Wellington roots

Could these men be New Zealand's first soul superstars?
Jon Lusk on Fat Freddys Drop

Thursday June 28, 2007
The Guardian

Those searching for something a little different at last weekend's Glastonbury festival may have stumbled across a strange but beguiling act from New Zealand. Alongside the sardonic wordplay of Arctic Monkeys, the bluster and bombast of Kaiser Chiefs and the crowdpleasing efficiency of the Chemical Brothers, the soulful, unhurried sound of Fat Freddys Drop came across as music from another time zone. Which it is, in more ways than one.

Long championed by taste-making DJs Gilles Peterson and Charlie Gillett, Wellington's self-proclaimed "seven-headed soul monster" is steadily reaching out beyond the expat fanbase that first discovered its uniquely Kiwi hybrid of dub/reggae, soul, funk, hip- hop and techno flavours, marinated in jazz and served with a distinctly Pacific swing. Fat Freddys Drop are nothing if not eclectic. But how did they get that name - no apostrophe and all?

"It's one of those silly names that just stuck," says founder member DJ Fitchie, aka Chris Faiumu (or simply "Mu"). A New Zealand-born Samoan, he's a softly spoken mountain of a man, with a mischievous sense of humour. But he is not Fat Freddy.

After jamming with silky-voiced singer Dallas Tamaira and trumpeter Toby Laing for several years on Wellington's fertile late-90s music scene, by 1999 Mu felt it was high time they made a record. The song Hope was the result. "We wrote and mixed and recorded it all in 48 hours with the assistance of a drug that at the time was called Fat Freddys - LSD," he says.

Mu had been DJing around Wellington since the early 1990s, and by the middle of the decade had picked up enough production skills to set up his own studio at the seaside house he was renting. No longer satisfied with simply playing other artists' instrumentals for others to freestyle over, he started programming his own rhythm tracks on an MPC sampler/sequencer.

"As soon as we made that step, it became obvious quite quickly that we needed other people to fill it out even more. They were added quite naturally - musicians who had a similar love for the improv side of it. We'd have them come down and jam over a real simple bassline and a beat, and see what they could make out of it. And, as we started putting out the odd 12-inch, I suppose we turned into a proper band."

By now fully formed with three horns, keyboards and guitar, Fat Freddys Drop released their long-awaited debut studio album, Based On a True Story, in May 2005. Despite the lack of a drummer or a bass player - their rhythm section is shared between Mu's MPC beats, Iain Gordon's synth-bass keyboards and Tehimana Kerr's choppy guitar work - the album was a multi-platinum sensation in New Zealand and a cult hit in Europe, with worldwide sales now approaching 150,000. Following a triumphant European tour last summer, the band's current series of UK shows finds them road- testing new, more soul-orientated material, where set lists are replaced by "structures". True to their improvisational roots, every gig is unique, and they record them all to capture ideas. If their long, rambling jams at times seem unfocused, as they collectively feel their way from one groove to another, the payoff comes in transcendental music-making when "the Freddies" are really "on".

The band's laidback, island-time ambience is unmistakeably a product of its environment, but that seems only to have enhanced their appeal to British listeners. Though Mu's beachfront home has just been sold, the new owners have agreed to let him to working there for the time being, and it is just the right setting for the band's calm, cool, maritime style. "The vibe of the beach totally feeds into the music," Laing says. "If you go to a studio in the middle of town and it's grimy and there's, like, pigeon s#1T everywhere, it creates one kind of music. We can just walk out the studio door and the sea is right there. That definitely has an effect".
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Gotta love the Freddys, they like Prince have control over their career and thus destiny.

Go the Drop... like all of our artists that travel abroad the odds are stacked against them. But one always hopes for the exception to the rule and in Fat Freddys we have a act that isn't a clone of artists already found in other countries.

Their appeal could be widespread and huge.