Queen Square, Bristol
1st August 2025
Photography by Sam Wilson (@samuelwilsonphotography)
Charlie Pinhey
Music journalist & online sub-editor for CLUNK Magazine based in Bristol. Fumbling around on social media trying to tell people about my interviews and reviews. Follow me @charvawritesstuff
IDLES kick off their first of two UK shows in Bristol’s Queen Square with support from Soft Play and Lambrini Girls
“Split the crowd from the left to the right all the way to the back,” Joe Talbot spat like a disgruntled teacher, “please.” He finished with a flourish of soft sarcasm. Shocked into action, the crowd parted once more as they had for Soft Play and Lambrini Girls several times each earlier in proceedings. Feet scraped sideways, trawling the ground and rippled back through the crowd.
Friday was the first half of IDLES’ Block Party shows at Queen Square, Bristol, for their only UK tour dates of the year. And what better place for the band to play than Bristol? “Just round the corner from here is where I went to uni, where I met the most brilliant people and decided I wanted to make music,” Talbot continued after ‘Divide and Conquer’. He pointed off to the far corner of the square, “And over there is where I got arrested.”
IDLES’ DNA is woven into Bristol. Walking down to Queen Square, I stopped at a mural of the band next to a laundrette in Bedminster. It’s a few years old now but has a conductive property that captures some of IDLES’ magnetised charge. ‘It goes and it goes and it goes…’ Like the mural, the same charge existed only tenfold in the crowd on Friday, turned on by Lambrini Girls and Soft Play, and again when Jon Beavis’s drums kicked in for ‘Colossus’. Like one of many fizzing molecules in a grassy petri dish I was ready to collide, and I was ready to love.
IDLES hammered through their twenty-song set with fire, rage and a healthy dose of reflection, but it was the words spoken in between that were particularly uplifting and simultaneously poignant. Joe Talbot took a beat to dedicate ‘Mother’ to his father who taught him how to be loving, kind and be creative. He also encouraged anyone in the crowd to speak up about addiction and mental health issues, “speaking about it might save your life or someone else’s life.”
Talbot’s words washed over the crowd and resonated in the same way as Soft Play’s ‘Everything and Nothing’ which also tackles loss. Live, the Soft Play track was stripped back with Laurie Vincent playing a mandolin, its softer tones allowing for Isaac Holman’s guttural vocals to take centre stage.
The show was also punctuated with support for Palestine with QR codes shone out to the crowd for them to donate to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. “Free Palestino!” came the shout from the stage and the crowd together whilst people donated what they could.
Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan dove into the crowd a few times and rocked out with Aiden, a young lad from the crowd, brought on stage to play guitar for IDLES’ final track ‘Rottweiler’. Adam Devonshire’s bass thrummed throughout as the mosh pit swirled into its final maelstrom and the walls of the buildings surrounding the square seemed to shake for their final track.
As well as being a homecoming of sorts, it was poetic to have the gig at Queen Square- one of Bristol’s commercial hubs; laying bare IDLES, Soft Play & Lambrini Girls’ dogged determination for foundational change, their voices unified and powerful in the wake of global turmoil.
Photography by Sam Wilson (@samuelwilsonphotography)