Born Funky Born Free
On Getting Funkadelic DIY Style
Twenty years ago, I found a mountain of discarded old records and immediately ran home to get my girlfriend to come and take a photo of me with them because I knew it would be my album cover, and that album would be called Born Funky Born Free. I would take all the love I had for other records and filter them into something of my own.
I wrote and recorded it in my bedroom, mainly alone, although I had a few friends come by and add their own distinctive touches.
I’d already made an album, with my band Automatic Cherry, but this was the first time I had fumbled through making everything myself, from working out how to use my dad’s old 80s drum machine to recording on the cutting edge technology of a digital eight track. The whole thing was really an experiment in self-empowerment. I was young and broke and in love with making music and didn’t really know what I wanted that music to sound like, but I was determined to have at red hot go at finding out. I wanted to create a soundscape that that you could feel reverberating through your body. I wanted it to be trippy and to take you to the outer corners of the universe. I wanted it to have cool words that resonated and seeped into your consciousness. I wanted it to take no prisoners and be weird and proud, and proud of being weird, the way all my favourite music makers had done, artists like Betty Davis, Lee Perry, Velvet Underground and Funkadelic.
Sometimes music is like an invisible cloak, you put it on and it turns you into something else. Making these strange, spare, psychedelic tunes turned me into a Queen of my Bedroom. A coming of age soundtrack. The air shimmered with possibilities.
One of the songs was called ‘My Friends Call Me Foxy’. That wasn’t necessarily true but sometimes you have to imagine the life you want for yourself and sing it up. This technique is as ancient as the blues, since long before Willie Dixon declared himself a hoochie coochie man.
My friend Kristyna, a photographer, offered to make me a video. We both had young daughters so getting out and about wasn’t always easy, so we decided to make it in my decrepit Darlinghurst terrace house, which was painted in a variety of bright, odd colours, because those were the paint cans you get cheapest, and we had very cheap rent on the proviso we took care of maintenance and whatever went wrong. Our lounge room was Halloween Orange. When the kitchen window frames literally crumbled away, I filled them with putty and mosaic-ed them with the shards of pretty old broken plates I had accumulated and just couldn’t bring myself to throw out. There was no hot water in the kitchen and we had to take a bucket down steep stairs to the semi-outdoor bathroom and fill it from the shower and lug it back up the stairs to do the dishes. Krystina was doing dishes in her bathtub over at her place. All mod cons baby.
So I put a first mix of a home-burnt CD of my song in the big ol’ boom box, put on my Action Girl singlet, gave the girls some spaghetti and parked them in front of the TV, pulled the little curtain across the doorway between the lounge and the kitchen, smoked a little joint to transition my mind back into its full foxy potential and we made our way around the house, punching the air and karate kicking, waving socks around and finger wagging (quite probably a move I cribbed from Krystina’s boyfriend Tex Perkins, a master of good stage moves) and pretending to ride my daughter’s bike. In real life, I can barely remain upright on a bike. Krystina used lots of in camera effects, which we were very enamoured with back then, things like night vision. By the time we’d filled a 60min tape with my action moves and Krystina’s close ups of odd little things around the house, we were done and ready for a pizza. My friend Nick Meyers, a real film editor, offered to edit it for me - he said he was keen to teach himself how to do split screen but I suspect he was just very kind. I wanted it to look sort of like a cartoon, with lots going on. He was dedicated and innovative and worked on it day and night for three days. The only real expense was the professional tape transfer so I could submit it to Rage, the only outlet for a music video that I knew of. I think it went to air twice.
We made another music video in the kitchen and the bedroom in similar style on mini DV for the title track, but I didn’t want to push my luck with Nick and didn’t know any other editors then and so it languished and gathered dust and partly disintegrated but I finally had it transferred to digital a couple of years back. Maybe it’s never too late and I’ll edit it for the next anniversary.
The Teaches of Peaches came out a few months before Born Funky Born Free. I loved that album, I used to love to just lie in bed and listen to it the whole way through, it was so cool and funny. Talking about its beginnings, Peaches said in a recent interview, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? But when I’d ask musicians or producers, nobody ever mentioned the production quality or the levels, they just said it sounds fucking cool. So, I was like, ‘Done!’ … Certain songs represent a coming-of-age for people. I’ve mine with The Cramps, The Runaways or The Violent Femmes – songs from when I first felt like I was free to be me. For so many people that song is one. How can you be mad at that? It’s a fucking beautiful feeling. And it’s still happening, every couple of years it has a new lease of life because it's one of those coming-of-age songs.”
It’s hard not to feel like twenty years is a milestone. I had good intentions of anniversary touring and reissuing Born Funky Born Free* on vinyl this year, but vinyl cutting waitlists are insane and outrageously expensive and between pandemics and book release etc I just couldn’t make it happen and had to settle for some reflection instead. But I did resurrect a half forgotten song Half Girl Half Beast from this album at our gig the other night, a dirty feminist ode to joy I hadn’t sung in almost twenty years and it really roared back to life and came of age with The Great Beyond (my incredible band). I think it might have earned a permanent home in the setlist and a new place in my heart. What goes around comes around. Nothing much has really changed but everything is different.
My personal musical goals are still the same and I’m still making stuff myself with whatever I’ve got and doing whatever I can. I don’t see that changing. The band and I are recording soon. We’ve had to be very patient for a long time and we’re about ready to burst. Where there’s a will there’s a way. I just know it’s going to be a beautiful foray into a funkadelic world of our own making, however we get there and wherever it takes us.
*Bandcamp is the best way to listen/buy music for independent artists. You can also ‘follow’ me there which means you’ll be the first to hear new music when I release it.