SQUID
What if your life’s work revealed secrets you didn’t even know you had…
For more than thirty years, writer and filmmaker Johnny Daukes unknowingly documented a story he could neither remember nor understand. Songs, scripts and films kept returning to the same themes, each becoming another fragment of an unwitting documentary, pointing towards a truth buried deep beneath memory.
As long-suppressed events began to surface, those creative works took on an extraordinary new significance, revealing not only Johnny’s history of childhood abuse, but the mysterious ways in which his mind had protected itself.
Following an exhausting process that came to a conclusion at the Old Bailey earlier this year, SQUID explores how art and music can preserve what memory has buried — and ultimately help bring it back into the light.
Blending live music, humour and storytelling, SQUID: A Victim Impact Statement is a true story about memory, creativity and an accidental search for catharsis.
THE MUSIC
Johnny started writing and recording music almost as soon as he started playing.
There wasn’t (and still isn’t) any desire to be a ‘guitarist’, but rather, the instrument became a tool of self-expression that was able to excavate a story his conscious mind couldn’t comprehend.
Repeatedly songs were written, which he believed or understood to be academic or intellectual approaches to subjects, that revealed themselves over time to be based in first person experience. Some of these; ‘Shadowman’, ‘Heaven Is Hell, ‘Squid’, were quite remarkably direct.
Some of these songs were re-recorded for the 2022 album ‘Shadowman - Records Remade’ and the backing tracks of these recordings are utilised throughout the show.
THE ORIGIN
In 2022 Johnny wrote the memoir ‘Shadowman’ that detailed the childhood experiences and subsequent creative output which form the basis of SQUID.
The book is available in multiple formats here:
MAKING SQUID
SQUID - A Victim Impact Statement brings together live music, narration and film - all created, recorded and assembled by Johnny in the workspace where much of the story itself was written.
These photographs were taken by Bona Kakembo on a day where she observed Johnny going about the process of developing the show.
