SQUID | INTERVIEW
Carl Marsh chats to Ollie Judge (lead vocals and drums), and Laurie Nankivell (bass and brass) from Squid, a Brighton quintet making bold strides in the realm of British guitar-ish music. Their debut album, Bright Green Field, is out this week.
Why have you not included any of your previously released standalone tracks on your debut album; you’ve got quite a few you could have used because it’s pretty rare of a band to do that with their first release?
Laurie Nankivell: I guess we wanted the album to feel really cohesive. It felt like the stuff we were writing at that point would work together on an album. The earlier stuff didn’t feel as relevant to put on, within the context of the new songs.
Ollie Judge: It’s quite a nice treat as well for people who’ve been waiting for it for a long time – to have a whole album full of stuff that hasn’t been heard before.
You probably get this all the time, but for me, it’s pretty hard to pigeonhole the sound and musical genre of the band. If I had to sum you guys up, I’d edge towards you sounding like a mashup of Black Grape and Aphex Twin. Am I close?
Ollie: That’s a new one, and I really like that [laughs].
Laurie: Nice, that’s great.
I say that as you experiment with music and sound so much – it seems you use whatever instrument or object you have in your reach at that specific time?
Ollie: Yeah, quite a lot. It’s so easy to record what we can live and then spend days then putting as much stuff on it as we want! Using [producer] Dan Carey’s toys in his studio is always the best part of the recording, I think.
I’m curious to know how the album was recorded; it must have been quite different for your producer?
Laurie: We were with Dan for four weeks; the first week and a half, two weeks was when all the live tracking was done. Week three was the experimental week, and then week four was just mixing and adding odd little bits. Oh, and also we did the strings and the horns quite late on as well, so we had a couple of days for those in week three or four.
An experimental week? Now I’m all ears!
Laurie: There’s a video I’ve got of this big spring on the roof of Dan’s studio where at one point he got really excited, saying: “Yeah, let’s use the spring, use the spring!” And I’ve got this video of Arthur [Leadbetter, keyboards/strings/percussion] hitting it with a triangle beater: he was hitting it so hard, and with it being hooked up to some weird-ass reverb, the spring just fell off and hit him in the face. [Ollie laughs] That’s on part of the recording on [Bright Green Field song] Narrator, somewhere near the end.
Ollie: I wasn’t involved with it, but there was the sound at the start of [another album track] G.S.K., and it’s Arthur and Dan again. Arthur always seems to be in these kinds of experiments and stories. He and Dan were going around trying to find the perfect piece of metal to hit with a beater for the sound at the start of the song, and I think it ended up being Dan who took off the metal plating on his massive mixing desk and used that to hit and to make that sound. So yeah, it’s just a lot of hitting metal and is quite macho, really!
For me, you can’t get more macho in a band than being the drummer and the lead vocalist at the same time! How do you manage it, Ollie?
Ollie: I don’t really know – it’s all I’ve done in a band, so I didn’t know any different. When I was a teenager, I got to the point with guitar where I could manage to sing and play at the same time – but I find the idea of that incredibly hard. It just came quite naturally to me, I guess. It’s a good workout as well – for someone who doesn’t do any exercise whatsoever, it keeps me in check…
Squid’s Bright Green Field album is released on Fri 7 May via Warp Records. Info: here. Squid also play the Tramshed, Cardiff on Sun 3 Oct. Tickets: £15. Info: here
words CARL MARSH photos HOLLY WHITTAKER