The Jimmy Cake are back and this time they’ve got some Tough Love for us. Vinnie Dermody has a heart to heart with us.
Tough Love is your sixth studio album release? Why tough as opposed to easy or free?
Easy and free are a bit easy and free for our liking if that makes sense?
Tough love builds character and maybe someday we can cash in on that character by writing a truly amazing song about it.
Would classifying you as local noiseniks be taken as a compliment or discredit?
It’s a pretty neutral word but it sounds like an insult and I’d love to hear someone use it against me sincerely in an argument. Preferably in a high-pitched Brooklyn accent please. ‘Ah shaddap ye hi-fallutin’ no good noisenik’. And so on.
You released your debuts Brains back in 2001. What lessons have you learnt on the way to the 2017?
Don’t release your brains at the beginning. Also if you work with someone and they burn you then give them one more chance. If they burn you again then it’s definitely one last chance and that’s it. Okay one more chance, this could be too good to turn down. Why do we keep getting burned?
This release is originally a recording from the defunct Joinery space in Stoneybatter. What made you decide to turn it into an album?
We were pretty delighted with how the performance turned out and it felt like a satisfyingly appropriate way to mark the passing of The Joinery and a golden opportunity to avoid waiting another (fucking) eight years to release an album. Carpe millennium – that’s our motto.
You formed as a 10-piece and are now down to five. How hard is it to sustain momentum and enthusiasm for a project that doesn’t pay the bills?
If paying the bills was a prerequisite for enthusiasm then we’d either be rolling around in the gutter unenthusiastically instead of happily under our mouldy railway bridge, in another country entirely or making radically different music. You know, music that sells.
What are your current influences?
Everything that has ever happened but with an emphasis on events, people, items & things, preferably with a musical twist! eg the first European King’s Minstrel to accidentally burn his face off with cranberry sauce.
Who is Jimmy?
Jimmy is just a regular gal who happens to have feet for hands and hands for feet. She only wants to be left alone to sit on her Porsche, whittle her head tusks and whack out a few choice numbers on the old ukulele emulator. That’s our Jimmy xxx
The Jimmy Cake launch Tough Love in The Grand Social on Saturday July 8 with support from Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands. Tickets €13 (€25 with LP bundle)
Jimmy Cake illustration credit: Eoin Whelehan Illustration
