“None of it should be feared, it’s supposed to be played with” IDLES’ Lee Kiernan on the power of modding your guitars
You have probably thought about IDLES songs in a few different ways – as shoutalong anthems, certainly, and also of late as furiously loud declarations of love. But have you ever thought of them as detective stories? Well, for guitarists Lee Kiernan and Mark Bowen, often that’s how they begin – with a sound shouted across a rehearsal room and a race to chase it down. “It’s not one person, it’s everyone,” Kiernan says. “Joe [Talbot, vocals] will say, ‘I want the guitars to do this,’ and then he’ll make a noise. Me and Bowen will look up at each other, like, ‘Alright, let’s find it.’”
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In the decade since Kiernan joined the Bristol post-punk giants, he and Bowen have apprehended hundreds of these barked creative prompts. They even named their YouTube pedal show ‘GENKS’ in tribute to one attempt at giving grammatical form to the metallic clashes the band – completed by bassist Adam Devonshire and drummer Jon Beavis – have dreamt up. “It’s just a really fun way of doing something,” Kiernan says. “Make a noise, figure it out. Also, there are huge influences from all over the shop, sounds in other songs that pique your interest. You try to figure out how to make something like that work within what you do.”
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Player Power
This sort of open-ended, exploratory approach to writing has a pretty pronounced gear element, too. The duo are noted pedal-heads, with Kiernan recently collaborating with EarthQuaker Devices on a fuzz-overdrive model called Gary, and equally they expect their guitars to be able to keep pace with each excursion into the wild. “Bowen and I rely on pedals so much – that is how we create our sounds and how we delve into different worlds,” Kiernan observes. “So [it’s about] having guitars that can help support that, or support each other. Myself, I’ve never really worried about what a guitar is made of, or what resonance it has, necessarily, because it’s more about what can be achieved by the sonics.”
IDLES’ latest link up with Fender on the Player II Modified series – with a Floyd Rose Strat and SH Tele among the models hitting the market – is tied in with this philosophy. As its name suggests, these guitars offer a reasonably-priced foot in the door in terms of understanding what can be achieved by taking a top-to-bottom approach to getting exactly what you want out of an instrument. They arrive fitted with locking tuners, noiseless pickups, TUSQ nuts, push-pull switching and a treble bleed circuit. “They’ve got the switches in, you can change the dials, you’ve got noiseless pickups – you don’t necessarily have to mod it,” Kiernan says. “You have the option to try these things. And then, maybe, you can rip them out and do what you want.”
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Mod Squad
That last point feels crucial. These guitars might represent either a starting point or an end point depending on who picks them up. They might do everything one person needs them to do straight out of the box, but someone else might soon start to feel the itch to go full Sonic Youth and gut something. That urge is wedded in Kiernan’s mind to a fundamental Fender philosophy. “Modding means you can make more sounds,” he says. “You can explore more, you can push the boundaries of what that regular guitar is and what it can do.”
“I think Fender have always done it,” he continues. “They’ve always had that door open to modded guitars. You could take that neck off, put a different neck on. You can have a Strat body with a Tele neck. You can do what you want. There’s that Frankenstein idea with Fenders. We talked about this when we were recording – when does that start in your life? It just happens, you’re not really sure what you’re doing, you don’t know if you’ve fucked it up. Taking a neck off is actually a really scary thing, but you put another one on like, ‘That was surprisingly easy.’ None of it should be feared, it’s supposed to be played with.”
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Tangk Top
Interestingly, IDLES’ own sound has been subjected to the same process. Few would have predicted that they’d take so few moves to progress from the stomping, snarling debut Brutalism to the hip hop-inspired Ultra Mono or the texturally diverse love-in Tangk, which was produced by Bowen in tandem with frequent Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich and the returning Kenny Beats. The band have shown willingness to pull a reliably popular sound apart even when they don’t know what it’ll look like at the other end, which takes as much bravery as it does belief.
“There’s never been a ceiling,” Kiernan says. “Everything that has been written on each album has been written in a time where that could be written – nothing could have been written before. It’s a learned experience as you go. There’s no looking backwards, it’s always looking forwards. It’s not about what we can’t do, it’s ‘What can we do?’ Let’s keep pushing as much as possible.”
In practice, a lot of that learning is done in an environment that supports branching out as much as it covers other bases that might be left open by members’ abilities or proclivities. Kiernan knows that Bowen will pick up a thread he might not have noticed. Bowen knows that Kiernan will do the same. If something is eluding one of them, it might be within the grasp of the other.
“We’re always open to learning,” Kiernan says. “Whether it goes well… that’s just the bit you gotta get to. There are so many things I am terrible with. I’ll keep trying but, like, looping is just not in my understanding. It’s not the way my brain works. As for Bowen? It works very well. But that’s the joy – we don’t both have to do it. We can carry and support each other. We can share responsibility and move forward.”
Practice Makes Perfect
Since Tangk was released a little more than a year ago, the IDLES touring machine has ground back into gear in fine style. This summer, they’ll chase festival sets with two huge hometown shows at Bristol’s Queen Square before spending the early autumn in North America, opening for My Chemical Romance at Boston’s Fenway Park and hitting arenas with alt-metal titans Deftones. All the while, though, they’ll be figuring more things out. The songs from album five don’t lend themselves to crowd-surfing mayhem in the same way as past ragers, posing a different set of questions to Kiernan and Bowen, who are both anarchic on-stage presences.
“It is everything and nothing,” Kiernan says. “We rehearse so much so that the songs can be the absolute best they can be when we’re playing live. But then, when you get there, it’s not the same. I’m not standing still anymore, but I also found that a lot of the new songs require me to stand next to my pedalboard for basically the entire thing. It’s been challenging to play more musical and sonically different sounds that aren’t so aggressive all the time. That’s also a wonderful thing, those ebbs and flows in the set. We’re not always going crazy. There are all those bits that are calmer, or when Bowen’s stood with his rig and Moog pedal board. He’s not even playing guitar at that point, and I’m free to run around. We worked it out between us, sharing parts and moving things around so we can still perform and perform.”
This might all feel like evidence of a band in constant flux, but there’s one aspect of Kiernan’s approach that has not wavered: if a guitar is out on tour with him it must carry its own weight. Hardiness and durability are vitally important to IDLES, who regularly rack up triple digits in terms of shows in a calendar year, and that is another reason why they keep circling back to the Fenders that have been in their lives since they first picked up six strings in anger decades ago. “That’s everything,” Kiernan admits.
“I have lots of guitars that are very fragile,” he adds. “They can’t go on tour. It’s not because I’m scared they’re gonna break – I’ve always had the ethos that you can fix anything. I used to break my guitars all the time and then I would glue them back together. That is possible with Fenders, and that was always the point. But, as time went on, reliability issues happened. The stronger they are, the more ready they are, the better the show is. You don’t want your guitar to be out of tune for a whole set. That used to work for us at one point in our lives, but it doesn’t anymore. We want people to hear how much we care. I love my Esquire and my Teles. They’re tanks. My Esquire has been touring for about four years. That doesn’t sound like a long time but it’s 120 shows a year of getting in the crowd, dropping it, rolling around. It just keeps going.”
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