EP.253 - SQUID

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how you doing, podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a beautiful Norfolk farm track.

Second week of July 2025.

The weather today I would describe as perfect.

It's warm.

24 degrees.

Some clouds in the sky, but they're beautiful.

Look at them.

So painterly expressive.

All the different shades.

Plus, there's a breeze.

A warm breeze.

I'm not with dog legs today.

I think she's up ahead with my son, who's taking her out for a walk.

She's doing very well and sends lots of love.

But wow, what a day.

I'm wearing shorts.

I wear them when the weather's warmer and for sports.

And I'm a little bit achy.

That's the only thing I can really complain about today.

But that's because I've been jumping around all day.

I was filming a music video for one of my tracks from my forthcoming album, Buckle Up.

In fact, I think it's going to be the second single out in a couple of weeks, perhaps.

Can that be true?

Yeah, sometime around the latitude weekend.

And it's called You're Doing It Wrong.

And this afternoon, I was joined by James and Jordan, James Hankin and his able accomplice, Jordan.

Didn't catch his surname.

Apologies, Jordan.

No disrespect.

And we rigged up the green screen and I did some dad dancing and lip syncing.

It was good fun.

Now they're going to go off and do whatever they want to that thing.

How are you doing anyway, podcasts?

I hope you're very well.

Thanks so much for coming back and joining me again for this podcast, especially after last week.

What do you mean, Buckles?

Last week was the live podcast with Guz Khan, episode 252.

It was an absolute hoot.

Yeah, well, I agree with you.

I think it was a hoot.

But it also included a piece of music from that live show that that evening the audience saw with a video that I had made

and it was called I Baked You a Pie

and I showed it in a few of the live podcast shows that I did last year in early to mid 2024 and those shows would typically begin with a short very funny presentation about the capabilities and also the quirks of AI music and image generation.

at that point in its development.

And I Baked You a Pie,

which was towards the end of last week's Guzz Khan episode, had been made with the help of an AI music generator.

But it was a kind of a callback at the end of the show to that

early AI section.

But I didn't really make that totally clear in last week's podcast.

I should have provided more context.

What I probably shouldn't have done was upload the video

that accompanied the track with no context whatsoever to my YouTube channel and set it to public.

So, a lot of people got a notification that I'd uploaded a new video, they didn't know what the hell it was, they hadn't listened to the podcast with Guz, and I got quite a lot of negative comments underneath the video.

I don't routinely read all the comments from the videos I upload, but I noticed a few hours after I'd uploaded the video that there were a lot of negative votes.

So, I scrolled down, and the general mood of the comments was: I would say disappointment slash anger.

They didn't think the video was funny.

And if you haven't seen the video, don't feel you have to and get angry about it.

But it was a song called I Baked You a Pie and it was like a jazzy number.

I used the AI music generator because I wanted it to sound like sort of smooth jazz from the 40s or 50s or something with a

nice female vocal.

Anyway, the YouTubers last week were upset because

of the ethical implications of using those kinds of AI models, which are often

trained on copyrighted images and indeed songs.

And there's no attribution or acknowledgement of the original source material.

And I confess I didn't think about that when I made the video and the song, or at least I didn't think about it hard enough, perhaps, in early 2024.

I'm guessing a lot of those YouTube commentators did not enjoy my Donald Trump book promo a few weeks ago.

Although, I don't know, maybe the ethical concerns don't extend to Trumpel Stiltskin.

Anyway, I'll share a handful of those YouTube comments

as well as a very nice thoughtful email that I received and you can see if you agree with what those folks have to say.

And I'll do that in the outro.

But right now, let me tell you a bit about my guests for podcast podcast number 253.

They are the UK-based non-AI five-piece band Squid.

Squid facts!

Formed in Brighton in 2016, but currently residing in Bristol, Squid are Ollie Judge, Louis Borlas, apologies for any mispronunciation here, guys,

Anton Pearson, Laurie Nankervell and Arthur Ledbetter.

Their first EP was self-released in 2017.

The second, Town Centre, was released in 2019 and produced by Dan Carey, who signed the band to his label Speedy Wonderground, home of other Carey-produced acts including Fontaine's DC, Black Country New Road and the now defunct Black Midi.

Those last two bands were, along with Squid, part of the so-called windmill scene that originated around the windmill pub in Brixton, South London, towards the end of the 2010s.

The bands associated with the scene, also including Goat Girl, Shame, and PVA, often leaned towards experimental rock and post-punk genres.

There was a strong chance of declamatory spoken word vocals and ambitious complex instrumentation.

Influences ranged from Talking Heads, Tortoise, and The Fall to Cannes, Frank Zappa, and even Miles Davis, to my ear, anyway.

In 2020, Squid signed to Warp Records, and their debut album, Bright Green Field, recorded in the first COVID lockdowns, was released the following year.

O Monolith, their second album, emerged in 2023, and earlier this year, Squid released LP number three, Cowards, to widespread critical acclaim.

Yum, that's the best kind of critical acclaim.

Nice, wide,

thickly spread acclaim.

I don't spread my acclaim too thick.

I've got to watch out for my cholesterol.

After a series of live shows around Europe this summer, Squid also play the End of the Road Festival at the end of August this year in Dorset in beautiful Llama Tree Gardens.

Also performing this year

are former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep.

He's also just announced a mini tour for the second half of July around the country.

Link in the description.

Strongly recommend it.

Saw him earlier this year at the waterfront in Norwich.

He's a real original and the band are amazing.

Also at end of the road, you've got Black Country New Road.

Speaking of the windmill scene, and also my Bake Off pal and forthcoming podcast guest towards the end of the year, Self-Esteem, Throwing Muses are going to be there.

Sharon Van Etten, Caribou, Father John Misty, Moonchild Sannelli.

She was fantastic in Glastonbury last year, I remember.

Adam Buxton will also be popping up at End of the Rogue 2 in podcast mode.

And I don't know, who knows what else I'll be doing.

My conversation with Squid was recorded at a rehearsal studio in East London at the beginning of April this year.

And as well as entertaining my questions about band dynamics, what musical genre they belong to, sweary shop assistants, the perils of playing pissed, and a very deep philosophical question that was not generated by AI,

although one of the others was.

The band played a couple of great versions of songs from their recent LP Cowards, but to get things going, they did me the honor of reinterpreting Ramble Chat, Squid style.

I'll be back at the end with a bit of AI controversy for you, but right now, with Squid playing specially for this podcast, here we go.

Ramble

and chat.

Let's have a ramble

chat.

We'll focus first on this

and concentrate on that.

Ramble, chat.

Let's have a ramble, chat.

We'll focus first on this

and concentrate on that.

very much for convening for this.

Thanks,

for having us.

For playing.

No, not at all.

It's really exciting.

For me, you know, I'm a big music fan.

I love your stuff.

And it's really exciting for me to see you all playing.

And that was a great version of Ramble Chat.

I don't know if if it's going to replace the regular one,

but thank you very much for doing it.

And you're going to be playing a bit more music later on as well, so thank you for that.

Yes.

How does it work when talking to you as a five-piece?

Is there any tension ever about who leads, or is it very, I mean, how does the structure of the band work?

Is there a leader?

Is it a kind of anarcho-syndicalist musical commune?

Well, we're not a democracy, but we're not also like there's no leader, so we have to just take it in turn to speak

and try not to speak over each other and listen.

Things take a long time to happen.

I think that's a hallmark of a lot of groups and organizations who organize themselves and make decisions in the same way that we do, thinking of various like protest movements and who else.

It's called unanimous decision making.

There's a whole there's loads of of Wikipedia pages about it.

Is that a real thing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, big time.

That is the opposite of what Curtis Yarvin wants.

Do you know who I mean by Curtis Yarvin?

I don't think so.

He's some guy that my algorithm is feeding me because I've been listening to the wrong podcast.

Is he a CEO or something?

I don't know what he is.

He's like a kind of douchebag philosopher that...

I know very little about him.

I watched an interview with some guy from the New York Times with him, and his whole bag is that he thinks everything should be a monarchy, not with necessarily like a king or queen, but there should just be one person in charge, and

they say what happens, and everyone does what they say.

And then that's better than a democracy, because a democracy is too wishy-washy, there's too much fannying around, everybody disagrees, nothing gets done.

And his example, one of his examples is like, well,

You wouldn't want like if you want a good laptop, then you want it from a company called Apple, which is run as a kind of monarchy, as an autocracy.

There's someone at the top, and

it's structured that way.

You wouldn't want to go and get your laptop designed by the local council, because it would take ages and it would be much worse.

Sounds like your laptop, Lori.

My, yeah, well, I had to get rid of the framework for it.

It didn't do me good.

And I went back to the monarchy.

Went back to

King Apple.

And the monarchy is good for some speedy technological purchases.

But in the case of our band, I'd say

what we lose in speed, we gain in kind of collective and creative freedom.

And harmony.

And harmony.

Because that is the big thing.

Like, in a way, it's amazing that any bands are successful ever, I always think.

Because it's so hard to be creative on your own, let alone with other people, let alone with five people who all have their own ideas and egos and instincts, and the fact that anyone manages to create anything at all that lasts more than three weeks is amazing.

Yes, I think I think that's so true.

It's in my view, it's always squids a byproduct of us being friends that are into music and at times bored because that's kind of like the first time we made anything, and it's still the case, but we're less, I guess, less bored and more busy these days.

Yeah, yeah, still friends.

What happens, though, when one of you gets a girlfriend?

That's a thing.

That's navigate us.

Or a boyfriend.

But that'll ruin everything.

Yeah.

Because how long have you been together now?

Coming on 10 years now, isn't it?

Yeah, 10 years in July, I think.

Yeah.

We played our first gig in Brighton in July

2015 at the Verdict.

Is it still there, Antonio?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, what passed it the other day?

Wait, July 2015.

That would be July this year.

Ten years.

Yeah.

We've got to do something.

Yeah.

Maybe we get the verdict.

That'd be nice.

Do you remember what it was like when you first got together, the five of you, to actually play music?

After you'd all met and you said, hey, fancy being in a band and you got together in a room.

What was it like to compose your first bit of music?

Did you start jamming other people's songs?

How does it work?

One of the first things we did together was a cover of the folk musician Robbie Basho.

Have you ever heard him before?

No.

There's a great track of his called Blue Crystal Fire and we did a version of that at Brighton Festival, I think it was, at the Dome, but not in, I think I thought it was in the dome and I thought, hang on a minute, this is like, this all seems a bit quick.

I don't think we're really a good band to be playing in the dome.

So we played in the Cafe of the Dome and that all made sense.

We did a cover of that and maybe like one or two of our own tracks.

But we were just kind of

me and Anton lived together for a bit.

Me and Ollie lived together for a bit.

We were all in Brighton, you know, it's pretty small.

So we were just taking it in turns to have people around and write tunes.

And then, how did the writing of the first tune go?

Like, does someone come in and go, I've got a great idea, or do you all just

one person starts playing,

and then the other one goes,

I don't know.

I've never been in a band, I want to know how it works.

I pretty much nailed it.

Sounds quite a lot of streamer.

I mean, yeah, I mean, that's one of the only things that we've got, like

we don't really have rules but I guess like one of the things we kind of stick to is that everybody's involved in everything that we do in kind of equal parts and we we don't we don't like try to hold on to like who came up with what idea and everything we do is just like a process that we set in motion in rooms together.

So like all of our songs were written together.

Five-way publishing split.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very important.

And were the rest of you all more or less on the same page musically?

Kind of, yeah.

Ish.

But a bit of variety,

which is, yeah, definitely helped shape the sound, no doubt.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's quite hard to, yeah, I guess, feel where we sit genre-wise.

And that's definitely down to five discrete minds that have some Venn diagram crossover, but definitely it feels possibly slightly less than another five people you get in a room together, you know.

How would would you describe the music you make genre-wise?

If you had to put yourself in a box, which one of those labels are you going to go for?

Oli, you worked in a record label, come on.

I just say rock music.

Yes.

So, what about post-rock?

Would you like that?

I quite like that.

I like all the post-rock bands.

How about math rock?

Less cool.

Less happy with that?

Yeah, less cool.

Yeah.

I came up with one.

Do you want to hear it?

I'd love to hear it.

Ramen rock.

I'd love that.

Yes.

Because

it's white, noodly, and delicious.

Don't get hung up on the white aspect.

It's not supposed to be a racial diss.

It's

true.

Well, it happens to be true, but I'm not implying anything bad by it.

Also, it's not as if there aren't bands of colour that are also extremely noodly.

I'm thinking of, do you know the band Stark Reality?

No, I haven't heard of it.

I think you might quite like them.

Yeah, no, no.

They're like complicated jazzers, I would call them, from the late 60s.

Complicated emotionally or?

No, musically.

And it is very, when you listen to it, you think, whoa, this is quite ahead of its time as far as prefiguring the kind of music that you guys make, for example.

And I mean, it's not exactly the same, but it is really

quite strange and it doesn't really fit with what else was going on around then.

Say their name again?

Stark Reality.

Cool.

Check them out.

It's a strong name.

Can you write that down?

Yeah, it's quite good.

Maybe I'll put a little blast of Stark Reality in here.

When stars get loosened, then their sockets play

off at night like rockets.

Though I stay and watch their trip and search where they have seemed to slip,

There you go, that's a blast of stark reality.

It feels like that sort of music, the kind of music that you guys make, and the sort of music that Dan Kerry, your producer,

also presides over with bands like Black MIDI or Used To,

it feels very current again.

It's so hard to say with Dan, I think he's really got his finger on the pulse with bands that are just starting out and just playing their first one or two gigs and have a lot of nervous energy that he can kind of immediately sort of detect.

That's how he found us.

I think that's how he discovered Black MIDI as well.

The windmill in Brixton being a really important local venue for a lot of young musicians.

But kind of with his label Speedy Wonderground, I don't know if you know it, but they make a track in a day, Dan and Lex do.

And there's a kind of a little handbook of rules, which is that the smoke machine comes on, the lasers come on, there's no lunch break.

It's got to be in the first take, if possible.

And it makes all these young bands like us when we recorded the dial in 2018, we were just like, oh my God, we're going to mess up every part.

And then somehow you get through it and you haven't.

And he's like, oh, that's the take, because you're just kind of...

you know, nervous and excited about what you've recorded with them.

But

yeah, he's an amazing musician as well.

He's so good at kind of taking an idea that just springs to mind instantly and calculate it or kind of transpose it into something that is really just feels great for your project, your song, or your EP, your album, whatever.

I think it's good to have rules.

I quite like movements that have like a manifesto, you know what I mean?

As much as I think it's nice for people to do whatever they want, obviously, and be completely artistically free, it is quite good to focus yourself with a little manifesto

like dogma in film.

And

I would imagine Steve Albini would have been someone who would have produced things in that way that you were describing.

Yeah.

Although I don't know.

Yeah, I listened to your chat with Kim Deal.

Oh, yeah.

And she was saying

she didn't do an album with Steve Albini because she wanted to do overdubs.

I think rules are good though.

I listened to it.

There's a Brian Eno interview the other day and he said all albums should have a deadline and have a small budget because that's when the best kind of stuff gets made.

I kind of tend to agree with that, although Brian Eno has a lot of rules, I think.

Didn't we try a whole deck of cards full of them?

We tried, probably quite a big budget as well.

Yeah, huge budget.

Did you try using the oblique strategy cards?

I think we did.

We did on the side.

Aren't some of them like go get lunch?

Yeah, yeah.

And like, we kept weighting.

I think we had a badly shuffled.

Let's find the lunch one.

Yeah,

Fire the bassist.

That wasn't enough of those ones.

At this point, I would like to introduce the first musical number.

What are you going to play?

Cowards.

Cowards.

Yeah, a song called Cowards off of our album Cowards.

The title track.

Very sombre affair.

As you've never heard it before.

Even sombre.

Sombre.

Okay, here we go.

This is Squid playing cowards exclusively for the podcast, and I'm watching them play it.

I'm in the middle of them playing it.

It's always raining in the castle,

but never outside

you switch it on

off all the time.

Why do I dress when there's no one

else to see?

Paul feedbacks

Little

the streets

Parthene bags

Little

the streets

They litter the streets

All the feedbacks will never go away.

Lust dogs and rats will

never escape.

If you said it could be better

round, I probably won't believe

you.

I'll knock the teeth out my head

and I'll see

while the thing

is waiting for me

Beyond the cancer

Beyond the carriage

We put the pallets down

and we walk around the town

when we put the pellets down

and we walk around the town

Don't ever say a board

Cause there's always something more

When we put the pellets down

And we walk around the town

Always

something

more

pellets down

And we walk around the town

When we put the pellets down

And we walk around the town

Don't ever say you're bored

Cause there's always something more

When we put the pellets down

And we walk around the town

When we put the pellets down

And we walk around the town.

Yay, thank you very much.

That was good.

I mean, I feel a bit crass going yay and clapping after a track like that.

It feels like I should come up with a different sort of response.

Like

an owl whistle, maybe.

Mmm.

Yes, exactly.

Very impressive.

Mmm.

Now I'm going to ask ask you some.

Sorry, were you gonna say something?

No, Louis asked me to do a peacock impression and I said I'm never gonna do it.

Dude, do the peacock impression.

Never heard anyone do a peacock impression.

Oh man.

Alright.

You always say them quite far away so I'm gonna move away from the mic a little bit.

Yeah.

They're always kind of like,

do you know what I mean?

Is that a peacock?

Yeah.

Yeah, gotcha.

Yeah, it is.

There was lots in Traitors, wasn't there?

On this series of Traitors, they used lots of peacock sounds in it.

I think that was pretty bang on, I'd say.

Yeah, what up?

Cheers.

It sounded like I associate that sound with the jungle.

Yeah.

But that's more that's more.

Yeah, but what would that be?

Monkey?

No idea.

Oh, that's like yeah, monkey.

Is it a monkey?

Yeah I reckon

that was Anton on peacock.

Thank you very much Anton.

Now at this point I'm going to ask you a sort of rag bag of questions but I will tell you that some of these questions were generated by AI

and you have to call out when you think it's an AI generated question but you still have to answer it and what do we say when we call it out

you just say I think that's an AI question

do you mind shop assistants swearing in front of you

if it was in anger at at me

no it wouldn't be anger it would just be like

chatting maybe chatting to another member of staff and they are just effing and jeffing all over the shop I don't mind.

It's okay.

Maybe a very

relaxed.

Tell you what, you know what?

If it was a kind of Malcolm Tucker style, like getting annoyed when you're trying to weigh the vegetables and you can't find the carrots on the thing, I'm all for it.

Like, that's frustrating.

I don't like the machines.

But at somebody, if they're frustrated with something else,

that's out of order.

That's not okay.

No.

I'm not talking about their swearing at you.

I'm thinking about, I went into a bike shop the other day and they saw that I was waiting, and it was a couple of guys at the till, till and they were chatting to each other about some till discrepancy or other.

And it was just absolutely filthy language that was being used about the till.

They weren't angry, I don't think.

But it was just like, oh, fucking hell.

I mean,

I think it was rung in.

Oh, fuck, you can't.

Come on.

Try and remember because it's got to balance it.

It's like, there's a customer here standing in front of you.

It's not appropriate to say cunt.

I think the C word is outlawed.

It's too much.

That's too much.

It's irritated.

But bike shop, though, anything goes in a bike shop.

It's like a guitar shop.

You can sort of say anything you want.

Okay.

How do you balance improvisation with composition?

AI quite criticized by Deep Show all over it.

Well spotted.

Do we have to

answer that?

Is that a question worth answering?

I think that's that's an interesting question from DeepSeek.

Should we answer

as if we're DeepSeek versions of ourselves?

If you want, yeah.

We like to balance improvisation fleetingly within our compositions.

On stage, when performing as Squid,

we will

play 5 to 10% improvisation within our standard compositions.

These often take the form of improvisations upon the harmony within which we are inhabiting at that moment.

For example, a B flat major seven chord.

That's good, Laurie.

Thank you very much.

You even did the thing that some of the new AI that's really good at it does it, where it puts like um and like long pauses in.

Yeah, yeah, that was pretty good.

And it's terrifying, really.

Well, I'm I'm training.

Thank you.

That was Laurie in AI mode there.

Have you ever made uh you don't have to answer this one, it might be a sensitive subject or a question you don't want to answer, of course.

do you ever make music on drugs

no no

never even tried that's that sounds like a total lie when we say it like that doesn't it yeah no no no no no no no I don't think

I think we have tried alcohol is a drug caffeine is a drug come on

we're usually pretty

good stuff

pretty um straight-edged on the

work time, yeah.

Sometimes when we even just have a pint at we've started doing evening rehearsals now and sometimes we'll set up and then have dinner and have a pint, but then even then

it ends up being quite a short rehearsal, doesn't it?

That's what I was going to say.

There were some times in the past where we were a bit more adventurous and usually the performances or rehearsals would start off quite well for the first five, ten minutes, but it doesn't last long.

And

half an hour into the show, the audience has thinned out a bit.

Yeah, there was a lot of things.

We split opinion, I think, back in the day, if that would ever be the case.

There was one at Glastonbury, wasn't there, that was

for some people the best show they've ever seen.

And for other people, the worst show they've ever seen.

By you guys.

Yes.

The experience becomes more polarising, and I think it was only good because your brother was in a squid costume crowdsurfing.

I think that's what people really liked about the show.

Thanks for our lackluster performance.

But you weren't, I mean, you weren't hammered, but you'd had a couple of drinks, is that right?

We were quite hammered.

Oh, you were quite tired.

This was 3 a.m.

It was

a long time ago, yeah.

At a very small audience, it was very fun, forgiving audience.

Yeah, we get it a lot, though.

Like

people in the audiences, particularly at festivals, saying things like, oh my god, what drugs are you guys on?

Gaze.

Yeah, I've had that loads of times.

Loads of times.

I've never had that.

What about the guy in Liverpool that said, you guys like talking heads, but on the gear?

And we were like, okay.

Excuse me?

But I thought that was about our music, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

they think that all the music must have come from a place of heavy drug taking, which is.

And I was thinking about it just metaphorically, you know,

talking heads were, was, as a concept, taking cocaine.

I think they used to.

I think Tina Weymouth and Chris France, certainly, he took loads of cocaine.

He writes about it in his book.

Yeah, yeah.

Best stay clear of the stuff.

But

I definitely grew up thinking that...

Alcohol equals fun and so if you're working and drinking alcohol that's as fun as things get.

And then I learned, it took me quite a while to learn that that was not true.

And actually, it seems so obvious now that the fun is in doing something well.

And if you are pissed or wasted in some other way, the chances of you doing that well go right down.

Some people, they could, it doesn't really matter.

And being kind of off their heads just makes it more interesting because it's got such a well, it doesn't matter on stage

for them.

I guess

it would be difficult coming off stage yeah well there you go i mean that's that that's setting aside what personal mayhem the whole thing is but you know but i also feel like for us yeah it just i think you're so right like it's so normal for us to play having not drank or taken anything that's just completely the way every show happens pretty much

that

the thought of playing drunk now is just terrifying

such a bad idea it was definitely a process gang at that point yeah it was like in Birkenhead where we'd we played in the library in Birkenhead

at 2 p.m.

Which I guess was helpful.

But you said this is the first show we've played, but we haven't had a pint before.

And all the people were there with their books being like, whoa.

People look worried.

We were in the green room being like, yeah, it's all the beer.

It's also like, I suppose, because we've been going on tour over the last, I mean, I guess we started going on tour about six years ago or something.

And if you're doing six shows in a week and your default is to just have two pints before a show and one pint after, for example, you know, you end up having 18 pints in a week without even really thinking about it.

That's more than you're allotted.

Yeah, and like way more than you're allotted.

And like, you're not even doing it to have fun.

You know, it's like nice to have a drink with your friends sometimes or whatever, but you're just doing it because

you have a routine.

And that's like quite a bad kind of pattern to get into, I think.

Yeah, definitely.

It's not a good long-term strategy.

I mean, that's part of the reason why bands don't stay together that long, on the whole, I guess, isn't it?

Yeah.

And comedians as well.

I think it's even harder for a lot of stand-ups because the urge to be a little bit off your face is so strong to just put some separation between you and the audience and not be 100% exposed.

But

it's not a good, healthy lifestyle.

How about this?

Do you want to go out with a this is not AI, this is a buckles?

This is a pretty this is a profound question,

which you can respond to in any way you prefer.

Which is preferable, living a blissfully happy life filled with great friends and lovers, only to discover on your deathbed that your friends had swindled you and your wife has been cheating on you,

or living a horrible painful life and being shown love and kindness right at the end

that's an amazing question i think i'd live the blissful life

yeah i'm unaware that everyone's stabbing me in the back until i until just before i die so how many you've got to say your name and then say how you would prefer to go i'm ollie i'd prefer a blissful life where I find out everything's a lie right at the last second.

I'm Arthur and I'd also choose the easy way through life and then at the end

bit misery but then so first of all

I'm Laurie and I concur with those two.

I guess maybe that kind of thing might happen with AI you know we'll realize we're matrixing at some points.

Yeah.

And you don't mind because usually you know the psychologist Daniel Kahneman he talked about what's known as the peak end rule.

So that most people judge an experience by how it ends

and how they feel at the end of it.

How about the other two of you guys?

Well, that, yeah,

it's a hard one.

This is Louis.

There's a big part of me that's saying this life of torment only to have a realization at the end that there's been so much redemption by this good stuff happening that you're there with that last feeling that this was actually great in the end.

I can't remember who said it, but there's a great quote where it's,

I'd rather be hated

for who I am than loved for who I'm not.

Come who said it.

I've been thinking about it recently.

And yeah, maybe that, yeah.

Ice cream, please.

You'll go for the cozy.

I won't, grandpa.

It's vanilla, your favourite.

Very good.

Well, I'll check in with you in 20 years' time and see if you still feel that way.

Yeah.

You're the one cheating

game.

If I'm still around, that is.

I may have expired by that point,

having had some pretty bad things revealed to me on my deathbed.

It's probably time for some more music, isn't it?

Chimal M.

I think so.

So what are you going to play for us now?

Building 650.

Which was previously known as Tuesday Rock Idea.

Tuesday Rock Idea.

Yes.

Oh, I like that.

That's a good utilitarian title.

Thank you.

Am I allowed to ask what Building 650 refers to?

Hi, Ollie here.

I think it's the Nike headquarters in New York.

That's the building number.

And I'm not going to say anything else than that.

Okay, so here's Squid's tribute to their favorite trainer brand,

Building 650.

I'm wearing Addy Das.

Show me around, show me around, show me around.

All the noble gas just powers in

town.

Frank's my friend,

he's my friend.

We have friends, it's Murderson Times

a real nice guy.

Well, Frank's my friend,

we tied them up.

A flame could melt

his nose and mouth

A flame could melt

almost anything

A sharp pignee

so carelessly

light the shoes

Cause I've seen rare things

Like a murder

saying lovely things

A flame could melt

his nose and mouth

A flame came out

almost anything

Those plastic fields

were on the window sill

There is no taste

Just an empty gaze

Frank's my friend

Not you American

No true American

No true American The lights are rough

in building six five oh

The lights are red

when we go

Franks, my friend,

no true American

Franks, my friend,

no true American

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Is it weird having someone someone else in the room when you're together, like just one other person watching you play?

No, it's not weird.

It it definitely does change the energy, but not in a bad way.

It makes us play better, I think.

Yeah, I think it was positive.

In fact, all the albums we've done, we've not done in a studio like this where the where the control room's different to the live room.

We've always done them in rooms where it's all one space.

So it's quite normal for us to be in a kind of studio environment where there's the five of us and then some other people listening in the same room as the performance.

I think it's quite good to have that kind of back and forth rather than like feeling like you're cut off from people.

Yeah.

Well, I was honored to be in here and absorbing your musical vibes.

I mean, music's the best thing, right?

How do you feel about the current state of music?

What about that is a big question.

That was not generated by AI.

It was generated by this AI part of my brain.

I just can't get my headline.

I've sort of lost track of where the music industry is at.

I don't really understand how it works at all.

I guess my understanding seems to be that bands make money from touring, and that's about it.

No one really makes money from sales.

You have to stream billions and billions before you make any money from streaming.

What am I getting right, and what am I getting wrong?

I think all those things are right.

Hit the nail in the head.

I think a big, I mean,

we can only kind of share share our perspective, and there's

it's probably quite different for people who are on like major labels or people that are unsigned.

But what we are is signed to an independent record label, so we've got like one perspective on how things work.

I mean, all those things that you said are true, but one of the main things that's like a big worry at the moment is that loads of venues are shutting down.

And when you've got a situation where like the only way that bands can make money and sustain themselves and produce the things that people love hearing from them is by playing shows, and then simultaneously, lots of venues are disappearing.

It's quite a

scary thing.

Shout out for your favourite venue that you would like people to patronise.

Oh,

Spanners.

Spanners, where Spanners?

Spanners is in Loughborough Junction.

And it's a small 100-capacity venue with two very lovely owners.

Lots of smoke and nice kind of orange lights.

Cafe Otto in Dalston, amazing venue.

And I feel like it's an institution that I really hope isn't going anywhere, but it's a great place in London to go and see some strange music that you may or may not have heard.

And it's, yeah, it feels like a lot of what I remember venues in Brighton being like, but in London.

I think I've been to Cafe Otto.

Yeah.

Do you remember who you saw?

Yeah.

I'll do some name dropping.

I went to Cafe Otto with Julian Barrett from The Mighty Bouch and maybe even Rich Fulture from The Boosh.

And we saw Bob Logg III.

Oh, I love Bob Logg III.

I've seen him late.

Explain Bob Logg III for people unfamiliar.

Well, I don't think anyone's ever seen his face, right?

He wears a motorbike helmet.

Yeah, with a telephone receiver as the microphone.

And he plays the kind of blues slide guitar.

and drum machine with his feet and he often gets people to to come sit on his knee while he

jiggles them up and down and plays the drums with his feet.

He played at End of the Road quite a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's ringing in many people.

He played at Cafe Otto, that's amazing.

Yeah.

Great.

Back in the day.

Quite a long time ago.

But I didn't know he didn't jiggle anyone on his knee there.

No.

He got two people when I saw him

on both knees.

Did he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've got to be careful with jiggling people on your knee these days.

Yeah,

this was was quite a long time ago.

If you took his helmet off, it might turn out that he's some DJ from the 70s.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, Podcats.

That was the members of Squid talking to me there.

And I was very grateful to them for making the trip to London, which I think they may have made specially for the podcast.

With all their instruments, great big instruments they had.

Guitars and cellos and drum machines and all sorts of bits and pieces.

Thank you very much to them and to the crew at the studio that day who recorded the session.

A reminder that Squid are playing at End of the Road Festival towards the end of August this year.

I'll be there too, it'll be a hoot.

Come along, maybe I'll see you there.

Another reminder that you can see fellow windmill scene alumnus Geordie Greep, ex of Black MIDI, touring around the UK between the 17th and 25th of July.

There's a link in the description so you can see where Geordie is headed.

That was a musical highlight from earlier this year for me, seeing Geordie and his band playing music from his recent solo album, The New Sound,

at the waterfront in Norwich.

He is a real original.

Although if I was to compare him,

maybe I would compare him to a combination of Marky Smith and Frank Zapper what about that pretty good combo as far as I'm concerned musically

anyway so before I go today

I thought I would share some of these comments with you that were left underneath my I baked you a pie video

which you can still see.

It's no longer set to public on my YouTube channel.

I felt quite foolish after I saw all the negative comments, not merely because I hadn't really considered properly some of the things they were talking about, but also because I really thought hard before I uploaded it.

I thought, is this offensive?

Is this, you know, in the same way that I would normally think pretty hard before I put a video out there on my YouTube channel.

I'm not saying they're all brilliant or that they're all timeless classics.

Indeed, every now and again I'll take some down.

And I probably will take this one down at some point, but I'm leaving it up there on a private link for the time being.

And you can access that private link by checking out the show notes for last week's live podcast with Guz Khan.

The images that I used on the video were also generated by AI, and the prompts were all requests to see an image of me, Adam Buxton, who AI seemed to think looked a lot like Rob Delaney in various forms.

Meeting various celebrities, some of them from Bakoff, because the song was kind of a Bakoff joke.

And a lot of the results were very wonky and strange.

And just the ways that the AI was interpreting some of the prompts, I thought, was interesting and kind of funny.

But yeah, I foolishly set it to public, which means that everyone who is subscribed to my YouTube channel gets maybe gets a notification.

I'm not exactly sure how it works, but certainly it racked up a few thousand views in the first couple of hours.

You know, it didn't break the internet,

but it was viewed enough times for there to be a few hundred comments underneath, and

most of them, as far as I could tell, were negative.

Here is a handful of responses.

And I'm not reading these out in order to ridicule the people who left them.

I just thought that

it might be interesting for you to hear what they had to say.

Maybe I will keep them anonymous.

One comment here that says, Dear previously creative, funny granddad.

Okay,

you've discovered AI and it seems amusing now, so get it out of your system, because in a couple of weeks, it will start to make you feel sick every time you see or hear it.

I promise I know because I've been there.

Dear previously creative funny granddad that certainly tweaked my anxiety nipples.

Here's another one that says as a big fan of your work Adam please don't do this and there was a lot of comments like that actually nice comments people saying i like your stuff but i don't like this

another one says, You're better than this AI slop, Adam.

A lot of people saying that kind of thing, calling it AI slop, which I appreciate and I understand where they're coming from.

There is a lot of AI slop, but I felt that I was using AI as a tool.

I think that AI can be a useful tool for creative projects,

but perhaps it didn't look as though I was

being very creative with it to those people.

But also, of course, there are the

ethical implications about how the images are generated and the kind of copyright infringement implied, which I probably should have thought harder about.

Final YouTube comment that I'll read says, got one of those feelings he made this for his wife or something as a joke, and then thought, just put it on the internet, why not?

I mean, I would say that that's pretty accurate.

It wasn't entirely made for my wife as a joke, but I certainly did play it to her.

And she did think it was funny.

This was the beginning of last year.

Obviously, since then,

she's read Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, and

if she saw it now, it would make her physically sick.

But yeah, back then...

There was chuckles at Castle Buckles.

I'm sorry, but there were.

But that's not the whole reason I

uploaded it.

Just put it on the internet, why not?

Did I think that?

Maybe a bit.

Look, there's worse things happening in the world.

But I appreciate that feelings and anxieties run high around the subject of AI.

And I thought hard about the more thoughtful comments that people left, not implying that the ones I just read out weren't thoughtful, but some people did leave particularly thoughtful messages.

And one of them was from a musician called Jessica Rock, who sent me a message that was very kind

and positive but there was a big butt halfway down.

She says I just had a listen to your last episode with Guz Khan and thought it was fantastic.

I could listen to you chat all day and I was so happy to hear his return on the podcast.

You might already know what I'm about to say.

as I've already told you I'm a composer.

But I was slightly bummed by the AI music generated song, partly because I just love the music that you create yourself, thank you very much, Jessica, but also because that AI model was likely trained with music from composers/slash songwriters who are already having a tricky time in the industry without robots stealing their music.

You had Kate Nash on the other day, who was excellent at talking about some of those things.

And then later she says, I'm just wary that if we normalize using AI music generators, it screws over musicians and composers even more so than Spotify and all those other things that Kate Nash was talking about.

And then she tells me a little bit more about herself and one of her musical projects, which is part of a display at the Design Museum in London.

I will put a link in the description.

But thank you, Jessica, for your very kind and considered message, and indeed to everyone else who left messages underneath the YouTube video.

Fair points made me think differently about the whole thing.

I don't hate AI personally.

I do think that some of it is actually kind of marvelous but I do appreciate

and share many of the concerns around it.

Obviously, I mean none of us knows how it's all going to pan out and it does seem very worrying the way that

the companies responsible for rolling it out seem seem reluctant to take people's concerns properly into account.

Several people underneath the YouTube video were just sick of the whole subject, though,

saying, I switch off every time you start talking about AI on the podcast.

I'm afraid I can't guarantee that I'm going to stop talking about AI.

I do think it's like a fact of our lives, whether we like it or not now, and I think it's quite an interesting thing to talk about.

I apologize if you disagree.

But but I will bear it in mind and I will try not to bang on about it in too repetitive a way.

Anyway, there you go.

Thanks for all your correspondence.

That's it for this week's podcast.

Thanks once again to the members of SQUID.

Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support.

Thanks very much indeed to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork.

Thanks to everyone at ACAST for liaising with my sponsors.

But thanks most of all to you.

Really appreciate the mainly warm tone of the messages, even though they were critical

under the YouTube video.

And if you have no objection, I wonder if we can have a quick creepy hug.

Come on, hey.

Previously creative, granddad.

Okay.

Until next time, please go carefully and hey, look for what it's worth.

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