‘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”’

John and I began songwriting together when we were 13. After university, we both moved back in with our parents in the Midlands and began writing an album. One day while my dad was cooking, I asked, “What should I write a song about?” He casually said, “Diggers.” He used to drive a Massey Ferguson digger for his father’s groundworks company and would pick me up from school in it. Compared to a bully at school, my dad felt so warm, safe and loving. In 90 minutes, I had penned down a song about these contrasting experiences.

Working at London youth centres, I used to commute from Leamington Spa a few times a week. The garage sound that was popular at the time inspired me. I had a rhythm in my head and it went like, “I’m Luke, I’m five and my dad’s Bruce Lee.” When I combined this double-timing rhythm, it felt magical.

People were a bit taken aback by the song’s quirkiness. One line that got many laughs was “The engine rattles my bum like berserk.” By the end, the audience would be laughing and nodding along. We included the song in our debut album and in early 2005, started to compile the hand-drawn video. We published it online in 30-second increments as the artist progressed. Soon, HMV wrote to us asking about the song’s release as customers wanted to purchase 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.

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.

Unreleased Nizlopi material is available on Patreon via www.lukeconcannon.com