YOU might expect the frontman of a band about to celebrate their 25th anniversary to release a reworking of an old hit with a flavour-of-the month producer or guest artist; something dependable to remind fans to buy a gig ticket or vinyl re-release.
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But Everyday Sun, the dreamlike new EP from Roddy Woomble, stands alone from both Idlewild and his previous solo work.
What provides a link to Interview Music, Idlewild’s kaleidoscopic current album, and this largely ambient work is the psychedelic video to lead track Everyday Sun.
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Shot by musician/designer Danny Grant on a video synthesizer from the 1980s, its colourful, blurry images of cities, empty spaces and Woomble on a ferry – possibly to his Hebridean home – are the perfect accompaniment to the vocalist’s poetic fragments about impermanence, memory and the constancy of nature.
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“Danny did the video to [Interview Music’s] There’s A Place For Everything,” says Woomble, talking a few days ahead of the announcement of Idlewild’s anniversary dates, tickets for which go on sale tomorrow.
“His visuals accompany the song, which has that idea of the meaningful and the meaningless, this constant wave of things crashing through your life, things that give it its purpose,” he continues. “You get that a lot when you live somewhere rural, remote. You look at these landscapes and they can be the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen and they give your life context, whereas other days you completely ignore them as you’re absorbed in your own thoughts. It’s the same place you’re looking at but you see different things in it. That’s what I was alluding to.”
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The EP was inspired by a concert in Abernethy Nethybridge in the Cairngorms where Woomble and cellist Oliver Coates composed music to play while the audience arrived.
“It was in a teepee outside of a forest, it was quite magical,” says Woomble. “Oliver recorded my voice reading lines from a notebook and put it through an algorithm, so the meaning changes throughout the track. If you stick with it, it’s a rewarding listen.”
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Whereas Coates and Woomble’s hypnotic 17 minutes is the EP’s final track, the bulk of this mysterious, lulling record was constructed online between Woomble and frequent collaborator and Idlewild bandmate Andrew Mitchell at his Dundee studio. The multi-instrumentalist, known for his instrumental work under the alias Andrew Wasylyk, will accompany Woomble on this tour of lesser-visited towns and venues.
“Andrew would send me basic beats and I’d find words and maybe work out a loose melody,” says Woomble. “Some of them don’t have melodies. Rather than it being about my vocals and my lyrics, I wanted my voice to be part of the music.
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“We actually took a lot of words out while we were passing things back and forward to each other. It was fascinating to have that dialogue. Removing a lot of lyrical lines meant it lost a lot of its meaning, but it gained a lot of space.”
March 26, The String, Lerwick; Mar 28, Webster Memorial Theatre, Arbroath; Mar 29 Arts Centre, Paisley; April 10, Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine; Apr 11, CatStrand Arts Centre, Castle Douglas. Tickets and pre-orders for the Everyday Sun EP, released on March 27 at www.roddywoomble.net
Tickets go on sale tomorrow for Idlewild’s 25th anniversary dates, including November 14, Usher Hall, Edinburgh via www.idlewild.co.uk
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