Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles by Mark Archer, Milano, Ariosto Spazio Cinema, 05/11/2023

Filming music is easier than photographing it. Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.

Having a great film of a performance by a musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost bite.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself. It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain, Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and other people coming directly from the music business. 

Obviously the movie about the Idles was the most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to themselves, and about the present time.

We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become professionals.

This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an example.

This is obviously part of an old script, and if it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is not a critic.

The movie cover Idles since their beginning until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health just to name a few.

Hated by conservatives all around the world, even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their ‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself, Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.

Because of their approach to music, precise as a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being in the present times.

When Joe Talbot in an interview reported in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.

The fact that this approach to both reality and sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native Tahitians as good examples.

Far from wanting to create a Police of the morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we should not erase the importance of these attemps.