“Oh no we’re just going to come over as really nice again,” bemoans singer and lyricist Laura James, idly twisting the head off a tiny kitten. Her band mates cackle as they take turns punching the huddled body of an old lady who had, moments earlier, “looked at them funny”.

Ok some of the above is not entirely true. Venue has invoked some dubious artistic licence to more clearly delineate the essentially sunny and good-natured demeanour of Fattyboombasstic, a band who are, by their own admission, “an antidote to all the navel-gazing angst-ridden middle-of-the road rock that is out there” Their Myspace site spells it out loud and clear: “Our songs are FUN and FUNKY AS F*CK!”

They kid not. Fattyboombasstic are true purveyours of the tightly grooving funk that should accompany the tumbling cardboard boxes of a Starsky and Hutch car chase, or the incessant rubberised thwack that endlessly circles Bootsy Collins’ brain. Wah-wah specialist Jonny “JD” Diver, a man so obssessed with frequency tweaking that he plays in his sleep (“I had a dream about surfing on a wah-wah”) also advocates caressing his beloved pedal with bare feet as it provides “more control”. Add to the mix bassist Pete Gibbs, drummer Martyn James and Laura’s sultry voice (“I add the pop element, coz I’m a Stock Aitken and Waterman girl from the 80s, Jonny adds the rock”) and its impossible not to get the party started. A spin of their sampler “Superfunkysexotronic” immediately reveals that the band are all players if high ability indeed three out of the four are music tutors – with huge collective experience at playing at weddings and corporate events and a vast interconnected network of cover bands. “We all play in quite a lots of bands, ” Martyn admits “so there’s all sorts of influences there, from function bands to soul, jazz and rock n roll”

Jonny: “Me and Laura started this band after we met in a disco function outfit, getting bored with that and having taken it to its limit. Personally I have always wanted to write my own stuff and do original things,”

Venue naturally wants to immediately hear about the dark side of the cabaret and covers circuit, and there’s no shortage of horror stories. “A cider festival last weekend, ” Jonny recounts wearliy. “There was a fight at the end and everyone just watched it as part of the enetertainment”

Martyn meanwhile has fond memeories of a Filipino festival at Ashoton Court: “The guy after us was a Filipino drag queen”

Everybody displays the hard-won skills of musicians who have toiled hard at the coal face of the public enteratianment industry. Pause for a moment, avant-rockers, and consider the daunting responsibility of being band paid and, by god, required to entertain a sundazed and largely pissed mid-afternoon wedding party. Laura makes a charming confession: “I kind of think, these peopel might hate us but I’m just going to pretend that George Clooney is out there and I’m just going to keep sining to him and not really care.”

Venue wants to hear more about the teaching side of things. Is there a big audience out there keen to learn? Martyn is in no doubt: “There’s a lot of enthusiasm and from all age groups as well: the youngest is 10 and my oldest is 50. A surprising number of teenage girls are picking up the drums now. Fifty per cent of my students are female.” And what if Venue turned up and said “I don’t want to learn the proper way to do it, I just want to get up on stage and make a row. ” Would that be frowned upon? Jonny: “Not at all, its encouraged. The way I teach is doing what you wanna do. If they want to learn to play in a aband, we can show them that; if they want to learn to read music or classical stuff, we can do that. It’s all good.”

Its the next album “Filthy something”, thats got the funkateers most excited right now, and they are casually hi tech in their writing methods too. “Yeah we’ve embraced the digital age, ” explains Jonny. “I’ll write a riff, puit it down with a rough drum track and email it to Laura. She’ll sing over it and send it back”

Martyn:”Then I’ll transfer it to the studio, work out the drum parts and send it back, so we can build up quite a track without actually sitting in the same room togther. Six tracks written, more to come.”

Venue issue No 828 27 June – 6 July 2008

Fattyboombasstic return to headline at the South West’s most famous noodle bar, Mr Wolfs.

This turned out to be a fantastic gig – although it didn’t bode well. Poor old Pete looked rough as anything when he and JD turned up at Mr Wolfs for sound check. My maternal instinct kicked in – getting him to drink some juice and buy some cold remedy from the local shop. But he still looked a bit peaky all evening.

There were two bands supporting us – Luis Franseco Arena was a one man acoustic tour de force, called Pierre from Tours – who played heartfelt original songs with an amazing voice sounding like a cross between Green Day and Coldplay.

The second band Bristol Songs where a friendly 5 piece Norwegian band, who played acoustic Norwegian melancholy folk music with amazing harmonies and  percussion courtesy of one small conga (or was it a bongo? I still don’t know the difference…) They were technically very good – but their music was quite downbeat for a warm up act, and they overran their set meaning that we started 15 mins later than we should (which also meant we missed off 3 or 4 songs off the end of our set) But no hard feelings.

The venue had been surprisingly quiet all night – considering how cold it was outside (I couldn’t stand outside with the smokers for very long and came inside with Peaky Pete to check out our support bands(!)) But as soon as we started playing the place started to get full – and I mean really properly full – no big gap between the front of the stage and the punters. People right in your face, dancing and clapping like (OK those people were Ian & Ella who insisted on gyrating in front of me when they weren’t sticking a camera in my face – bless em!)

I had a great time on stage; I was really enjoying the feeling of having an audience responding to what we were doing. Hey its much easier to have stage presence when there are people to entertain, you know. My fave song of the night? Might have been “Fire” – cos I could see the sound engineer Simon getting over excited and putting wonderful reverb effects on my voice! Don’t think there were any major cock ups – ok maybe we could have practiced Love Rears its Ugly head again, but I think we got away with it! Only slightly didgy moment was when Pete almost passed out on stage – he looked really wobbly and his lips had gone the same colour as his face. Marty yelled at him to have some water – he did and gamely carried on. I think he said he felt better after that – but it wasn’t surprising he almost passed out – he’s only eaten a few crisps and chocolate buttons.

Post gig I was euphoric! Loads of good feedback from strangers (dare I say fans?) in the audience. Hey I even got a nice kiss of a really handsome young chap – on the cheek mind you (alas!) Mr Wolf himself caught up with us outside and said “Well done” and said he would like to book us again.

Which is nice…

“This was an unexpected treat. We are deep in 70s funk rock territory and it sounds good. An unassuming axe hero with a wah-wah seemingly welded to his foot tears it up Eddie Hazel-style, with blisttering solos through the world’s smallest amp; a thumb-popping bassist with taste and space locks down with a fine drummer; and Laura James, a soulful singer is given to ecstatic bouncing across the stage. These are some outrageously talented musicians. They announce “Claustrophobia”, a disco number, and we are immediately transported to a Sylvester-era Danceteria of glitterballs and roller-skates. There’s an ill-advised dalliance with exotic time signatures for one number but otherwise its slick funk all the way. Only serious musos cover Living Color’s “Love Rears Its Ugly Head Again” and few would be bold enough to tackle a Hendrix song and still make it sound great. A little more stage presence to match the quality of the music would be good. Why not go the whole hog and create a Bacofoil and stack heels afro-tastic dance sensation?”

(Kid Pensioner)

Good…. let me tell you all about it.

Marty Mcfly and me turned up at 6.45 to soundcheck (the contract had said that the first supporting band were to get there at 6.30 on the dot) Only to be told by Duncan, the sound engineer that we wouldn’t be needed until 7.30 (The Blunders’ drummer hadn’t turned up yet – tsk) Still it was nice to have a chance to have a swift shandy while sitting in the late afternoon sunshine waiting for Pete and JD to show.

The soundcheck itself went well – they have got a really good sound on stage – I could hear myself clearly through the monitors for a change! And when I scooted round the front while JD was in mid solo – the sound from the front was nice and phat!

After the soundcheck we really only had an hour to kill until we were on – unlike the 4 hours we had at Moles last week. Which was nice. Met Chris the agent(?) from Label records who had been so keen to come and see us after just hearing our Myspace tracks (?!). I agreed to put him and his scout-in-training, Luke, on the guest list. The young guy on the door was very kind and displayed our lovely box of FBB cds on the entrance desk and offered to sell them for us. It did mean that everytime I walked past I would ask “Have you sold any yet?”

There were a handful of people in there by the time we started playing – funnily the only people who turned up specially to see us (apart from the Label records peeps) were Pete’s ex-flatmates – and we’d given him a hard time earlier as he said he hadn’t got anyone coming along to see him!

I think we played well – I was really enjoying the sound on stage. Favourite songs were “Are you thinking” and “Dynamo”. Something weird happened in “Haircut” at the end – something odd that Marty was playing, but I chided him on the way home, so he won’t do it again.

Only problem was I was so paranoid that we would run over our alloted half hour slot I saw it was 9.15 on my watch and called for the last song. Then Marty said he thought we were playing till 9.20. Aaah! We had ended up only playing 6 songs! Oops…

We stuck around for the next band, The Loaders. Marty & I were struck by the lead singer’s resemblance to the Other One in Tenacious D. Acoustic punky rock covers. Very enthusiastically executed. But maybe they should have been supporting us, not the other way round…?

The headlining band were The Blunders, a Clash-esque 3 piece – with crunching squealing guitars and spiky black hair (and the bassist had one of those earrings that looked like a piece of tubing in his ear – and all you can thing about when you look at him is how much that must have hurt putting it in…)

Felt more inclined to watch them but babysitters aren’t cheap so we headed back to Bath after one of their songs.

The guy on the door stopped as as we were leaving “Four people paid to get in to see you so that means you earned… £4.00″

Woo hoo – a whole pound each :>

Arrived at 7pm for  the soundcheck to find just us and Trev there. Trev saw our set had 18 songs and warned we were only supposed to play an hour – an hour 15 mins max. So some judicious chopping of songs happened in the pub later! We ran “Filthysomething” (cos Pete had forgotten it) and “Get the Funk Out” (which I was nervous about singing). But we got through it so it stayed in the set for later. We were also told we weren’t on till 11pm – which was a bit of a shock as we had told people we’d be on at 9.30 -10pm. Ooops!

We then went to the Porter for food (I was starving!) and met up with our friends/fans/rent-a-crowd (delete as appropriate) who had showed up to support us. And it seemed that the constant email/Facebook events/Myspace bulletins/ general coercion seemed to have worked as we pulled in quite a few people – for a school night. Trev had warned us that the past few Wednesday nights in the summer holidays had been dead – and although that would be bad for audience size and reaching out to new prospective fans, it reassured my anxiety a little that there wouldn’t be hordes of slacker youths shouting “Get off the stage grandma – you’re shite!”

We went down to Moles about 10pm – and there were a few people there we knew who were tapping their watches wondering when we were going on. The place had started to fill up a bit so that there was a nice friendly vibe going on – and I actually started looking forward to performing.

I had to sign my brother in as a guest (why did I bother I ask myself?) and saw on the sign in sheet a name next to which was written “Venue” in the company field. OMG? Did that mean someone from Venue really was there to write a review? I scanned the crowd quickly to see if I could see who it might be. I did accost one poor bloke who was sat in the corner – he looked terrified as he explained that he wasn’t from the local mag. (Sorry – whoever you were!) I think I did see the Venue guy sitting on the steps for the first part of the gig (well he had a big bag with him anyway) - it remains to be seen if he liked it (fingers crossed for this Thursday, eh?)

So the actual gig went really well. We played 15 songs in the end. The sound on stage was good; unlike last time, I could actually hear myself clearly, and my voice was mostly behaving itself so I felt quite relaxed (or that could have been the 2 rum n cokes I had had beforehand?) JD, Pete and Marty were all playing brilliantly – yeah we had a few fluff ups but I can’t really remember what they were (“Haircut” possibly? And one where Marty couldn’t hear when we had finished) – but i don’t think the audience noticed – tee hee. My favourite songs were “Dynamo”, “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” & “Fire”. My least favourite was “Get the Funk Out” – Pete had the right groove & JD did an awesome Nuno Bettencourt impression but my voice was really not up to belting out rock numbers like that. Maybe we just need to practice it more? Hmm…

JD broke a guitar string halfway through so I had to tell jokes while he changed it. Tom actually came on stage to tell his Joke du Jour “What do you call a man with a piece of ham on his head?” (At least it wasn’t the ginger joke…) My brother Ian did some most unsavoury dancing with Tony – who seemed to enjoy some of it. I averted my eyes…

We finished about 12.15 – a cosy hour an 15 like the man asked – and GOT PAID!!! Woo Hoo!! Probably only the second or third time for FBB (yeah yeah I know we do it for the love etc etc)

All in all a good gig – shame there weren’t more people, and shame we didn’t sell any CD’s. But we all had a laugh and hung out with our mates & did the stuff we love to do, so its all good.

It remains to be seen if we get reviewed in this weeks Venue – expect me to jack it allin when the headline reads: “Get off the stage grandma – you’re shite!”

Links:

The newsletter I sent out:FattyBoomBasstic play Moles 29th August 2007

More photos on the Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=4893025538