The Remote Part by Idlewild

The Remote Part is the third album by Scottish rock band Idlewild, released on 15 July 2002. It received broadly positive reviews and is Idlewild's most commercially successful album to date, entering the UK album chart at Number 3 and selling 100,000 copies within a month. It is currently certified as Gold within the U.K. Vocalist Roddy Woomble notes that the band felt like "a collective of songwriters" during the writing process. Woomble credits guitarist Rod Jones with influencing the album's musical direction, stating that Jones "really started to take steps forward in terms of his guitar playing, and also his harmonies. I think he pulled the record in a more poppy way, as that’s the sort of musician he is – he loves bands like Teenage Fanclub and Yes and ELO and The Police."Touring guitarists Jeremy Mills and Allan Stewart stayed with the band during recording, and appear on the final track "In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction". They are also credited with writing "I Never Wanted" alongside the band. Following the album's release, Stewart later joined Idlewild as a permanent member, while bassist Bob Fairfoull left the band. At the end of "In Remote Part/Scottish Fiction", Scottish poet Edwin Morgan recites a poem entitled Scottish Fiction, which was written especially for the album. The album was performed in full on 19 December 2008 at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow as part of a series of retrospective shows, and again in London and Glasgow in December 2017 as part of 15th anniversary celebrations. As of April 2019, the album has sold 180,895 units in the U.K.