Wellington blew into the top of the local album chart last week with Fat Freddy's Drop and Shihad claiming the number one and two spots respectively in their first few days of release.
But Fat Freddy's Drop's achievement was especially impressive as their eagerly awaited second long player Based On A True Story is the first independent album to hit number one since the long forgotten Carol O'Halloran topped the charts for four weeks in 1981 with exercise album Jazzercise.
And while there are strong expectations Based On A True Story will go platinum by the end of the month, Fat Freddy's leader DJ Fitchie aka Mu, or Chris Faiumu, is hoping the album will hang around the charts longer than a fog bank at Wellington airport. . . .
Mu - who along with his trademark MPC sampler/sequencer has for a long time been a towering figure in the capital's music scene - says he's not really surprised by the album's stunning initial sales.
"We've built up a lot of anticipation by taking so long to do this record and by doing a lot of gigs over the years, I think it was always going to do reasonably well when it dropped. Even if it was shit album it was going to do well in the first week.
"We're trying not to get too carried away with it, the key is to try and keep it selling. To follow it up and keep it moving."
But a quick listen to Based On A True Story shows the band have moved on since their gold-selling first release Live at the Matterhorn.
While other bands might lay claim to funk, reggae, jazz, and techno influences, Mu, long time collaborator singer/lyricist Joe Dukie aka Dallas Tamaira and a star-studded line-up of musical talent filling out the rest of the seven-piece band combine those styles seamlessly - ending up with a cohesive sound all of their own.
Live at the Matterhorn showed how they do it, essentially by establishing a groove and then working it, working it and then working it some more.
Mu says the band made an effort to change direction on Based On A True Story but the refinements took time.
"We jam a lot and write a lot of music on the fly. It took a while to condense the music down to album-friendly length of arrangements.
" We definitely wanted to do a studio record. We didn't want to just record a whole lot of jams and take the best take. We wanted to try and enjoy that and get into the whole process of writing the music on the computer as well. "
"We've kind of sussed it out...it took a while to accept that they're two completely different things, working live and recording in the studio."
"Just initially it took a little while to get our heads around it. I've been working in studios for a while now, it wasn't too foreign for me, but for some of the other musicians it took a little while."
Overall, Based On A True Story took 18 months to make, with the recording interrupted by a European tour. Mu says the band worked intensively on the record from their return in the middle of last year to about a month ago.
He says the band could have probably kept tweaking the album for another year.
"It's one of those things, where you're never finished really - you've gotta just at some point let go.
"We kind of also wanted the album to kind of reflect a piece of work that relates to time – that is the last couple of years, and we kind of wanted to put those songs to bed." And while the making of the album saw the band develop its own way of doing things in the studio, Mu says they are similarly determined to follow their own path in how they run their affairs.
Based on a True Story was released by the band's own label The Drop - despite numerous approaches in recent years from a number of major labels. " It just didn't make sense for us really. We've built a reputation and anticipation of the record from doing lots of live gigs. We were fairly confident we were going to sell a lot of records and we would rather take a much bigger slice of the pie by staying independent.
"The other thing is we're not a really young band, half of the band have got kids, we're a little bit older and into the business side of what we do. We didn't really want to hand over all those jobs and all those decisions to someone else and watch it go by. We wanted to get our hands dirty and get involved and learn really and enjoy being business owners and running our own business." Part of the upside of that is the band moves at its own pace, "which I think frustrates a lot of people that it's not particularly fast but that isn't big deal to us we want to take our time to make solid decisions". But it looks like fans won't have to wait quite as long for the next album.
"There's a lot of stuff that didn't make it onto the album and we're pretty keen to keep recording while we're on a bit of a roll and either bang out another album or have one ready to go fairly quickly." M u says with their first studio album under their belt, the band are confident their second will be stronger. But in the meantime they are proud of Based On A True Story, and think it will last for a while yet. "I think it's a slow burning album...hopefully it will last a reasonable length of time." * Based On A True Story is out now
By ADAM BENNETT, NZPA, 17 May 2005
