‘Ed Sheeran asked us for work experience then drank all our beer’: Nizlopi on making JCB Song

‘We’d get big, rugby-playing men coming up to us in tears and saying “I miss my dad” – or “I love my dad and I’ve never told him”’

Luke Concannon, singer

John and I started writing songs together when we were 13. After we finished at university, we both moved back in with our parents in the Midlands and started writing an album. One day I went downstairs and my dad was cooking. I said: “What should I write a song about?” And he was like: “I don’t know. Diggers.” He drove a Massey Ferguson digger in his own father’s groundworks company and would pick me up from school in it straight from a job. One kid a couple of years older than me at school would often pummel me, and my dad always felt so warm, loving and safe by contrast. The two worlds were a massive juxtaposition. I went upstairs and 90 minutes later more or less had the song exactly as it was recorded.

I’d been working in some London youth centres, commuting from Leamington Spa a couple of days a week. I was inspired by the garage sound that was big at the time so I had that kind of rhythm in my head and then it was like: “I’m Luke, I’m five and my dad’s Bruce Lee.” When that combination of double-timing things came in, I was like: “This has got some magic juice to it.”

People would be a bit disarmed by the weirdness of it. They’d laugh at the line: “The engine rattles my bum like berserk.” By the end, they’d just be laughing and rocking to it. We put it on our debut album and in early 2005 started to put the hand-drawn video together, and published it online in 30-second increments, as the artist completed his painstaking work. HMV wrote to us to say: “When are you releasing the song? People keep asking if they can buy it.”

It was No 1 just before Christmas 2005. In late January, we played a sold-out show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London. And it turns out, Ed Sheeran was there. Ed would have been about 14 then. He just kept writing to us: “Could I do work experience with you?” He was very intense. He just wanted to rap-battle us all the time because Eminem’s 8 Mile had just come out. It was Ed’s vision and his gift to be a pop star, but at that stage it wasn’t what I was about.

We had been playing to 200 people a night with a certain vision, mission and purpose – then suddenly this one song just goes boom and we’re at Hyde Park playing to 20,000 people. It’s damaging to the integrity of a living system to grow that quickly. It caused a lot of rupture, stress and conflict and was part of what broke up the band. It’s almost like if a child is growing at a steady rate and that child grows 300ft in six months – it’s probably gonna hurt and it might even kill the child.

John Parker, bass player

I taught Luke to play guitar so it’s my fault, really. When he played the song to me, I was going, “Er, JCBs? Er, really?” Once we’d played it a few times, changed a few things musically, I still thought it was a bit naff. I guess I didn’t quite get it until we started playing it live.

It was then that you’d get big, rugby-playing men coming up to you in tears, going: “I miss my dad” or “I love my dad and I’ve never told him.” Luke was very good at orchestrating the audience into a kind of choir. It’s a funny song because obviously it’s about Luke when he was five with his dad, but it’s amazing how many dads are builders and work in construction and let their sons sit in their diggers.

We used to take work experience kids: they got a week in the studio and a week on the road. Ed Sheeran stood out. I remember him being very enthusiastic, always asking questions. I do remember, in Bristol, him just drinking our rider. It was a full-on gig for me and I was like: “I could really do with a cold beer.” All gone. I said to Luke: “We can’t have him on tour.” In 2006, he opened a show for us in Norwich, not far from his home town, and he had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. I said: “Oh, we’ve created a monster here.”

I don’t think we believed we had a hit until we started doing things like Richard and Judy. When you’re a creative, you spend most of your time saying to aunties and uncles: “It is a proper job.” When you’re on Top of the Pops and you’re No 1, they get off your back for a while.

The JCB Song is almost totally separate from Nizlopi now. Luke and I had always talked about what we wanted – we wanted to be as big as U2 – but when we started tentatively going up that ladder, both of us had very different reactions. It put a lot of pressures on us. I think we forgot for a while that the band was a friendship, and that we were friends who played music together, not musicians that became friends.