Howl sat down with Squid’s drummer and vocalist, Ollie Judge, over Zoom this week. We meet Ollie as the band are gearing up for their UK tour, which sees the avant-rock group hitting venues big and small up and down the country.
It’s a sunny Friday afternoon as the Zoom call boots up, and Ollie Judge from Squid fills the screen of my laptop. Squid are one of a cluster of ‘Windmill bands’, who came up through the ranks of Speedy Wunderground and Brixton’s iconic Windmill venue. The label and venue have created a microclimate of excellence over the past decade, with bands like Squid, BC,NR, and Black Midi pushing the leftfield, post-rock scene in the UK forward leaps and bounds. At the helm of Speedy, is producer extraordinaire Dan Carey, who has produced all of these bands and worked with many of them at the start of their burgeoning careers. Ollie explains his feelings when meeting Carey as a fresh-faced new band: “oh god, he's, he's worked with Kylie, he's worked with all these like huge pop stars, he must be, you know, big hot shot.” Carey’s reputation precedes him, but Judge speaks to the authenticity of the man, “He's totally down to earth and is maybe one of the most enthusiastic people I've ever met”..."He's really really encouraging as well”. Ollie takes a moment and stares beyond his webcam: “When we started off I was like, are we any good? But he [Carey] is fantastic at nurturing talent and gently pushing you in the right direction, which I think is quite rare in the music industry. it's not so much about streams or money with him.”
Since the early Speedy sessions, Squid have been on a sonic journey of sorts. They started out as a band in the post-punk mould, but their releases over the years have become more and more experimental and avant-garde. Such sonic variation speaks to eclectic taste in the band - Judge elaborates “I think we all have different ways of finding and consuming music. Laurie [Laurie Nankivell, bassist] will always go to the techno section when record shopping and I'll always go straight to the hardcore section or something. It's quite interesting really. We did a radio show and I was just like shit! Yeah, our music tastes are actually pretty different.” I press Ollie on his methods of music consumption - “I mean I've got Spotify, but I do find that my attention span is quite short when I'm listening to music on Spotify, whereas you've got no choice but to listen to an LP”. Judge is a fervent vinyl consumer, often taking a punt on anything interesting looking. “There's a record shop on Gloucester Road, just down the road from me, called Plastic Wax. They always get really interesting. Second-hand records here”...”I think, probably most of the stuff that I buy is second hand”.
We get on to discussing new music, and methods of discovery, “There's a band called Quade who just announced their record the other day. They're like amazing kind of folky, post-punk kind of vibe”...”Post-rock as well. There's a band called Minor Conflict, who are amazing, which, even though my partner's in the band and two of my best mates are in the band, that's separate!” Judge admits that despite his vinyl habit, much of the new music he consumes is served up by algorithm, “it's got its ups and downs, I think, but probably more downs, but that is how I find a lot of music, I guess through social media and following record shops. I think being in a little van touring just goes hand in hand with doing that”.
I ask about Ollie’s growing record collection and how it influences what he and Squid create: “I think the way we do that is just not talk about it. Bring your influences to a writing session but don't explicitly say what's been influencing you, because then I think that can take you down a path that might lead to a track sounding too similar to something else”. He elaborates, “Someone says, like oh, that sounds a bit like that song, and we just fucking chuck it on the floor!”, he laughs through a grin.
With Ollie opening up about the studio environment, I dig deeper into the band’s methods when writing and recording. Ever the open book, Judge elaborates happily on the band's songwriting process: “The most important thing is just getting in a room and playing. If someone's made a particular kind of synth sound or a found a nice combination of effects on pedals or samples or something, that usually sparks an idea and then we keep jamming that.” Squid create such visceral soundscapes, it’s intriguing to get a glimpse behind the magician’s cloth. The manner in which they create, and the songs they write are monoliths of sound. Like Mogwai or Godspeed You!, the layer upon layer of instrumentals work together so effortlessly. Judge, and by extension the rest of the band, come across as absolute perfectionists “There's like just folders and folders of minutely different versions of the same song on our Google Drive. It can get quite maddening sometimes especially with the second record because it's quite a lot of it's quite complex time signatures and stuff. So just kind of focusing and playing something like that over and over and over again”. He continues,"if you write the track and then you go and record it, it's usually a bit of a free-for-all. When we record, it's like someone has an idea, someone records something on top of it and that's how it kind of gets so busy and so layered. But the beauty of that is that you can always strip it back up and put stuff back in.”
Judge explains how the instrumental writing process is mostly democratic, but as the vocalist, most of the lyric writing responsibility falls on him. He speaks further on his lyrical process and what influences his words: “it’s usually just like books and TV. The past few years when I lived in London, we had just started just started the band I found it really inspiring just looking at what was going on around me. Maybe it's because I moved to Bristol and things are a little bit slower and more familiar. I think I get less inspiration from what's immediately around me here. It's not as big a city, and I just do the same things that I always do”. The transition from the big smoke back to the West Country clearly left Judge wanting more from his immediate surroundings, and he has more recently turned to literature for inspiration. Ollie clearly draws inspiration from the gnarlier, dystopian end of the fiction spectrum: “Anton [Anton Pearson, Squid guitarist] got me Slaughterhouse 5 for my birthday, which is pretty mad. At the start of the year I just read loads of really bleak books, but it was really fun, but inspiring. I read a book called Tender is the Flesh, which is a kind of dystopian novel about a virus that meant humanity couldn’t eat animals, so they start farming humans and breeding them to eat.”
In an effort to lift the tone, I enquire about Ollie’s singing percussionist contemporaries. ”Uuhhh, singing drummer singing drummer… I had a really good answer for this…” Judge racks his brains, again staring past his webcam into the depths of his memory. “Recently I went to the cinema to watch Stop Making Sense [the concert-film about legends Talking Heads]. “There's this bit where David Byrne lets them do a Tom Tom Club song while he goes off and gets into his massive suit and Chris Frantz is a pretty funny singing drummer, I mean, he just kind of shouts into the microphone. I guess it's quite similar to what I do. I thought that was quite fun. I've never seen him do that before.”
Before long Zoom reminds me that I haven’t paid for their premium service and our forty minutes of free chat are coming to an abrupt ending. Before the virtual meeting kicks us out, I ask Ollie to talk through the band’s upcoming tour and the contrast between the size of rooms they’re playing. “When you play big rooms, you kind of feel the grandness of the space, and that kind of affects the way you play, kind of unconsciously, I guess we've never done a headline gig in Italy or Spain, so we were playing like 200 cap rooms in Italy and Spain and then going to Germany and France where we've played quite a lot before, and going to like 2,000 people. But I guess, yeah, just kind of crowds are a bit more feral in smaller rooms - maybe it's the walls being closer in or something.”
Squid’s UK tour kicks off this week, where they head to Bristol’s SWX on Friday 13th October. They hit all the usual spots, Leeds, Manchester, London, Newcastle, as well as an intimate show in a Lake District brewery “if you're playing in a brewery, I feel like you're going to get some beer out of it in the very least!”
Tickets for their upcoming UK tour can be found here:
