Guitars
Elsewhere, in the guitar department, things get a bit more complicated with Idles. Although normally a Fender Strat or Mustang player, on Crawler, Mark Bowen mainly used the Electrical Guitar Company’s EGC500, with its aluminium resonator plate. “Super hot, super resonant because of the aluminium thing,” says Bowen. “You can get really weird sounds. Especially when you’re going into DI, the charm of the guitar comes through.”
During the making of Ultra Mono, Bowen also began using baritone guitar, having tried out a Fender Bajo Sexto. “That got me really hooked on baritones,” he says. “So, Fender made me one. I don’t like Tele bodies, so I had it as a Strat. Then I used Hiwatt amps, mainly. I also got into using a Sunn Model T preamp, going into the Orange AD200. You’re stood in front of it, going, ‘This is AC/DC... come on!’”
Pedals played a large role in shaping Mark Bowen’s guitar tone.Idles’ other guitarist Lee Kiernan typically uses Marshall rigs, though on Crawler expanded out into a Fender Twin Reverb and a ’70s WEM. “Just anything that would be caustic and bright,” says Bowen. “A hangover from Ultra Mono that we did again on this album was using straight‑to‑desk DI guitars.
“A big thing that Lee did on this album was he kind of played a lot of snare rhythms, and a lot of percussion rhythms. And then as always with Lee, he was the top end violence that you get on certain songs, like ‘New Sensation’. He’s very prominent there.”
Bowen in particular is an avid collector of effects pedals, with his current favourites including Adventure Audio’s Dream Reaper (for fuzzy, modulated feedback) and Death By Audio’s Waveformer Destroyer distortion.
“Dream Reaper is kind of a feedback‑scape carver. So, basically you can create a lot of harmonic overtones in your feedback. You can really manipulate it with the filter. I’m still obsessed with the Death By Audio pedals, like the Reverberation Machine. If you ever hear a reverb on any of my guitars, that’s what’s happening. And the Echo Dream, especially the modulation, is still my go‑to.”
The only keyboards to feature on Crawler, in the brooding, slow‑building ‘The Beachland Ballroom’, were Mark Bowen playing Real World’s Yamaha C3 grand piano and Philips Philacorda organ.
“It looks like a piece of hipster furniture,” he says of the latter. “Everyone gravitates towards it. You’re sat in front of the desk, and if you go and sit on the sofas at the back, it’s right there in your eyeline. In‑between takes, everyone’s going over to it. I just started playing it and it really kind of had that Motown feel to it.”
Joe Talbot plays the Philips Philicorda, which Bowen says “looks like a piece of hipster furniture...”
Vocals
When it came to recording singer Joe Talbot’s whisper‑to‑scream vocals, the process was perhaps unsurprisingly an intense one. Bowen credits Kenny Beats with having the skills and patience to capture Idles’ hyperactive frontman’s performances on record.
“It was new territory for us because Joe was singing. Joe is the most impatient human being in the world in the studio. And he’s also the most hard‑on‑himself performer. So, he sings a line, stops, screams in furious anger, goes back, does the next line, stops. And that process he wants as quick as possible. So, while he’s doing his screaming, he wants you to get back to the line and do the next line.
“Kenny works with rappers and watching him process and comp vocals as he goes is one of the most incredible things. That was novel for us, having the recording of the vocal process run smoothly. Basically, everyone left the room and left those two to it. And every time you went back into them, they were just arguing with each other.”
After damaging a number of vintage valve microphones, singer Joe Talbot eventually settled on a Shure SM7b.
Mic‑wise, for the louder vocals, Talbot used a Shure SM7b. “Normally we’re trying to find a mic that will take his barking,” Bowen says. “And so on the barkier passages on this album, we’re using an SM7, that he can hold in his hand, which is a very useful thing for a singer like him. He is very dynamic in his movements. If we can get him physically moving around and gesturing, you get a lot more out of Joe. He’s very physically involved in his singing.”
For the softer or more melodic vocal tracks, the team attempted to use a range of vintage Neumann U67s and U87s on Talbot. “We broke maybe, like, £50,000 worth of microphones at Real World,” Bowen laughs. “It was so funny. They’re so old, they’ve got dust in them, and he’s so fucking loud. Like, he is the loudest vocalist I’ve ever heard. So, like, 60 years’ worth of dust is just getting bashed into this capsule.
For the softer or more melodic vocal tracks, the team attempted to use a range of vintage Neumann U67s and U87s on Joe Talbot.
“And again, we were using Distressor a lot with Joe’s vocals, because he’s a hugely dynamic vocalist. He really wants his quiet moments, and he really wants his loud moments and it’s very hard to negotiate that with his mics. Those vintage Neve preamps that they’ve got at Real World are stunning, into the SSL, which is kind of just accepting everything you throw at it.”
Bowen singles out “one amazing moment” during the recording of Joe Talbot’s vocals on Crawler, when late at night Kenny Beats handed the singer a Shure 520DX ‘Green Bullet’ mic (typically used for harmonica) to allow him to improvise over the bare bones of the instrumentation of ‘MTT 420 RR’.
“It was really dark, February in Real World, y’know, bay windows everywhere. We looped the song and he just started doing all these weird passages and finding what he was going to do in the song through that. And we just kept all those loops in there. If you listen to that song, in the background, there’s lots of very warbly passages and Joe kind of like running through where his range fits in the song. Very, very cool. Really big moment. Everyone got very ‘in’ on the song at that point.”
Finishing Touches
After all of the tracking was done, Kenny Beats and Mark Bowen spent a lot of time editing and working on the grooves within the files. “We really worked hard at the end of finishing recording,” says Bowen. “We did a lot of editing where we got the drums and the bass to sit exactly where we wanted them to. Kenny is very much about the ‘pocket’. Y’know, he comes from a place of funk and hip‑hop. Dev’s always way too far in front of Jon, so he moved Dev a little bit further after. And we did the same with the guitars. I’m miles ahead of everyone else all the time, because I’m just thinking about everything else to do with the song.”
The mixing of Crawler was then handed over to Craig Silvey (Portishead, Arcade Fire, the Horrors). “My God, talk about a mix engineer,” Bowen enthuses. “It’s an absolute joy to watch him work. He works all in analogue, and he’s got this Avid controller that’s controlling all his parameters, his barrage of outboard. He does everything on the fly.
“We’d worked a lot on the end of session mixes. We really wanted Craig to have a very, very firm sense of what the songs were and how we wanted them to sound. He listened to the end of session mixes, and just made an infinitely better version of those.
“His approach to balance is mind‑blowing. His mixes are so well balanced in the positioning of where things are in terms of the EQ, and where things are in the stereo scape. Just the positioning of guitars and instruments and the flow and movement.
“But again, we were doing a lot of that stereo manipulation in the studio ourselves. Y’know, a lot of the stereo scaping that we were doing on ‘MTT 420 RR’ was preserved in the mix. Craig was able to kind of clear up a lot of that.”
Mark Bowen and Jon Beavis at Real World’s SSL 9000K.
Bowen believes that the big difference in the mixing processes between Ultra Mono and Crawler was his and the band’s growing knowledge of recording. “Oftentimes, our songs have been transformed quite a bit from the studio through the mix process. Sometimes that’s been vitally needed. A lot of Nick Launay’s mixes really improved our sound and really captured the chaos of the band, by pushing the faders and moving things around.
“Whereas with this album, there was an accomplishment to what we had achieved in the studio, and a sense of confidence in just having done that. And I think for the first time we had that translated in the mix.”
From here, the road ahead is clear for Idles, in terms of the areas they choose to explore creatively and sonically. Mark Bowen, for one, has ambitions to push rock music into new and unexplored territories. “I think now that I’ve kind of grown in confidence as a producer, it means that we can write a hell of a lot more with production in mind,” he says. “Again, my goal is to reduce the steps from my head to your ears. I want to make the mode as coherent a pathway as possible. I’m really interested in this idea of us setting up our own studio and creating our own space.”
A key inspiration is Radiohead’s Kid A, even though it might not provide an absolute clue as to the future sound of Idles.
“Kid A was that moment where DAWs were coming in,” Bowen points out, “and you can hear that translation in things like ‘The National Anthem’ with Jonny Greenwood carving stuff up in Pro Tools. There’s scope for a band to do that again — y’know, a snapshot of where we are now with music technology. But using guitars as the primary oscillators. That’s my vibe.
“I want to push the boundaries of what we can do as a band without ending up sounding like a prog band. Still maintaining that rock & roll and that punk ethos, that hip‑hop ethos, but translating that across. That’s my next goal.”