Tom Jenkinson is 26 years old. As genre-dissolving spaz-jazz drum n’ bass hardcore rave-funk pioneer Squarepusher, this broad, bearded man has released something like nine albums. A few are good. A couple are dodgy. The others – including his debut Feed Me Weird Things on Rephlex and now Go Plastic for Warp Records – never cease to amaze with their kaleidoscopic freak-out mind music.
He’s got a girlfriend (he loves women, don’t get him wrong) but lives alone off a busy traffic artery in the unhip part of East London on the first floor in one of the dirtiest flats I’ve ever seen. Summertime ants crawl among rows of empty beer bottles on the kitchen’s work-surfaces. Stuff which can only be described as stuff is piled everywhere. He’s too busy to clean though. There’s too much music inside his head that has to be made; too many demons to quell. His electronics engineer father drilled a strong work ethic into the young Squarepusher at the family home in Chelmsford, Essex.
In fine macho rock tradition, Jenkinson’s latest single for Warp is about his dick. It’s already a classic. Officially titled “My Red Hot Car,” it’s actually called “My Red Hot Cock” and is a genius mutant piss-take of the fashionable UK garage scene and sound. “If you call a track ‘Red Hot Cock’ you’re going to get into all sorts of bother, so we called it ‘Car’ to spare a blush or two,” Jenkinson points out, surrounded by his home studio tools. “And if you think about it, you can’t fuck someone with a red hot car. I like seeing girls’ faces when they hear it.”
Jenkinson has just returned from his first trip to the US, where he played two headfuck flex-out shows in California. He fell in love with the country. Seriously. Here he presents a convincing argument in its favor. “Basically, I wanna move to America. Things work properly there, like to the level that I want them to. You get the feeling in England that when you start blasting off people get a bit fucking done in by it, they get all fucked off with you cuz you’re blasting off too much – but all I can do is blast off. I can’t fucking stop it. I’ve got so much stuff to say, so many angles I feel like showing and I feel that that is suited to America. Cuz in America there’s no restrictions. You get the feeling there that people want you to go as mental as you can, and that is all I wanna do because I fucking love showing off. That is my prime aim: to go mental. The point of America is there’s no boundaries. It’s where I was born to fucking be. This is it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where I’m going: The Land of Burgers. The Land of Hope and Beefburgers.”
Like the rest of the world, Squarepusher’s main concern is George W Bush. “The President’s weird. In fact he looks just like a computer graphic; I don’t reckon he’s real. He’s so 2-D and his voice is, well, wind-up actually. His eyes are so close together, have you noticed? Dangerously close. He’s almost a cyclops. He’s fucking crackers.”
Squarepusher is not, repeat not, an IDM nerd. He hates being hassled at gigs but loves getting fucked with his mates. But he doesn’t want anyone to know how he fashions his unique sound. For Jenkinson, it’s all about seduction.
“I love seducing people,” he says, “It’s a game. You’re always pretending you’re things that you’re not. It’s like being nice to someone before smacking them in the face – it’s more fun than just smacking them in the face.”
Then Squarepusher grins the grin of a man who knows exactly what he’s talking about. “It’s like chatting someone up and then doing them from behind at Mach Four.”
PIERS MARTIN
MP3s of “My Red Hot Car” are available from www.warprecords.com. The album Go Plastic is released this month. Squarepusher tours the US with Plaid in the summer.
