BACK after a five-year lay-off which saw frontman Roddy Woomble forging a successful solo career as a melodic folkster, Idlewild are enjoying excellent reviews for their 'comeback' album, Everything Ever Written. Featuring a pair of contrasting singles in the pleasingly discordant Celtic funk rock antics of Collect Yourself and Come On Ghost's ambling, anthemic country rock, the LP displays a broad musicality and comfortable, vocal harmony-enhanced self-assurance that's a far cry the Edinburgh-bred band's thrillingly punky indie rock beginnings a la Captain, A Film For The Future and Everyone Says You're So Fragile.
Indeed, fans of their early records Hope Is Important and 100 Broken Windows (or even the comparatively more recent Make Another World) won't find much mosh-fodder on Everything Ever Written - however, lovers of the rootsy, folksier sound Idlewild explored on 2005's Warnings/Promises (which proved hugely divisive among hardcore fans at the time) will be in their element.
I put it to Woomble that the new album feels a little like a belated sequel to that decade-old record. Perhaps it represents the kind of direction he would have liked Idlewild to continue in, had certain elements fallen into place at the time? "That's kind of the way I see it as well," he responds. "I think after Warnings/Promises, things went wrong for a few reasons. One, our record deal with Parlophone ended, so we were an independent band again. Which actually was a positive thing, because we'd had all those years of having a major label behind us and now we were free to do what we wanted. "But what happened was that, although Warnings/Promises was us really progressing and we gained loads of fans with it, we also lost a lot of fans. It was a really interesting record and what we should have done next was, instead of me doing a solo record (2006's My Secret Is My Silence) to explore the kind of acoustic thing I was into in at the time, we should have combined that with what ended up being Make Another World. "That would have made an very interesting record. But we didn't, because the rest of the band weren't really that keen on doing something so folky. Personally speaking, I think that's the first time where we sort of stumbled a wee bit creatively."
Make Another World was by Idlewild's own admission something of a 'greatest hits'-inspired affair. Largely comprised of crunchy, melodic rock fare seemingly aimed at re-assuring fans who had seen the softer, more progressive sound of Warnings/Promises as a mis-step, it marked a point of no return for Woomble. "I definitely started wanting to do my own thing a bit more," he tells me of the period which saw him relocating to the Isle of Mull and releasing another solo record, The Impossible Song & Other Songs (2007). "Obviously the band carried on for a bit making a living out of touring (and recording the fan-funded Post Electric Blues in 2009) but it had become slightly workman-like. I think everyone started to kind of resent the fact that we had become that when there was no need for it.
"Having taken five years away, we've realised that we are still viable as a creative unit. And the new record was in the Top 10 in the midweeks when it came out (it eventually landed at number 20, Idlewild's highest charting record since - you guessed it - Warnings/ Promises) which is fairly unbelievable for us especially considering that we released it on our own label with a PR budget in the hundreds rather than the thousands. "So there's a real feeling of homespun momentum in the band at the moment, especially with the concerts going so well."
When we spoke, the 2015 Idlewild line-up - founding members Woomble, guitarist Rod Jones and drummer Colin Newton, plus new boys Andrew Mitchell (bass) and Luciano Rossi (keys) - had just played their first Scottish dates of the tour, a rapturously received two-night stand at Glasgow's ABC, Roddy's preferred venue in the country's 'rock capital'.
These gigs found the band playing five songs from the new album alongside a broad selection of other material, including outings for A Film For The Future and Captain, played back-to-back and given a mesmeric Krautrock-informed slant. "It was really good," Woomble informs me. "Obviously, we're a Scottish band playing to a Scottish crowd, so there's an element of excitement that goes both ways. We hadn't played properly in Scotland for five years and the concerts sold-out so quickly that there was a real level of anticipation. "I think we're playing the best we've ever played and doing a real mix of songs. I don't want to sound boastful, but I think everyone was quite surprised at how good it sounds with the new songs and the reworked old songs."
One early favourite given a new lease of life is Quiet Crown, one of Idlewild's first 'slow songs' which has now blossomed into a fully formed celebration of their current, vocally orientated musical prowess. "The vocal harmonies are a big part of the band now because everyone apart from Colin sings," explains the frontman and singer. "We also have Hannah Fisher playing with us too, so having a female vocalist also helps create a really nice sound. "That's kind of where the power in the band is now, to be honest. As the years have gone on, we've become less interested in that kind of fast-paced rock we used to do a lot of 10 to 15 years ago. Our priority is to play as many new songs as we can because that's what we're all most excited about. But there is still a good mix of our stuff in the set. "The problem now is we have quite a lot of records. We actually started off trying to learn 30 songs for this tour and slowly but surely we realised we couldn't be bothered playing about 10 of them. We were much happier learning the 20 songs we're all really into and concentrating on playing them really well."
* Idlewild, tonight, The Limelight 2, 7pm.