idlewild - chandelier

"like a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs" was the rather glorious description of one of idlewild's early shows that first caught my attention back in the days when i first started reading the pages of the new musical express, amassing piles of now dogeared clippings on yellowing paper, conscientiously cutting out every advert for or picture of any bands that i loved to adorn my bedroom walls, schoolbooks, the family cats, anything i could find really. my mother once told me if i spent half as much time doing my homework as i did sprawled on the front room floor with ragged copies of the nme and melody maker and the kitchen scissors i would have been the best pupil in the school's history. she may have been right, but that's beside the point; i remember reading this review of an idlewild show while my family watched emmerdale farm on a winter night in what must have been 1996(?) and i knew just from those words that this was a band that i wanted to have a large part of and so i saved my lunch money all week, bunked the train from leafy suburbia to london in the pouring rain and emerged a few hours later sodden, and with this delightful seven inch in a rough trade bag for my troubles. i got home and had a furtive cigarette out of my window to celebrate whilst the glorious riot of noise exploded around my room, jumping around on my bed, and listening to chandelier still makes me want to do that even now.



idlewild - chandelier.wma

a great track which never featured on any of their albums, this version is a little scratchy as it was my favourite record for a long while, at a time when i had little respect for boring conventions such as keeping records in sleeves and the like, but i think it adds to the flavour, i'm sure you could find a cleaner mp3 somewhere if you desperately wanted it. but you would be a philisitine. anyway, idlewild were a band from scotland who started out pretty small and ended up pretty big. around the time that this came out they were very young and shambolic, roddy woomble the singer claiming that he'd never had any desire to sing or do anything musical before he ended up in idlewild. the other quote about them that sticks in my mind is roddy saying that he "wasn't an entertainer y'know, i wasn't one of those people who walk down the street singing or anything" which i always found quite interesting, but there you go; later in life they developed a much more refined style which in itself has its charms, but this is them at their best in my opinion. i have heard that the band is still together but their major label dropped them which is a shame, although that might well be old information by now. anyway, hope you like the mp3. i'm off for lunch.