weren’t sure. But there are so many different tastes in the band regarding what we want on the record and what we think should be singles.”
So how do you decide on what’s going to be a single?
“Colin, our drummer, is really big and we’re good pals, so we just go round and threaten the rest of them,” he laughs, before admitting that they were all in agreement on 90% of the album. “Not everybody gets their own way, but that’s what happens when you’re in a band, especially one with five people. There was one song which was left off the album – it’s going to be a b-side – called ‘Gone Too Long’ and I was crying like a baby, begging for that to be on there. I think it’s like a two and a half minute Weezer single. But nothing else on the record is that straightforward.”
Each of Idlewild’s albums has been getting successively bigger. While admitting that Parlophone “have been amazing to Idlewild”, Fox admits that there is “a slight bit of pressure” for this album to out-perform its older siblings. “But we do think that it’s a really good record, better than anything Idlewild have ever done,” he argues. “I think we’re getting out of that whole indie bubble and I think this record is going to appeal to a much wider audience. Everyone who’s in a band wants to get better and more successful. That’s why people are in bands and I think they’re totally lying if they try to tell you ‘it’s all about the music, man’. Of course it’s about the music but you want to do well, like in any job. So there was pressure, but when we came home from LA, we listened back to the album and we think it’s a really good album and we’re all proud of it.”

Warnings/Promises is out on Parlophone Records.