mattus.co.uk: the website of Matt Wood

Idlewild are a band who have never garnered the popularity and critical acclaim that their music deserves. After their early sound was memorably branded “like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs” by the NME, their subsequent transformation into more family-friendly indie rockers has been accompanied, in the most part, by a decline into rock obscurity. Mention Idlewild to the man on the street and you’re likely to win a baffled look, or else a reference to the vivid yet eminently forgettable hip-hop film of the same name; such is the failure of the Scottish quartet to permeate the wider public consciousness.

The problem with Idlewild is that they’re not quite sure who they are. It’s not that other modern rock bands have never changed their style – think of OK Computer next to Kid A, or compare the bullish early efforts of Travis to the wispy romanticising of Flowers in the Window – but that Idlewild are on the move too often to forge a lucid identity. It was precisely the success of OK Computer that allowed Radiohead later to experiment. Idlewild, meanwhile, never established themselves prior to this shift in style, and now nobody’s sure whether they’re sanguine punks or brooding melodic rockers. Faced with this dichotomy, A Distant History – which is basically a chronologically-arranged collection of the band’s B-sides – fulfils its potential to be a terribly disjointed and disunited compilation. But it does it so brilliantly that you shouldn’t care.

The tendency of the critics has been to approach this album from one end only. Rob Hastings is a fan of the ‘plaintive’ acoustic rendition of El Capitan towards the end of the album, but describes the band’s earlier, punkier efforts as ‘energetic… at worst, ridiculously inept.’ To Ben Marwood, meanwhile, the later tracks descend into a ‘borderline-Travis anthemic dirge’ in comparison with the excellent earlier songs. The point is that variety is a Good Thing; a point missed by the cabal of critics who decry Idlewild’s transformation and proceed to rave about the Stereophonics for spending ten years sounding exactly the same.

So have a listen to this album. Don’t come to it with any preconceptions, whether you’ve heard of Idlewild or not; try and appreciate the noisy, straight-out-of-school Queen of the Troubled Teens as much as the almost folksy Winter is Blue, and that acoustic version of El Capitan. You’ll see that the metamorphosis hides some degree of continuity – Woomble’s vocals have always been sincere, and the lyrics have always trodden the line between inspired and nonsensical – and hopefully also that it’s really rather good.

I’ve heard many justifications from people who illegally download music, not least myself. One of the most frequently espoused is that CDs are overpriced; the price of the record is disproportionate to the amount and quality of material the purchaser receives. As most of the money goes to the record companies anyway – so the theory goes – arbitrarily high music prices are screwing not only the fan but also the artist.

For somebody who loves music and dearly wishes that it were available more cheaply and without nonsensical usage restrictions, the In Rainbows experiment was a breakthrough. Radiohead, for the uninitiated, made a record after the conclusion of their recording contract and offered it for sale directly on their website, thus stripping out the middleman. But – and here’s the clever bit – the purchaser could set their own price, according to their estimation of the record’s worth; for me, this was £8.99.

Now it’s not a perfect system, I’ll admit. It would never work for smaller bands, and it would’ve been good to have some way to listen to samples of the record beforehand in a secure environment before choosing how much to give. In the absence of such a feature, many admirers donated significant sums simply in support of the band’s new business model.

Nevertheless, I was disappointed to read that the majority of ‘purchasers’ had paid precisely nothing for the album. Nothing? The key here is that Radiohead have nullified the traditional excuses for the non-purchase of both physical music (it’s too expensive) and of electronic music (its usage is restricted, it’s too expensive). This wasn’t just a slightly novel method of obtaining another free album; this was a matter of principle. If you were given the chance to value music yourself, and you chose £0.00 or its equivalent in your local currency, then you just gave the RIAA and all the other cronies who control the music industry every excuse to continue with the imposition of their arcane business model.

And that’s a high price to pay.