The Jimmy Cake: ‘For the next gig we were going to call ourselves The French.’ ‘And then Bag of Mickeys’
The Jimmy Cake were the most interesting band in Irish music in the early 2000s. An instrumental outfit combining punk, minimalist neoclassical harmony and general avant-garde madness, they played guitars, drums, accordions, trumpets, pianos, saxophones, clarinets and banjos and achieved many moments of sophisticated beauty and cacophonous joy. There were six to 10 of them, so sometimes they felt more like a wild commune than a band. They recorded and released the first of their five albums, Brains, in 2001. The original line-up (more or less) have reconvened for a 25th-anniversary gig at the National Concert Hall this month where they’ll play all of Brains and a selection of their other work. Four members of The Jimmy Cake are in the Hut bar in Phibsborough in Dublin, near the practice room they share with the trad band Lankum . (John Dermody, the Jimmy Cake drummer, is Lankum’s touring percussionist and the brother of their fiddle player Cormac MacDiarmada.) They are happy to reminisce with me about a scene that I also remember very affectionately. The Jimmy Cake came out of a project called Das Madman that the guitarist Simon O’Connor put together to compete in a battle of the bands at Trinity College Dublin . “Das Madman was like our Simpsons season one or two or Seinfeld season one and season two,” says the other guitarist, Vinny Dermody (brother of John and Cormac). “Like, it was not good. But I look back at it with great affection for the time that it was a part of.” Having their cake: Ed Power meets The Jimmy Cake “It was just a lot of people coming together from quite diverse references and just fizzing with notions,” says John Dermody. “It was a very optimistic time in Dublin,” says Lisa Carey, their clarinettist and keyboard player (who’s also my sister-in-law). “Suddenly there were cultural spaces and venues.” “You could live very cheap,” says John. In the 1990s, independent promoters such as the Hope Collective and U:mack were bringing cult bands from all over the world to Dublin. “We got to see some of the most eminent hard-core and punk-rock bands that have ever existed for about £2 or £3,” says Vinny. “Green Day in the Attic,” says John. “Gorilla Biscuit and NOFX in Charlies for three quid,” says Vinny. “The X in the Fox and Pheasant,” says Simon. The indigenous scene quickly diversified into a hive of countercultural activity with club nights run by U:Mack and others at the Funnel Bar. “Richie [Egan, from The Redneck Manifesto] had his own ‘zine,” says John. “Willie [Stewart] from [the hard-core band] Bambi had his own ‘zine. It was very interconnected with people who grew up on straight-up punk rock moving into slightly more diverse shit.” The Redneck Manifesto Das Madman broke up and were asked to come back together for a gig at the venue Eamonn Doran’s. Instead of doing so they wrote a whole new set, expanded their line-up and picked a new name. The plan, says John, was to change their name with each gig. “For the next gig we were going to call ourselves The French.” “And then Bag of Mickeys,” says Lisa. Sadly, they stuck with the first name, partly because they became very popular very quickly. Soon the band were part of an incredibly productive, diverse left-field Dublin music scene that included acts such as The Redneck Manifesto, Rollers/Sparkers, Decal, The Connect Four Orchestra, David Kitt , Si Schroeder and The Chalets, all influenced by the DIY punk ethic and all benefiting from a brief period when Ireland was both newly wealthy and still affordable for young people with very little money. “How does it happen that you have all of these bands mushrooming in the same place, and then they’re all swapping musicians with each other?” says Simon. “And all this stuff blowing up around it and then it kind of occurs for a while and then it’s gone.” It was partly a reaction to the more explicitly commercial bands that sought fame in the wake of U2 , says Vinny. “We were almost positioning ourselves as the anti that. I remember growing up in the shadow of U2 and the shadow of that literary tradition. One of the reasons I hate lyrics is that every one of these bands would do, like, a literary reference. It was Samuel Beckett doing the shopping or George Bernard Shaw making a cup of tea. I wanted to f**king smash it to bits.” And why instrumental music? “I’m not big into lyrics generally,” says Vinny. “I find words to be strange, especially when I have to hear them loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of times over and over again.” “We were also very bad at lyrics,” says Lisa. Dublin had a lot of instrumental outfits at the time, but those were, for the most part, guitar-led. The Jimmy Cake had a much wider musical palette that moved from musique-concrete atmospherics to squalling noise to beautiful counterharmonies. I quite Like Apes: so long and thanks for all the tunes “We played what [the songwriter] Nev Clay refers to as ‘expensive chords,’” says Lisa. What was it about what they were doing that drew a crowd? “It didn’t sound like anything else,” says Vinny. “And I think there’s traditional elements and folk elements to it that made it accessible.” “It was very melodic,” says Lisa. “I am a divil for harmony and a long melody.” “We stood out by the size, the instrumentation, the length of our songs, the way we talked in interviews,” says Simon. “There was a very good energy. When we wrote Brains we were writing all the time… Brains was melodic, but then we got heavy and fast, and I imagine people getting quite excited by that.” They also put the band’s uniqueness down to their being a mixture of self-taught musicians, such as Vinny, John and Simon, and more trained musicians, such as Lisa, the pianist Paul G Smyth and the accordion player Jürgen Simpson. Many Jimmy Cake members enrolled on the master’s degree in music and media technology at Trinity College, where they had access to studio equipment and were taught composition by the likes of Donnacha Dennehy – a founder of Crash Ensemble – and Roger Doyle. This fuelled their exploratory tendencies. “It made our subsistence existence healthier, because we could cut costs in loads of ways, having in-house expertise,” says Simon. There was, at different points, mainstream-label interest, but the band never took it especially seriously. “Some of our pals had gone off to do that,” says Simon. “Some of our band members had gone off and done that. But I think we knew logistically it was never really going to happen.” “There were just too many of us,” says Lisa. Their energies had already spiralled into diverse side projects, such as the band Luc & the Platelets and the record label Front End Synthetics. It might give a sense of the general music scene of the time to discuss these side projects for a moment. Luc & the Platelets once had a fully produced wrestling match with their fellow scenesters Warlords of Pez in a ring at Guinness Storehouse. “We all got costumes made,” says Vinny. “We all had our own entrance music. We all had our own backstories.” “Our partners were our fur-coat-wearing coaches,” says Simon. “I orchestrated a [fake] scrap between Lucy [Clarke, his now wife and then drummer with The Chicks] and Caoimhe [Derwin] from The Chalets, who was one of the ringside mols.” “The best wrestling name was El Casei Immunitas,” says Lisa, fondly. Simon and Vinny were also in an experimental band called Thinker Org. They broke up, Simon contends, over a difference of opinion about a video piece by a collaborator that was going to showcase hundreds and hundreds of ejaculating penises sourced by software from the internet. “That’s a lot of cumshots,” John says with (I think) wonder. The Jimmy Cake morphed over the years. Around the time of Spectre & Crown, their third album, Simon left to produce his own music. By then the scene they’d been part of had dissipated somewhat. They went on to produce two more albums, each very different from the last. “We were kind of on our own at that point,” says Vinny. “Rollers/Sparkers were our constant companions, and a few other oddballs.” “I think we got a bit isolated,” says John. Nowadays they are very plugged into the trad-oriented music scene and the wider music scene in general. Vinny puts on gigs as Enthusiastic Eunuch. His partner, Ellie Myler, is the drummer with Øxn . And John drums with Lankum, of course. Most of the band still play music in some form. The trad scene also has punk DIY ethics, although Vinny notes that more naked commercialism is seeping in around the edges with some of the newer bands. “It starts with what art is possible and then it becomes what money is possible,” he says with a sigh. Why come back together to perform Brains? “We met in January and floated the idea of reconvening without any idea of what we would do,” says Vinny. “And then there was 25 years of [David Kitt’s] Big Romance.” Several of The Jimmy Cake played with Kitt’s touring band back in the day. (“I was playing a DX27 keyboard and wine glasses,” Simon says of Kitt’s early gigs.) This Used to Be the Future, Brains’ opening track, feels like an apt title for what’s happening. “That’s the greatest song ever written about Lenehans on Talbot Street,” says Lisa. “We were in Applerock Studios and [Lenehans] had this big sign outside,” says John. “It was like a Jetsons-style thing,” says Simon. “And I can’t remember which of us said it,” says Lisa. “But one of us said, ‘This used to be the future.’” How does it feel to be playing this music they wrote in their 20s in their 50s? “I was initially very sceptical about the nostalgia element, but then again it’s the end of the world, or at least a big changing of the guard, so fucking do whatever you want,” says Vinny. “I said to a friend I was relearning [the songs] and he said, ‘It’s grand: you only ever played one note,’” says Simon. “I played four notes.” “I had to relearn how to play clarinet,” says Lisa. “My face hurt. For the latter part of the band I was playing keyboards so had to get my whole embouchure back. John Taylor [from Duran Duran ] calls the Rio bass line a ‘young man’s bass line’, and I was thinking, ‘This is a young woman’s clarinet line.’” “What’s actually interesting is after playing some lines for a bit you don’t just remember the thing,” says Simon. “You remember why you played it.” “I still remember coming up with the line for Haunted Candle in [the trumpet and banjo player] John Brown’s flat on Thomas Street and being so delighted with it we started making margaritas,” says Lisa. “It’s very easy to forget it was a good band,” says Simon. “As you’re playing you go, ‘Why did I leave this band?’” Things look different now, says Vinny, who regularly promotes the music of obscure and original musicians and has strong opinions on its worth. “You get to this point in your life and you realise that any art made on its own terms, with love, by people who are friends, is a success.” The Jimmy Cake play Brains at the National Concert Hall , in Dublin, on Saturday, November 28th, as part of the Landmarks series