Somewhere in London, sometime ago, a concept was born, a movement, an idea all the kids could hold onto and unite around. About the same time a Squirrel by the anme of Jimmy decided to play some music and mix up traditional reggae and ska beats with a heavy rock underbelly.
As Jimmy grew, he gathered new members (and lost a few older faces), and by settling his huge fluffy feet in the roots of the Nottingham music scene, Jimmy the Squirrel, the concept, the movement, the idea and the band were shaped as the 6 piece we see today. We investigate.
* Jody – Keyboard * Liam – vocals
* Mike – Bass * Stef – Trombone
* Sam – Guitar * Ed – drums
JoOp: We're here at a Jimmy The Squirrel gig, at Junktion 7. First question, half of you guys live in London and the other live here in Nottingham, how does that work?
Mike: Not very well.
Jody: It works like this errrm.. Like it has tonight. We meet up where we have to play and…
Ed:…Try and get shit done before the gig. I mean a lot of it's like, the Nottingham lot practicing their stuff in Nottingham and the London lot making sure it's all good down there.
Mike: There's only 2 of us that live in London and the other 4 live in Notts. So me and Ed always practice on the bass and drums at my house in London, then we get it together when we are together.
Stef: It relatively stays quite tight so we don't have to like, spend loads of time and money on practicing when they come up because it's more or less together anyway… we try to!
JoOp: Who is Jimmy The Squirrel? – and Whence did he come to lay down this fiercy scurry-skank ska?
Sam:I suppose I came up with the name when I was trying to figure one out for my dog and we were desparately searching for a band name for years and then I sort of, came up with it and people seemed to like it and it stuck.
Ed:It never means as much as it seems to mean, people think it's a fun character we came up with. He's a concept. More of a movement!
((Everyone laughs))
Sam: You'd better get away from the whole image of a squirrel.
Stef: We like Fish now! – and you don't even know… That's the name of the new E.p. '..And You Don't Even Know'. That's WHENCE that came, that's a wicked word.
JoOp: How far do you want to take this band? – and I understand Jody and Stef are apart of another Nottingham ska band 'Weeble'.
Liam: We'll take it as far as we can.
Sam: The sky's the bleeding limit as far as I'm concerned…
JoOp: … And then it's space from there! Aside labelling yourself ska, how would you metaphorically describe your sound?
Liam: We don't label ourselves a ska band.
Mike: Sophisticated rock n' roll for all ages mate!
Jody: we have a lot of hardcore beats aswell you know.
Stef: with friendship and love at the 1st degree!
Sam: there is a line though.
Ed: it's round about the waste down!
((everyone laughs))
JoOp: Anything major coming your way, that you're particularly preparing for?
Liam: Everything's major as far as we're concerned.
Mike: This gig we're having a CD launch, so we're hoping to get feedback from that. We're looking forward to the Saggy-pants gig!
Stef: We've never played Hyson Green before and we're playing the Frog and Onion next week.
Ed: Gotta lot of gigs ahead, so that's why we're looking forward to just playing more and more. Keeping the gigs up.
JoOp: So that's your recent news aswell then?
Mike: We're trying to get a new set of material together and sort out some merchandise.
Jody: You know when we were talking about having half the people in Nottingham and half the people in London, that's probably the hardest thing to do. With people writing in London and people writing in Nottingham, the song writing process doesn't go down that well. Which is what I think we need to work on…
Ed: At the same time though, with that. It's always like that because me and Mike in London will write about 3 or 4 things to work on until we get perfect and then we'll come up to Nottingham and these lot have done 3 or 4 things, then everyone learns it pretty quickly. Over all it takes a while to get each and individual song, but suddenly we'll be playing 8 new songs at a time.
Stef: And they're completely different because of the different vibes we each put in.
JoOp: Ok, understanding your band is split between 2 cities, where abouts have you gigged in the UK? – or even abroad?
Ed: You know these questions, I like these questions! They're pretty cool.
Sam: Mainly in Nottingham, we've played a few gigs in London, we've played Coventry. We've got possible gigs in Derby coming up, hopefully.
JoOp: Who have you been touring with the likes of, and which bands do you like gigging with?
Ed: Mouthwash!
Stef: Mouthwash are on hellcat records. Oh but they're on Household name records now.
Sam: We've played with 'The Big' recently and they were really good.
Jody: 'Breakneck'
Liam: 'Weeble'!
Sam: Every band we've played with are pretty cool, when we play a night there's at least one band we get on with really well.
JoOp: Finally shoutouts, messages you want to give to anyone? – anything you haven't mentioned already.
Sam: I love you mum, I love you dad!
Ed: Shoutouts to all the bands mentioned already.
Mike: Any projects that we're all involved with.
Stef: All you young lovers out there…
Sam: Saggy-pants for setting up a gig for us and I want to see more punk and ska gigs! Fight the metal over-load right here in Nottingham.
Ed: Oh come on! I'd like to thank all our mates that we know.
Sam: Subway! We can't have a band meeting without being at a Subway and thank Broxtowe College aswell for helping us out with a recording.
Ed: And fit birds who put out their valuable time and efforts!
