Taken from the new issue of HEROINE, out now. 

At eleven on a Friday morning, Jacob Read aka Jerkcurb meets me from Peckham Rye station to walk over to his parents’ house. A previous collaborator of King Krule, the south London illustrator and songwriter is an emerging talent whose work imbues an air of old school romanticism, dark humour and buckets of imagination.

Read produces smouldering downbeat tracks, accompanied with animated visual counterparts that depict dense retro-futuristic scenes. With his debut single Night on Earth causing a stir on the internet, we hang out in his childhood bedroom turned studio to root through sketchbooks and discuss apocalyptic love songs, teenage bands and the struggles of being a young creative in London.

Nazanin Shahnavaz: What’s your relationship with this room?
Jacob Read: Childhood room, now turned adult room. It’s a love-hate thing really. Mainly hate, but I fill it with things that I like to look at and I have a lot of collections.

NS: Why do you hate it?
JR: It’s just the connotations of your childhood, and feeling like you’re in this regressed environment where you grew up. I’ve been alive for 24 years and this room has seen a lot of different stages. My earliest memory of this room was of a cot, and I’ve had six or seven beds since – the latest one is a fold out kind of thing made of denim. But, I’ve arranged the space now so that it’s a bit like a studio and it’s really productive, I have my desk for when I’m animating and if I’m working on music I tend to sit on the rug.

NS: What collections do you have?
JR: I do illustration, but I approach it from a fine art perspective so I’m always on the lookout for books with weird visual references, usually with an Americana aesthetic and about American cultures that aren’t really around anymore. Perhaps it’s because I’m half-American and I have a lot of childhood memories of being in America, but I have books on small newspaper adverts, 70s house plants, Tiki Culture and I collect a lot of weird trinkets.

NS: How do these references translate into your work?
JR: I usually take these references and add something modern to it, like the Apple Finder icon and I’ve recently been into characters where you can’t see their eyeballs, so it’s not very clear if they are robots. I use a lot of my illustrations as artwork for my music too, and the name Jerkcurb goes for both my music and illustration/animation work.

NS: Where did the name Jerkcurb come from? What is it?
JR: I used to work in the Post Office down the road, and I worked with a guy there for about a year and a half and I never got his name. It was really embarrassing because after the first couple of weeks you can’t just be like, ‘What’s your name?’ so you’ve just got to go with it. He was a lovely guy and he didn’t speak too much English, so it wasn’t like we were chatting all the time. On my last week, he wanted to add me on Facebook and he typed my name on his phone as ‘Jerkcurb’ and I thought it was the best and the weirdest combination of horrible words. Also, I like that it doesn’t connote what the music sounds like; people often think I’m in a metal band when really it’s pretty mellow. I did initially use Jerkcurb just for my artwork, because when I started making music it was a side project to the band that I was in at the time.

NS: Oh yeah, what was the band?
JR: I was in a band called Words Backwards with Jack Marshall, who is Archy Marshall’s [King Krule’s] brother, and our friends Theo and Raf. We’ve all been friends since primary school and Theo, who wrote a lot of the songs with us is a jazz trained drummer, so he brought a lot of jazz influences to our mental teenage punk music. It really didn’t sound as good as I just described it, but it was a lot of fun and we used to play at the Bunker in Deptford all the time, it was our resident shithole. We’ve reformed with a new line up as Horsey, it’s fucking bizarre. I can play you some if you like, though I don’t really know what time of day you would listen to Horsey. [We listen to Horsey in the background]

“I wrote this song from the perspective that the only way I could find the confidence to meet her face to face was amidst some kind of apocalypse – world ending type situation.”

NS: Why did you start making music under Jerkcurb?
JR: I wanted to make music that I could actually listen to, like on the train or something and Jerkcurb began with my fascination with film. I used to study film and I loved watching films, watching a great film is the best escape. I didn’t really have an interest before I’d seen Die Hard or whatever and then suddenly I was like, “Yeah, I’m a film guy!” and I eventually started to make soundtracks to those films based on my own take on the narratives. It’s always been about narrative for me.

NS: What are some of the narratives that you have explored?
JR: In a similar way to film there’s definitely a character perspective but the themes are not necessarily make believe. It’s things that I think about, personal things, but put through a character and exaggerated. It sounds pretentious, but I always think animations and cartoons are a really good way to portray the human condition, like the exaggerated mannerisms and behaviours. I have that lense when I make music, when I make a sad song I want it to be really sad.

NS: So you embody these characters to a certain degree?
JR: I think I do, or at least in my brain. Maybe not physically or in my day-to-day life but I definitely think about these ideas and exaggerate them. When I first started playing live I did the sad thing all the time, but I got bored of it and wanted to do something a bit more macho and started to channel the aggression from my old band, like this fake masculinity that I don’t have.

NS: Is there a specific track that tells a particular narrative?
JR: The song that I’m putting out today, Night on Earth, is based on how I met my girlfriend. About five years ago, I met her on the internet before Tinder and all that, like when it was weird to meet people online – it’s still weird – but it’s become a bit more acceptable. It was a secret thing, I didn’t tell anyone and it went on for ages. I never thought I would meet her and it got very intense for me, I wrote this song from the perspective that the only way I could find the confidence to meet her face to face was amidst some kind of apocalypse – world ending type situation.

NS: I think that’s really sweet.
JR: It sounds really stupid saying it out loud, but that’s where the idea came from. I was trying to do a Roy Orbison 50s crooner kind of thing. I don’t really like the phrase crooner, because it reminds me of Alex Turner on Jools Holland and that cringes me out. But, it’s kind of like that, very desperate and over dramatic.

NS: What has influenced your tastes growing up?
JR: Aggression [laughs]. Actually this book, No Wave: Post-Punk Underground New York 1976-1980 by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley really changed the direction of what I was into. I read the book cover to cover and found out about all these artists like Suicide, James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Birthday Party, Arto Lindsey, Lounge Lizards and I just fell in love with how raw and aggressive they were. It was a big eye opener for me. Visual influencers were cartoons like Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, and a lot of Nickelodeon stuff like Hey Arnold – I’ve even sampled Hey Arnold on one of my tracks because I love it so much.

“Archy used to play under Zoo Kid and we were into words backwards, and Zoo Kid backwards is Dik Ooz, which was perfect.”

NS: Are you involved in any creative scenes locally?
JR: I have a lot of friends in the neighbourhood, and like I said, I’m really good friends with Archy and Jack who grew up round the corner. We went to the same primary school, then we were all into skateboarding and terrible music like Blink 182 but he’ll never admit, then playing music together was the last thing. Jack and I started the other band, and there’s not many other people that I feel such a strong sense of competition with. We use to go around each other’s house and draw giant alien wars, and I’d have one race of alien and he’d draw the other and we’d just draw our characters killing each other. After college we went different routes, I went to uni and was focusing on drawing and I guess Archy was getting really big but we were all still friends, Jack and I were in a different band called Dik Ooz.

NS: Dik Ooz? That’s disgusting and hilarious.
JR: There’s a legitimate story behind the name, Archy used to play under Zoo Kid and we were into words backwards, and Zoo Kid backwards is Dik Ooz, which was perfect.

NS: What’s your earliest creative memory?
JR: I remember drawing underwater pictures, I would have a big piece of paper and just draw as many different fish as I could. I remember I once thought I had lost the ability to make up new fish and I got really sad, so I turned onto dinosaurs and I was like ‘Yes! That’s it, they’ve evolved into dinosaurs!’ and I started drawing dinosaurs all day.

NS: How has your work evolved over the years?
JR: It hasn’t really [laughs]. I guess you can dress it up as different things, but the reason stays the same: I just have to do it, because I want to do it. I think if you start to think about it too much you become cautious, you need to allow room for mistakes. I think mistakes are what makes art and music so special and not like anything else, because you can benefit from making mistakes.

Jerkcurb plays tonight at the Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Ln, London E8 2EB, UK. For more info and tickets head to the event page.