Thread by @SecretDJBook

Entonces! This week’s MEGATHREAD is a very simple affair. It talks of a lifelong love affair with THE FUNK.

I am as obsessed with it today as I was back when I was a kid listening to my Mum and Dads records.

Earth Wind and Fire were my Gods.

MEGATHREAD 🧵🧵🧵

Eventually with a decade of my paper round I got enough together to buy the corpse of a drum kit.

A 2nd hand Premier Olympic. I’d got the bug at school having music lessons for several instruments.

At first it was just about early lunch pass, a dodge for getting off lessons.

Eventually my folks, so sick of me thrashing about teaching myself, paid the music teacher from school to come once a week. He'd turn up with a pedal, snare and stool. All drummers are essentially ambidextrous and would mirror me, like a driving instructor with extra controls.

I taught myself from records, so he built on that and would show me simple things I heard all the time were actually quite tricky and full of funk, like Grange Hill. No one is trying to be cool on this thread today. Only liars have cool origin stories.

Or we’d learn the drum fills and groove for the theme from Minder. My instructor was a good teacher cos he understood the simple educational value in taking apart something very familiar.

Then I’d ask if he could help with records I actually liked but couldn’t entirely understand in detail, like this one. The bit that was ‘out of time’ was triplets. So that week Prince taught us triplets on the hi hat.

My teacher wasn’t going to put up with this for long. He was a jazz funkateer at heart. Drummers will not be surprised at all that soon enough we were talking about Steve Gadd. About how very gentle, groovy and yet complex a pattern like this could be -

It wasn’t tablature. I’d already done theory on other instruments, and music is just like language. Once you’ve learned one - others come much easier. So each week we would write out the correct notation and sometimes we’d transcribe the whole record.

The other 99.9% of the week was all mine, and once I’d agreed to put blankets on the kit and go into the basement it was all about Earth Wind and Fire. Me Mam would say I’d kick and thrash drum parts in my sleep - I’d wear headphones all day and night.

Having the funk is about understanding space. Stuart Copeland drums in the same way Frank Sinatra sings. Completely oblivious to the formal ‘beat’. Arriving so long after, or before, that it is almost impossible to play/sing along precisely.

Naturally spent a lot of time listening and trying to imitate Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks, and failing! Accents, delicacy and restraint are things that do not arrive early. They are earned not bestowed.

Suddenly out of nowhere Go-go just grabbed me by the throat. James Brown paved the way for a thing that was just continuous breaks, but Go-go was not dissimilar to the later raves. Just all funk, all night. I saw Chuck Brown on ’The Tube’ and that was it.

From my first kit right up until touring with bands I couldn’t afford a drum stool so I learned to play sitting in an old armchair. In one of the bands, forced to cart the huge thing around, I was mocked as 'The Comfy Drummer'.

Mid set I’d get introduced by the singer and we’d do a quick James Brown impersonation and ‘hear the drummer get comfy’. I'd stop playing, wiggle in my chair and go 'mmm, comfy'.

You had to be there I guess.

Brixton beckoned and the early days of Acid Jazz. Never thinking I’d actually get to see Trouble Funk at Hammersmith! But there was absolutely a species of South London Funk. You felt it. Lived it. And of course no one epitomised this more than Cymande.

Being part of a ‘scene’ but mad things happening like Roy Ayers needed a vibrophone and you got to just walk into the Jazz Cafe and see him play your kit and even get to shake his hand while off your tits on mushrooms. Roy Ayers!!

While electronica was very much a thing, nothing really beat playing in a band. There’s a buzz playing records and it is great to make people happy but there’s something about locking into a groove with other players that is forever a bit special.

Funk doesn’t mean obscure 7 inches from the 70s. As usual, straight white men turn a feeling into a genre. ‘Collectors’ kill everything they touch.

A lot of the 70s supergroups had a singer that liked a lovely ballad but a band that was secretly a funk beast. While Lionel Richie or Barry White was out the room the lads would lay down a monster -

Then Barry would come back in -
“Ey! have you lads being doing funk again?”
“No Barry!”
“Oo you big liars, these drums are still warm”

For a ‘definition of the funk’ you have to look at space. Music is a binary system. Notes and space. On and off. Few ever consider the off. Little consideration is given to the nothing. But a busy energy can also persuade your feet -

And if you ever wonder where some of that Weatherall beat came from -

Right? Not a million miles away from -

But I digress, for a while there was a thing that Prince, Cameo and this dude did brilliantly with huge gated drums and would get me more into playing a 2nd hand Simmons and basically trying to compete with drum machines -

Because we drummers were amongst the first to be made obsolete by tech. Replaced by robots. I sold my acoustic stuff and got more and more into the synthesised -

So it wouldn’t be until fairly recently that I got back into funk records made and played by people. But when it came back it was played by white kids who went to conservatories and you know what, there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all -

But once they got Nate Smith involved, oh boy!

I became obsessed with Snarky Puppy and it’s been a long time since I loved something so much to a point where I had to have everything. The lot. There’s nothing they do that I do not want to have immediately.

So yeah, as usual this could have gone on forever but hopefully the YouTube algorithm will do its thing and send you down a filthy funk hole this weekend and see you dancing in your pants in the kitchen.

It’s not a mix it is a story of sorts. Just my story there is nothing historical or definitive here. And you will have your own friendship with the funk over the years. Or like me you may spot a wrongun and say to yourself “yeah, that one there is a stranger to the funk”.

Things like this get less and less exposure thanks to Musk, so press like and share to get it out there and if you enjoy, drop a tip in the fund to help keep things going, or don’t, it is not obligatory -

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EXCELSIOR!

what's got three legs and a cunt on its back?

a drumstool.

if anyone has a drummer joke I haven't heard already I've have a mild heart attack as I am sure I have heard them all.

If you are new and missed the other MEGATHREADS they are collected on the 'highlights' section of my profile -

x.com/SecretDJBook/h…