The day after IDLES played the Agora this year, the band set up shop for Variety's "Live From My Den" series at the Beachland Ballroom to perform the song inspired by the venue.
IDLES has played a couple of memorable shows at the club, as fans know, and frontman Joe Talbot talked to Mojo earlier this year about what inspired the track: “[It's] the most important song on the album. There's so many bands that go through the small rooms and dream of making it into the big rooms. Being able to write a soul tune like this made me go, fuck — we’re at a place where we're actually allowed to go to these big rooms and be creative and not just go through the motions and really appreciate what we’ve got. The song is sort of an allegory of feeling lost and getting through it. It's one that I really love singing.”
"While this song was supposedly written about the band’s struggle for success and seeing it manifest itself symbolically at my venue, that in and of itself speaks to the passion of popular music culture and its capacity through determination. These punk rock Brits from Bristol played an impressive attention-getting show in our small 148-capacity tavern in March 2018 to 110 people as did acts before them like the Blacks Keys, the White Stripes, Drive-By Truckers, the Hold Steady, the Decemberists, Lucius, Trampled by Turtles, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Joe Bonamassa, the Milk Carton Kids and on and on. After their tavern set, they wandered through the kitchen to gaze into our bigger 500-capacity ballroom with its old-school proscenium stage and longed to conquer that room.
"And they did, on May 14, 2019, selling it out and turning the night into a sweaty moshpit of mutual love with an enthusiastic audience. It is in those moments, when audience and performer step into a transcendental monism, where the magic happens."
The IDLES episode of "Live From My Den" debuts in full on Dec. 2.
Watch the Beachland performance of Beachland below.
