Fat Freddy's Drop

Pacific purveyors of hi-tek soul Fat Freddy’s Drop are a seven-piece family of musicians who’ve grown up together in Wellington, New Zealand.

Emerging through a multitude of incarnations from funk jam bands to reggae soundsystems, jazz covers to live Detroit style techno, their debut album is called Based On A True Story.

Shipping Gold on the first day the album dropped, Based On A True Story made history as the first independently distributed album to hit No.1 on the NZ Album Charts. Within two weeks, the long player album reached Platinum.

Fitchie AKA Mu is rated New Zealand’s premier producer and as leader of the countries most uncompromising band, he drives the MPC 2000 (a sampler) cooking up Freddy’s bouncing beats and bottom heavy bass lines.

Joe Dukie AKA Dallas Tamaira, is the lyricist and singer who’s stage name/alter ego is drawn from the names of his father Joe, also a singer, and his grandfather, a musician nicknamed Dukie after Duke Ellington. Influenced by Bill Withers, his resonant lyrics and sweet vocal hypnotize you.

Dallas’s cartoon sketches bring the band’s alter egos to life and link them closer to their namesake, Fat Freddy’s Cat, a character from US cult comic strip The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

The bootae shaking horn section bring the jazz to Fat Freddy’s Drop. Meeting at Wellington’s acclaimed Jazz School in the mid nineties they have been at the core of a new musical movement in New Zealand via popular (NZ) bands such as The Blacks Seeds, Trinity Roots and of course Fat Freddy’s Drop.

The intricate licks of Fulla Flash AKA Warryn Maxwell’s tenor and alto sax intertwined with stabs from Tony Chang AKA Toby Laing’s trumpet come together with the wall of sound of Ho Pepa AKA Joe Lindsay’s trombone, creating crescendos of apocalyptic scale.

Jetlag Johnson aka Tehimana Kerr holds down the roots for Freddy’s with his old school reggae guitar skank while Dobie Blaze aka Iain Gordon serves up funkadelic proportions of analogue keys juxtaposed with stirring organ swells and south pacific style harmonies.

Meals are a sacred pastime for Freddy’s, and Dobie Blaze doubles as the family chef. His culinary feasts keep the family from going hungry, skinny bunch of punks they’re certainly not! As Fitchie says ‘the band that eats together stays together!’

Freddy’s HQ is affectionately referred to as ‘the beach’, home to Mu and Nicole, who drives the band’s NZ label The Drop, and where the Freddy’s come together.

Literally 6 feet from the beach, The Drop studio is situated in the basement of the old 19th Century Bath House on Lyall Bay, one of the oldest buildings in Wellington; New Zealand’s capital city.

Life at The Drop exists on ‘Island Time’, the bros work at their own tempo, under few pressures from the outside world. The result, Based On A True Story, is an album unlike anything else you’ve heard. Recorded, engineered and mixed by Fitchie at the beach but written almost entirely live on stage during the bands infamously long sets.

Fat Freddy’s Drop are first and foremost a live band. No two Freddy’s gigs are the same as their improvised jams take each song into mystic supernovas of skanking soul goodness.

Based On A True Story is a fresh slice of future funk, ten tunes of surprises, fakes and freaky sidesteps.