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Photo: Jamie Leith
Since the early 2000s Wellington seven-piece Fat Freddy’s Drop have been one of Aotearoa’s most notable and highest-played acts. Their latest album Slo Mo is the first strictly-studio creation from the band in six years, currently available on vinyl only, before its streaming and CD release on November 8th.
Founding member and beatmaker Mu, (also known as DJ Fitchie, real name Chris Faiumu), says the two week gap is “a cheeky way of promoting vinyl”. It’s a medium he has a long history with.
“I’ve been buying records for 40-odd years”, he says. “I’m the youngest of five kids, I inherited my sister’s great little soul collection. My brothers were more into Santana and Neil Young.
“When I hit intermediate I started on a cassette collection, which by the time I finished high school in the late ‘80s, turned into vinyl. I think the very first record I ever bought was Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. That’s where it all kicked off.”
He describes Slo Mo in its liner notes as “Afro rhythmic soul music, an exploration of Black music from Polynesia”.
Fat Freddy’s Drop are famous for finding moments to sit in - bars of music that can withstand repetition over lengthy song durations - and the album starts with a perfect example, ‘Avengers’, which establishes its groove straight away. How does the band find these moments?
“We do a lot of jamming, and we have the luxury of having our own studio”, says Mu. “We are often looking for that bassline that we can sit on for ages. We’re searching for ideas. When we find one we’ll sit on it, and allow Dallas to go find some lyrics, and the horns to go find a line.”
They’ve always been popular, (their first album Based on a True Story debuted at number one in the local charts, and went gold the same day), but never ‘pop’. Is there an internal barometer for when things tip too far in that direction?
“It’s just trying to strike that balance between what we think is good, solid music with some integrity, but not so far up our own egos that it gets too self-indulgent and unlistenable”, says Mu. “We’ve also tailored our new music towards having it be energetic enough to be played live.”
“There’s a lot of music we wrote for the first albums that we never get to play live. They’re just a little bit too down, too slow, too deep, and we’d struggle at a huge live festival in Europe, it just wouldn’t work.”
It’s a part of the world they regularly visit, and are still very popular. “It honestly still feels like it’s building in Europe,” says Mu. “It’s a numbers game, there’s just a lot more people there. Compare that to New Zealand, where I think people are probably sick of us.”
The relationship between a Fat Freddy’s live show and their albums can be fluid, with one influencing the other. Mu says in the past songs would be 60 percent finished before trying different ideas on stage.
Slo Mo is a more purely-studio creation, with ‘Oldemos’ coming to life over drum loops courtesy of Riki Gooch, and slap bass on ‘Getting Late’ played by Tyrone McCarthy. The album is also sequenced to reflect a live show, moving from the reggae bounce of ‘Next Stop’ and ‘Stand Straight’ to the techno pulse of closing track ‘I Don’t Want to See You’.
Mu says songwriting is always democratic, but “in the studio there are definitely stronger personalities that will make the calls. And that’s good I think, and we all respect each other, and know each other enough, that there’s not too many egos getting in the way.
“Someone will make a call, and we’ll try it out, and if it doesn’t work they’ll back off. It’s usually pretty friendly. I don’t think you’d get too far if it got feisty too often.”