Getting to Know Jakubi – Music interview
Melbourne-based five-piece Jakubi are about to embark on a massive 35-date tour of America. Before they head off, we asked them to tell us about themselves:
We are two brothers, two cousins and a random guy from all different walks of life that, through pure chance, somehow came together to make music and do a lot of really fun stuff. Friends of friends and a love for producing brought us together. It wasn’t supposed to be anything too serious, just jamming and making tunes. Over time it grew legs of its own, now we just ride with it.
Couch Potato is the name of our new single. It’s about a girl that is over the everyday expectations and dull routine of not living, but purely just existing. Papa thinks it’s time to grow up and get a job, but she ain’t ready yet. She floats through her days on a cloud of curiosity, wondering if she is the only one out there, til one day she meets a boy, “a mr couch potato just like her, he loves what she does when she does what she loves”. I think we have all felt that way at least once in our lives. That feeling that you are just living out someone else’s life. In your own body but within someone else’s template… haha, I just made the happiest chilled track sound so deep. That was some serious Matrix shit right there, lol.
Melbourne is the place that we were all born and raised. It is also the city where we all came together and started jamming. While we are really looking forward to getting out of Australia for a while, I think it’ll always be home. I travelled through Europe a few years ago and was amazed and blown away by the history, age and architecture of all those cities. With saying that, it was a real eye opener to how sick our own city is too. Have you ever actually hit Melbourne city as if you are a tourist? A lot of cool alleyways, so many clubs, pubs, bars and restaurants. Also we have a really sick live music scene. If I’m been honest though, we could probs do with a few more degrees!
We spend too much time sitting around playing cards, haha. We were in Perth last week for three days, and my memories consist of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. In our defence it was raining the whole time so outside wasn’t much of an option. We also have really short attention spans, so we spend a lot of time jamming on new material. It’s sorta like, we write this track, we all dig it, but an hour later we can’t remember it because in those 60 mins we had five new ideas for five different songs, haha. We a pretty scattered people, sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.
Our upcoming US tour will be the most exciting and scary thing we have ever done. It’s been a while in the making so we are really pumped to just get off that plane and say “wow, we made it”. I think until then it won’t feel real to us. It’s a bit of a dream come true. We have had a lot of dramas with visas and stuff like that, so I think we will just probably spend the first night celebrating that we actually made it into the country. Looking forward to the experience of waking up in a new city everyday. Playing in some new places and hopefully, getting some time out to be tourists. So shattered that the two months we are there, NBA is in-between seasons. I think our US agent possibly planned it that way knowing that if ball was on, I would go missing a lot, haha.
It might surprise people to learn that every member of Jakubi has solo projects and writes/producers for other bands and artists. We also lead double lives as dances, ballers, event managers and DJs. Our first single ‘Can’t Afford It All’ was actually the first song we wrote all together as a band and our first show was in our drummer’s lounge room, which was also the roof top of a cafe he was working at. We squeezed about 50 of our closest friends into that tiny room and just pretty much said, this is what we have been doing, it’s called Jakubi and that was it, we were officially a band, haha. We only had four songs so we played them all twice over.
In the future we want to be still making music together and individually. I think the dream is always to do what you love and some how find a way to make a living out of it. It would be really sick to own our own place where we could combine all our studios to make one crazy big studio. That way we could just write and record all our tunes 24/7. We would also have really understanding and awesome neighbours that wouldn’t complain about the 3am funk coming from our house, haha. Sorta like the way ‘Chilli Peppers’ made ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’. If you haven’t seen the doco on the making of that album, do it! I think it’s called ‘Funky Monks’.
I love the idea of having everything at our finger tips so we can just let it be and see what happens whenever without watching the clock.
Find Jakubi’s tour dates on their Facebook page.
Interview by Bobby Townsend.
