Tag Archives: funk

Spin Doctors – Croydon Fairfield Halls – 21st February 2014

I did a very surreal thing on Friday; I met the ORIGINAL Spin Doctors after their Croydon gig at the Fairfield Halls! Blimey?!?

The Spin Doctors came on after the very energetic and entertaining ‘Brothers of the Mothershovel’ support act; the brothers are a decent bunch of local lads who just about stomped the stage to pieces whilst going about their set.

The brothers in funky hats impressed me so much with their mixture of folk and ragtime swing, I bought their album (Nicely produced it is too!). Hopefully it’ll pay for new strings after the guitarist broke a few during his vigorous strumming!

I last saw the Spin Doctors at the Islington O2 academy on the 30th of January 2013; the main thing I love about seeing the band live is that you never experience the same gig twice! They are an exceptional jam band who love to improvise and it’s a privilege seeing them ply their trade at such small and intimate gigs.

They covered ‘Revolution’ by the Beatles this time which was very cool, before belting out the vast majority of their most excellent back catalogue along AND some tracks from their recent album ‘If The River Was Whiskey’. Oh yes, and the Goodies inspired ‘Everybody Loves String’ improv piece! Genius.

Waiting for my turn to meet the band afterwards, I was extremely nervous. What do you say to Gods? Do they like small talk?

I eventually stumped up the courage to walk over to Eric Schenkman and ask why they didn’t play the excellent ‘About a Train’ from their new album? The track absolutely grooves with lazy blues attitude and I was disappointed not to hear it “Yeah, we’ll do it tomorrow!” came his reply.

What?!? Are you for real?!? I thought it was just lip service, you know, banter?

So I cheekily asked if they’d play ‘Refrigerator Car’ as well (also absent from the Croydon gig) as it’s one of my favourites. “Yeah we’ll play that too!” said Eric. What a genuinely lovely fella he was though, chatting to anyone who popped over, trusting fans to hold his customised telecaster?!? A class act.

It’s one thing for a DJ to take requests, but a world class band? I think I was probably beaming so much, I’m surprised the smile didn’t cut my head in half.

I eventually made it to talk to lead singer Chris Barron after briefly ‘chatting’ to Mark White (bass supremo) about his love of BBC comedy ‘Are You Being Served’ which was very surreal; Chris and I chatted about the new album while he enjoyed a pint before reiterating that they would play the tracks I mentioned to Eric before we all went our separate ways around midnight. Huzzah!

It was an utterly, utterly, utterly bizzare experience that I’ll never forget; thankfully for my nerves, the band are extremely down to Earth and they genuinely seemed to enjoy chatting to everyone who stayed behind.

Good thing I had bought tickets for the following night at the Garage in Highbury and Islington eh?!

Toejam and Earl – Sega Megadrive

Toejam and Earl is an exceptional game on the Sega Megadrive and one that I played to death when I was 13 years old; my favourite thing about it was the game’s legendary soundtrack; Stone cold funk!  I still have my original game, and it’s in my top 10 games of all time.

The game is absolutely filled to the brim with wisecracks, one liners and slapstick comedy. If you’ve never played it, get down with the motherfucking shit!

Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn’t it? Looking back now, I can see why I love slap funk bass and groove as much as I do!  The soundtrack skips and slaps as you go along helping Toejam and Earl (two aliens from the planet Funkotron) in their quest to find pieces of their spaceship because they crash landed on Earth.  A very crazy cartoony Earth full of weird nasties like man-eating post boxes and ghostly ice cream vans!

The other cool thing about this game was the random game setting which really shook things up because the generic coloured power up presents changed randomly each time you played.  The presents either provided you with an arsenal of gadgets and weapons, or killed you off with various hilarious booby prizes!

I’m still hopeful that this will come to Xbox Live so that I can have a game or two with some mates and relive the good old days; in the meantime I guess I’ll just have to remain a pointdexter!

Jammin’

Yet another reason why Call of Duty isn’t the puppies privates and never will be

You Stink! – Full Version

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This was another originally written by us (inspired because of our mutual appreciation of for Funk with a capital F) during a period where I’d literally just started playing guitar and had to make do providing crap backing vocals (1995 latest) and helping out with the recording etc because I wasn’t capable of playing such simple (but effective) riffs.

All that aside, I still think this is a bloody cool track and again pretty much embodies the sort of fun we’d have doing music back in the day. It’s also one of the few times I’ve lent my tone deaf vocals onto a song and been proud of it.

I have also included some of the studio chatter at the end which I thought was rather funny; Alex had the uncanny ability of getting a cold when he needed to pop a vocal on and I love the impatience in his voice when asking for a playback. Good times.

You’re white, you’re pink, and baby, you stink! GET DOWN!

Hot off the press – Little Potatoes

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Just mixed this down after a day in the office doing some overtime. Dug out another track from the same recent session that the snippet of Blick is from (Alex on Drums and I’m just playing the Danelectro electric). I just popped a makeshift bassline on it to fatten it out a bit (thankfully without any blisters this time).

This track originates from a jam and was my attempt to get away from always playing blues/rock guitar chords and riffs. Originally it was a slow moody jazz piece with some amazingly simple but effective shuffle drums, but I wanted to put this snippet on the site because I really love the offbeat drums Alex puts down towards the end of this sample. Definately the funky end of jazz.