One minute's walk from Joe Talbot’s Bristol home is a food bank. These days, he says, the queue regularly snakes all the way back to outside his front door – as people, wearing protective masks and standing at a safe distance from one another, literally risk their lives to try and feed their families. It’s the sort of scene you’d expect in a dystopian film, but this is the increasing reality in communities all over the UK. “It’s savage,” says Joe. “To have people going to charities for food – it’s not government subsidiaries, they’re charities – is dark.” IDLES’ frontman wrote the song Carcinogenic about these struggles, and how they’re compounded by advertisers telling these same people to eat better, look better, be better – leading to what Joe describes as “a cycle of blame, shame, and&...
