The Jimmy Cake – You’re Actually Going To Hate This

Paul: “We’ve continually reinvented ourselves. What we’re doing now is night and day compared to Spectre & Crown, and Spectre & Crown is very different from what we were doing before. Essentially it is a new band. There’s been changes in the line-up as well, with Patrick Kelleher being in the band and there isn’t a brass section anymore and we’ve moved to more synthesiser kind of stuff. So it might as well be a new band in all but name. We’re not playing any old material – it’s all new.

“We certainly wouldn’t be opening with a 36-minute track – ever – if it was really that important. We really did think that people were going to absolutely hate it – people will hate this. The songs that people say ‘oh, Jimmy Cake, yeah I really like_____’ – then they’d name the songs and I’d be like, ‘oh god, we don’t do that anymore. You’re actually going to hate this.'”

“We had our own conversation about this recently and decided that this album was about ‘too much.’ Too intense for too long, so that it just becomes overwhelming over and over again.”

Vinnie: “We played a gig in Burke’s last night, in Limerick. It’s a really nice series of shows they’re doing – Tieranniesaur, Jape and a few other people – and literally we were half the bar and they were half the bar, the audience. You don’t get to play in places like that with such nice people and such a small, atmospheric room very often. The Stables in Mullingar would be very similar – we had a similar experience when we played there.

Paul: I enjoy the proximity of everybody as well. I was probably bumped into five times by people going to the loo while I was playing!

An album of three songs played as a live set demands an accessible audience and a band with ten years to their name have the fresh pool of new listeners to find. The plan for album four – I really hope they call it Zomnabulism – is set. With such a solid back catalogue though, could the Jimmy Cake find themselves reanimating the old albums in the same way?

“After we made Spectre & Crown we made a very conscious decision that everything we wrote, it was with playing it live in mind.” Paul says “Spectre & Crown wound up being a huge studio project and very tricky to recreate live, so we just said we can’t do that again. The way we’ve recorded this new one was actually very live.”

Vinnie: “Spectre & Crown turned out to be ungigable – it needed 15-20 people to represent it accurately. We tried it several times and it just did not happen, which was one of the reasons we completely abandoned playing our back catalogue because it became a situation where we were misrepresenting what we do quite badly and became, in my opinion, a poor live band for about a year.”

Paul:” It was very damaging for morale as well. We were coming off stage going, ‘yeah, it’s not as good as the album.'”

Vincent: “We were talking about doing a ten year of Brains but, again, time and money and energy are all issues in this regard. It’s quite difficult to be part-time, write the intricate music that we’re writing at the moment, get it rehearsed effectively and gig it and then also try and do the Brains thing without taking the energy away from what we’re doing. It’s the curse of being a part-time band, and it’s constant as well. We can never do as many shows as we’d like, so we can never be as potent as we’d like to be live. You see bands who do 300 shows a year and obviously they’re going to be a hell of a lot more on the money and familiar with their material. We do a gig once a month maybe, and there are 30 or 40 changes in the live set that you have to remember instinctively. It would be nice to do this full-time and have all of this shit utterly embedded in your brain as opposed to having to relearn the experience every time we do a gig.”

Paul: “That’s pretty much why live we’re just playing the new material and we’re playing it to death, so that when we do bring it to people it’s as it should be. It sounds the way we want it to sound. We’ve got to that point now. “

“The new album, at three songs, 72 minutes, there ain’t no track-skipping really. It’s our 21st century reaction to the way music is moving.” Vincent continues. “There’s not a lot of room for picking your favourite song and putting it on your iPod. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of job.
”People’s memories and ability to concentrate are being constantly eroded now. The way music is going, it’s quite chronic. You can see it reflected in the homogeneity of end-of-year polls that seem to seem to happen among bloggers and magazines now. You wouldn’t see really radical albums breaking through the way you used to. Unless I’m living in some fantasy fucking golden age that never existed – but I know it did.”

The Jimmy Cake numbers at least seven on any given opportunity and the band is something of a costume shop of ideas, full of individual instrumental outfits that add to the style.

“We do have structure.” Paul says. “There is a misconception – I saw it in print as recently as this week – how we’re described as ramshackle and mostly improvised, but there’s absolutely no improvisation at all.
”We’ve learned over the years not to try and force it down any particular road because we’ve realised that any time we have tried to do that, it’s been crap. Any time we’ve come into the room with an idea, presented it to people and they’ve mangled it beyond all recognition, you just have to run with that. It’ll always be much more interesting than anything you come up with. And that’s why we’re still together, because it will always be more interesting than doing it on your own. It’ll always be surprising.”

The Jimmy Cake play Crawdaddy on Friday 23 December. Tickets are €10.

http://www.thejimmycake.com

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