IDLES’ Joe Talbot says it’s an "insult" to blues and reggae to hail them a punk band.
The 35-year-old frontman has explained that he believes it’s wrong to label artists and bands punk when they are inspired by the likes of calypso, reggae and blues, which came before the genre emerged, and were the "epitome of what subversive art in the face of adversity really truly is."
Speaking about their upcoming hip hop-influenced LP, ‘Ultra Mono’, to Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Joe explained: "One of the things I’ve always talked about, the influence that hip hop’s had on our music. But one of the things that always kind of got me, I’ve been saying for a long time, we’re not a punk band.
"When we started out, someone said, ‘What kind of music do you play?’ And I always said recession soul, because it was like … The idea, we were in the first recession and I was like, ‘It’s soul music, man’. Like beauty from ashes, there’s a building in Bristol in a predominantly Afro-Caribbean area that’s now kind of gentrified a bit, but not obscenely like you would see in London … where it said ‘Beauty From Ashes’. And I always thought that was a beautiful thing to think about, what is beauty from ashes? Grief, utilise your grief. You know what? The black community and the Asian community, the immigrants come over here and they make something.
"One, our country. Two, they make something beautiful from little, all ashes. I just think using punk as an adjective is a f****** insult to blues, to calypso, to reggae, to everything that came before punk that was the epitome of what subversive art in the face of adversity really truly is. Whereas it isn’t … Didn’t start in 1975.
"I’m not going to stand there and just suddenly start attacking someone that uses punk as an adjective, of course not. But it was always a point for me to say, ‘We’re not a punk band.’"