Squid’s twisted, ugly brand of post-punk rock music was a perfect match for the industrial surroundings of Newcastle’s finest gigging venue for a set packed with interest and surprises, not least a theatrical twist at its climax.
Squid’s latest tour, in support of their critically acclaimed sophomore album O Monolith, begins with nothing but cowbells. Two rhythms weave immaculately together whilst drummer and frontman Ollie Judge gets comfortable on his stool, plinthed and silhouetted against a growing storm of technicolour stage lights. A buzzy, detuned synth loop arrives spectre-like, then an eerily off-kilter bass line and dizzying assemblage of dovetailing guitar lines. After a minute or two Louis Borlase lunges forward and unleashes a piercing guitar riff, his instrument scratching and screeching higher and higher, urging this monster of a song towards its startling finale. This is Swing (In a Dream), Squid’s fascinating set opener that serves as a head first dive into the strange, nightmarish underworld in which this band’s music resides, full of unhinged melodies and alien stretches of what can only be described as noise. It makes for unrelentingly challenging listening – unlike their similarly daring peers Black Midi, Squid aren’t tempted to throw in a delicate acoustic ballad just to keep the audience on their toes – but it is all utterly enthralling.
My friend Liam and I are in the thick of it. Despite arriving shortly after doors opened at Newcastle’s Boiler Shop, we’ve somehow secured the best spot in the venue, pressed against the barriers and right under the nose of a shadowy Judge, who is throned centre stage. With the masses of fans all behind us – Bristol group Squid have garnered a comparable cult following to the likes of Black Country, New Road in recent years – we can fully appreciate the perfectness of the venue, a bare and atmospherically lit former warehouse that seems built solely to recreate the dystopian future so vividly painted by Squid’s music. There’s plenty to look at on stage, too: five musicians and many more instruments. Borlase inhabits a small forest of synths on their stands; Laurie Nanivell makes use of a dedicated cowbell station when he’s not injecting songs with trumpet; Arthur Leadbetter has his own ring of synths, plus an electric cello for good measure. What’s more, it’s not all just eye-candy for music nerds like me; Squid’s ambitious compositions genuinely demand half the stock of the nearest Gear4music warehouse. It’s this vast choice of instrumentation that allows these songs to be so volatile, the band indulging in lengthy song transitions that veer towards the genre of ambient noise, full of indecipherable squeals of synth and undulating tides of electronic fuzz.
It’s in these off-script song transitions that Squid were their most daring and compelling. An early sortie in the preamble to Undergrowth was breathless, Judge emerging from a mist of guitar with a thumping dance groove that sounded like a warped version of Parcels in full nightclub mode. Then there was the song itself, with its heavy hip hop groove and sticky guitar hooks. “I’d rather melt, melt, melt, melt away,” Judge yelped in the chorus, competing with a honking trumpet amidst a superb, head-banging racket. Peel St. was another early highlight that emerged from experimental noise, the band miraculously turning what sounded like a jammed photocopier into one of the most lethal grooves they’ve ever dug their teeth into.
It was all a bit too much for one man a few rows back from us, who used the few pauses in the music so impatiently shout the lyrics to Squid’s biggest hit, Narrator, at one point getting the crowd to clap distractingly during a quiet section of solo guitar. Liam and I saw him extricated from the crowd and awkwardly heaved over the barriers by half a dozen security a few songs later. “Sunday night… who would have thought it?” Judge mentioned quietly at one point, apparently in disapproval. Tellingly, it was one of the only things he said directly to the crowd all night.
It was a good thing that the five members of Squid were all far too absorbed in their craft to let a rude audience put them off. The crowd did at least elevate standout Documentary Filmmaker by singing along gleefully to a trumpet riff, then shouting along to Judge’s descriptions of a hot summer (“the sweat dripped off my plastic sheets”) during a suitably stifling climax. The biggest climax, however, was reserved for a deafening rendition of Siphon Song, which was helped by a more restrained use of the robot-like vocal manipulations that somewhat took the sting out of the studio recording. A patient outro that flickered like a dying ember gradually revealed Narrator, the track that many in the crowd will have been waiting for. It was a performance that was bound to fall short of the experience of listening to the original track for the first time – Martha Skye Murphy, whose blood-curdling screams in the finale make for one of the most disturbing pieces of rock I’ve ever heard, was of course not present at Boiler Shop – but Judge’s sheer vocal stamina in the epic crescendo was admirable, even if the song rather outstayed its welcome over the course of a nearly nine-minute runtime. Simultaneously drumming and singing (or, more accurately, wailing) for such a behemoth of a song was no mean feat.
Whilst Squid’s sonic onslaught was sometimes overwhelming, they could never be accused of boring their audience. In Newcastle this was true right until the very end, with the awe-inspiring The Blades, which started with a clever reprise of the opening cowbell rhythms. Here lies perhaps the most memorable image of all Judge’s sinister lyrics: a drone operator sits alone and watches his screen that shows aerial images of people on the ground which he darkly reduces to “blades of grass waiting to be trimmed.” Judge repeated these menacing lyrics with increasingly uncontrolled yelps, as if playing the drone operator as he gradually loses his mind in the warfare, powerful trumpet melodies and wailing sirens exploding like bombs. It made for a violent depiction of mania that would be compelling even if it didn’t come at a time when war crimes are becoming depressingly common in the news.
Then came the twist. For the first time in the whole gig, Judge stepped out from behind his kit, untangled his microphone from its stand, and positioned himself at the very edge of the stage, almost within touching distance of Liam and me. “Back to bed / Another man’s hand on the joystick,” he almost whispered over dreamlike sustained guitar chords. He looked genuinely frightened, gazing nervously up to the metal rafters of the warehouse building while gradually tangling himself in his microphone cable. Judge – or, more accurately, his character – seemed defeated, lost, hopeless. It was a moment of intense theatre that would haunt me on the subsequent walk home and make me wish Judge had dug even deeper into the performance art that his evocative lyrics so easily lend themselves to. As the quiet final notes of this otherwise thunderous gig rang out, Judge stood alone centre-stage, incapacitated by his own microphone cord. The crowd had been rowdy all night, but something in Judge’s performance seemed to have genuinely struck a nerve. As the stage lights dimmed, all that was left of Squid’s concert was a stunned silence.