‘Never Fight a Man With a Perm’: IDLES misunderstood anthem
Pounding the pavements of a disillusioned, post-indie-sleaze music scene in the early 2010s were Joe Talbot and co. Soon to be globally known as IDLES, the band’s adolescence was backdropped by a politically fractured Britain, hurtling towards new-found Brexit realities that ultimately fostered the sense of violence that exists within their early records.
Juggling the introspective and collective, in their seminal sophomore record Joy as an Act of Resistance, Talbot’s lyrics paint a visceral picture of the indignation within society at that point. From the record, one song, in particular, was thrust forward as a counter-culture anthem, for its jagged sonic profile incited something primal within a growing community of disenchanted music fans.
The album’s lead single ‘Never Fight A Man With A Perm’ thrust the band’s profile to a much broader level of exposure and to many, acts as the band’s signature track. A caustic guitar melody, paired with Talbot’s barking vocal, driven forward by a raucous rhythm section that completes a world of ordered chaos.
Every fibre of the song is provocative and utterly understandable, given its creative genesis. “It was a particularly tense point in the writing of that album” guitarist Mark Bowen recalled to BBC 6Music. Talbot’s response: “This album needs a knife”.
It was a succinct piece of creative direction that inspired the guitar hook running throughout the track. What follows is a now iconic opening verse and lyrical journey that allows fans to exercise their own anger, humour and wit while singing along. The opening line ‘Brylcreem, creatine / And a bag of co-ca-ine’ paints an unmistakable picture of modern British culture and slipstreams the rest of the record’s assault of masculinity in the age of bro-science and televised vanity.
While the track feels like a rotating gun turret opening fire on all facets of British society, Talbot has since explained its criticism is driven more from a place of introspection than widespread judgment.
“Lyrically, it’s one of my most understood songs”, Talbot explained to BBC 6Music. He continued, “It’s actually a criticism of me and where I was at in my time. Because I had a mouth on me, and I was a judgemental, sanctimonious, angry little boy trapped in a man’s body. And so I got beat up, and beat up, and it was more of a reflection on that and just how ugly that side is.”
You can identify that truth in Talbot’s statement by understanding the criticism formatted as an unreliable narrator, surveying the warts and all landscapes of post-modern Britain with a furrowed brow. And while that may be the case, it’s hard to fully believe that as the whole truth as Talbot’s description of ‘Topshop tyrants’ and ‘Walking thyroids’ certainly weren’t plucked out of thin air as a means of internally criticising himself and instead must be truthful portrayals of a societal dreg Talbot definitely detests.
However, a further lyrical misunderstanding exists within the song’s chorus. While many fans and admittedly Talbot himself belt out ‘concrete to Leather’ during the song’s anthemic climax, the real lyrics, as revealed by Bowen in the BBC 6Music interview, are actually ‘Concrete and leather’.
And perhaps, in that subtle difference lies the truth of the song’s overall meaning. The simple pivot of ‘to’ to ‘and’ tells a story not of someone walking tall, pounding the streets of Britain’s nightlife but instead of someone subjected to two separate but equally as harsh forces. While ‘Concrete to leather’ leads the outward-facing charge of societal criticism, ‘Concrete and leather’ grounds it back to the internal by describing the two oppressive forces that loom over the pits of toxic masculinity.
