Features Squid Games

Let’s take stock. Immediately following the release of their debut, Squid set off on an endless tour – after all, they are fundamentally a live band. “We put so [many] of our compositions into the live show; taking [nuggets] from the live show into the writing room, that’s still one of the more central ways that we come up with new ideas”, Louis explains. “I think that’s how quite a lot of the ones from the new album came into being, just having really bare-boned things that we jam live and then let develop over the course of like, a thousand gigs.”

In fact, the band’s first concern after releasing ‘Bright Green Field’ was to embark on a tour they called Fieldworks, where they decided to “road test some new material, playing sets of completely work-in-progress new music” at smaller venues than they’d usually play. Their debut was less than a week old, but they’d immediately turned their attention to the future, and to getting match-fit again after the enforced break of lockdown.

“I remember being really, really nervous for the first gig,” Ollie reminisces. “But it felt really good to do that tour, because pretty much everything we were playing on it has ended up on our next record. We wouldn’t have this record if we didn’t do that tour.” Louis smiles. “After so long of being in a domestic environment, the idea of going back to doing shows in massive venues was quite daunting, so these were little shows that we would try out ideas at - in a church in Torbay, and then a brand new venue in Falmouth, getting off the beaten track.”

The Fieldworks tour seems to be the genesis of the upcoming second Squid album – and geographical location, as Louis mentions, seems to be vital to the band’s creative process. One of those shows was outdoors at The Silver Building in London’s Docklands, which the guitarist credits as a “fun dystopia that matched the elements of ‘Bright Green Field’”. That album’s title evokes a physical space, too, and when pushed for a location that suits this new material, Ollie offers “Stonehenge, maybe?”. “Yeah, there’s definitely some folky elements that I think we thought were running through it,” Louis agrees, “although I’ve listened back and wondered where they’ve gone. I think they’re [still] there, in a way.”

More than Stonehenge, however, there was one place that defined the album more than any other, and that’s Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Wiltshire - a home for the band over the duration of the writing process.

“They’ve got these long bunkers out the back, just by the car park, and we did loads of the writing there over the course of about 18 months,” recalls Louis. “In the middle of winter it would be freezing cold - we couldn’t really even play because it was so cold - and then it was the height of spring when we recorded it. The whole album, the conception of it all, is totally focused on Real World, which is really nice.”

Squid weren’t the only residents of the studios during their two-week recording spell, though. “It was peak springtime,” Ollie smiles, “and it was the first day where you could feel the heat of the sun coming down. I went outside, and I saw Tom Jones sat on the bench, sunning himself, just sat with his eyes closed. I went up and made some British small talk with him - ‘Nice weather we’re having’ - and he was just like, ‘Aye, it’s fucking lovely!’,” Ollie cackles. “I can’t believe I heard Tom Jones swear!” Louis nods: “He was such a force of good energy across the two weeks. Me and Arthur were sleeping in my parents’ camper van, which my dad lent me, so we’d finish a day of recording in a big spacious room, walk by and say, ‘Goodnight Tom Jones!’, and go and get in our sleeping bags. It was like a really, really weird dream.”

With of-the-moment producer Dan Carey having manned the desk once again, some of the new material will get its first public airing when Squid make their belated return to London’s Scala this month. “There are certain tracks on the album that we’ve been playing in the same format and arrangement as to how they are recorded, and there’ll be ones, I think, where we need to be a bit delicate with ourselves going into their first outings,” Louis smiles. “But it is really exciting, and it’s coming up pretty soon, so it’s going to be a really nice way to start feeling like this is a year for touring our second album.”

Are the band concerned about the practical difficulties of playing any of the new material live? “Pretty much all of it,” Ollie laughs. “Well for me anyway, because a lot of the songs aren’t in 4/4.” “It comes down to interesting arrangements,” Louis nods, “and not necessarily always using the stage as a platform to play your studio recordings note for note.” Indeed, the band’s songs are always in flux; the version they play of a song live at any moment is as close to a definite article as they get. Ollie is reminded of a comment they received from a fan at a gig, just after the initial success of early track ‘The Cleaner’. “[They] had gotten so used to the radio edit, which lops off huge sections of that song, and they came to a gig like, ‘Wow, you played this amazing extended version of ‘The Cleaner’.’ And we were like, ‘No, that IS ‘The Cleaner’!’ For Squid, the live moment is all that matters – everything else is secondary.

Nonetheless, heading into LP2, the fan anticipation for a new recorded body of work is clear. Despite having spent long enough writing and recording the album that a sense of grandiosity would be understandable, at least today, Squid have no such thing. When we ask if there’s anything else they’d like to add, Ollie grins. “It’s a rock record, basically.” Whether that’s true remains to be seen, but there’s one certainty about where Squid are headed – things can only get weirder.

‘O Monolith’ is out 9th June via Warp Records.

Tags: Features, Interviews, February 2023, From The Magazine, Squid