Squid
‘It was a happy accident’: Ollie Judge of Squid on touring, covid-19 and his creative process.
Holly Whitaker
Before they kicked off their Fieldworks tour in Falmouth at the Cornish Bank, I caught up with Ollie Judge, lead singer and drummer of leftfield psychedelic punk outfit Squid. Like all of us, Squid have had a strange year. Forced to kickstart their career mid-pandemic, they have grown used to challenge. But, that doesn’t make the next few months any easier. They’re now faced by the prospect of catching up on 100s of dates across the world as well as completing all of their new dates.
Squid burst onto the British music scene in 2018 with their song The Dial, and shortly afterwards released their hit single Houseplants. Since then, they’ve established themselves confidently in the exciting new British guitar-band scene.
In June they’re due in Norwich to play St Andrew’s Hall, as part of their Fieldworks tour, and in July they’ll be at the Norwich Arts Centre for a sold-out restriction-free live show.
Hi Ollie, thanks for agreeing to talk to us. First of all, how are you?
Good! We’re playing a socially distanced tour at the moment, and it’s quite a strange feeling. We played a gig last night and it’s a lot more people than I have seen in a while. I think there were only about 40, it looked like a lot more people than there really was.
Was it nice to get a reaction to all of those songs for the first time?
Yeah there was a lot of waist up dancing which is nice. I think we only played like three tracks from the album, and the rest were kind of new ones. But yeah, people were loving it. Especially Pamphlets, people went crazy for that. But not too crazy!
Picture Credit Holly Whitaker
So, this gig is part of your Fieldworks tour, what is the thought behind it? Is it just practice for yourselves, or is there a bit of theory behind it?
We’re just playing all the new music that we’ve been writing over the past few months. Though we’re quickly realising a lot of it is kind of half written.
If we weren’t nervous enough playing a first show in just over a year, we’re also going to play completely new material. So that’s been really fun. It’s just been road testing the music because we haven’t had chance to do that for a while.
As a band you’ve always been moving around loads of different locations. At first, you were tipped as a Brighton band, then you’ve also spent a lot of time in London, and at the moment you’re living in Bristol. Do you find that travelling quite useful? It seems with Fieldworks travelling is part of the creative process.
Yeah totally. On this tour, because we can’t play big venues, we thought it was a great opportunity to go to a lot of places that you don’t usually get to see. It was just so we could play all these cool places that are a bit off of the beaten track and see what that does for the music. I think we are quite affected by our surroundings.
Has releasing an album during the Covid-19 pandemic affected your creative process at all. It’s obviously radically changed the rhythm of releasing music.
We’ve never really recorded an album before, so we’re not really used to that whole thing anyway. I think it’s quite nice releasing an album and letting it kind of live for a little bit before relentlessly touring it. People can get used to the tracks and know what to expect. Although we are playing catch-up with all the tours we had booked. We’ve got double the amount of tours to do in little time, which my girlfriend is probably not gonna be happy about!
Is it nervewracking touring again?
Yeah totally. Just from going from zero to normal is going to take a bit of adjusting. Luckily on this tour we get lots of days off. We get to stop and take time off and go home, so it’s not too bad. It’s easing us into it, which is nice.
Picture Credit Holly Whitaker
As a punter, I am quite nervous as to how I’m going to react, I haven’t been in a room with loud music for quite a long time, do you have that same anxiety too?
Yeah totally. We got on stage last night and it was a bit like ‘Oh gosh... this is really weird.’ Apart from rehearsing I haven’t heard any music through a proper PA for a long time. It was quite nice to hit the kick drum and have that oomph sound rattling my body.
Do you think it was a good year to release an album? You didn’t have the same time to gauge reactions, but you did have time to really dedicate yourself to the writing process.
It was definitely strange, and again quite nerve-wracking. A lot of the music on the album has never been played live before. It never had any crowd feedback, so we were going in blind in that respect. Yeah, really nerve-wracking but kind of quite exciting. It was an album full of songs that people haven’t heard before which was kind of nice.
I’ve never released an album before, but I’ve really enjoyed the process. Like, this seems normal to me, but I guess it was pretty intense trying to get all the shit together for the album. I could imagine it being way more intense if we had to do it during normal times.
Listening to the recent album, you can’t not touch on the production work. Obviously, Dan Carey at the helm, and over the past couple of years he has produced some very notable albums, Dogrel, Schlagenheim, and of course Bright Green Field. Listening to all of them, a really distinct dry quality comes through, it allows all of the instruments own voice to come through. Would you agree with that?
You’re definitely right about the dryness. I can always tell that it’s a Dan Carey production just by the snare drum.
It’s kind of strange though because he does such a crazy mix of things, but he’s got his own style with all of them. He produced Slow by Kylie Minogue, and the beat is sogood. It’s also very reminiscent of his techno music, but it’s a full-on pop tune. He’s got his own style really, he’s a bit like a chameleon, he can do anything.
Do you think Carey’s production approach allowed certain qualities to come through on the album that otherwise wouldn’t have?
We haven’t really worked with anyone other than Dan. So, trying to imagine what it would be like without Dan is a hard thought. But I think his fingerprint has kind of been on everything we’ve done. I think we definitely all egged ourselves on a bit trying to do weird and whacky stuff.
You said you can always tell it is a Dan Carey production when you hear the Snare drum. The drums and snare are quite the forefront for Squid, so does that have a big impact on the dynamic between you?
Yeah definitely, I think I remember the first time we heard a mix of The Dial (the first track we did with Dan) and I’d never heard my voice that loud before and I absolutely hated it. But I grew to like it after a while.
Lots of people say that Squid are a post-punk band, do you think that’s true. Or is that a bit inaccurate?
I don’t know, I’ve never really understood putting a ‘post’ on the start of a genre. I think basically what it means is that you fit into ‘punk’, but the ‘post’ gives you free reign to do something a little bit out of the confines of that genre.
I always think about post-dubstep when that was a thing. Post-dubstep people always said they hated that term and I don’t necessarily hate post-punk, because I love a lot of post-punk music, but I just don’t really know what it means. People just need something categorised in order to understand it I guess, which is fair enough. But I don’t know, we get asked that question quite a bit and I just don’t really know what to say. As long as they like the music, I don’t really mind.
On the album, I noticed some meditative elements, and Louis curated a regular playlist called Squiet Please. On the album, that ambient dimension really comes through. When I first listened to some of your Eps and singles, it didn’t really come through as much as it does on the album.
Yeah, I think so. Most of us in the band, especially me and Louis in the past few years have really got into ambient music. I think that it is so difficult to do well. I mean anyone can put a keyboard through a delay pedal and it’ll make a drone. It’ll sound nice, but it’ll be hard to have a huge level of emotion through it. I think that’s something we definitely wanted to do, and hope we have done with the album. We’d really love to nail it, maybe do a whole ambient album or something, that’d be cool.
Picture Credit Holly Whitaker
Do you serve the concept of Squid or does the concept serve you? Or is it a give and take?
I think we’re a product of our parts. It’s definitely a case of all five of our minds together being stronger than each of our minds on their own. If you took any one of us out of the band, then the band would be shite. So, Squid serves us.
Has isolation made you think much differently about your music, or changed your approach? As a band, you seem quite frenetic, and quite ‘live’. And obviously for the past year you haven’t been allowed to be live, so do you think that’s affected the way you make music, think about music and work as a musician?
Definitely, I think it’s probably one thing that this whole tour is kind of doing. We haven’t really moved around this much in a long time and I think it does help with that creative output a little bit. But it has been really nice being in one place for quite a while. But that’s less of a work thing, and more of a personal thing.
I think we really vibe off moving round and seeing different places and meeting new people and stuff. But then I do think that being in one place and not being able to road test new material has been really good for our song writing because we know we wouldn’t be able to try out new songs live. So, you have to start them in a room and finish them in a room. That was quite a nice thing. I mean we did that with like three of the tracks on the album, we didn’t play them live at all and just finished them in the same room that we started them in.
A week or so ago, I watched a video of you playing Robert Wyatt Pigs (In There) … Has Wyatt had a big effect on the band. As soon as I watched that, everything kind of made sense, and it seemed very natural to me
Yeah, he definitely is. Laurie, who plays bass, is a huge Robert Wyatt fan, through his Dad. I don’t really know too much about him. But I think through Laurie he’s been a huge influence. I think we just quite like that sort of eccentric English music, like XTC and Robert Wyatt. The people who don’t look the part, but they play the part.
What are some of your other influences? As a band, Squid seem incredibly eclectic, you seem to listen to a lot of different types of music.
It’s always quite difficult because we don’t really talk to each other about what type of music we listen to. I was listening to a lot of a band called Unwound when we were doing the album. Quite dark, and sort of post-hardcore.
Did you always want to be in a band, was this always driving you forwards?
I don’t think so, no. It seemed like something that never happened and now it’s happened. It was a happy accident.
Picture Credit Holly Whitaker
