Fat Freddys Drop Bio

Fat Freddys Drop

Based On A True Story
From the underground to the higher-ground, Fat Freddy’s Drop is the seven-headed soul monster doing it for the love of music, and food!

Driven by the power of hypnotic live performance, sheer hard work and savvy independent CD and vinyl releases, Freddy’s voodoo is heading for worldwide domination.

The watershed year for the purveyors of hi-tek soul was 2005 as the band stepped out of the rush to release their debut studio album Based On A True Story on CD and double gatefold vinyl.

Envisaged as a ‘slow burn’ Based On A True Story has become the country’s quintessential album, and it’s now in demand in Australia, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Holland, Japan, and North America.

Officially released in Aotearoa, NZ in May 05, B.O.A.T.S shipped Gold on its first day, making history as the first independently distributed album to strike #1on the NZ Top Ten Album Charts. In total Based On A True Story held the top spot for a record breaking 11 weeks.

In October 2005 Freddy’s garnered a stash of Tui Awards at the NZ Music Awards: official loot; Album of the Year, Best Aotearoa Roots Album, Best Group and direct from the peeps – the People’s Choice Award.

Freddy’s then traveled to London in December 05 to pick up the Worldwide Album Of The Year at the Radio 1 Gilles Peterson Worldwide Music Awards 2005, as voted by fans of the tastemakers show on the BBC.

Based On A True Story was the second Top Selling Album in Aotearoa NZ for 2005, and in 2006 soared to the Number One spot for Top Selling Albums. B.O.A.T.S has now hit x7 Platinum sales in Aotearoa NZ, rolling past 100,000 album sales and becoming the longest charting album ever by a local group, holding on at over 84 weeks.

At the NZ Music Awards 2006, Freddy’s picked up three awards: Highest Selling Album for Based On A True Story; Best Video for Director Mark Williams aka Slave for Wandering Eye and the coveted, People’s Choice Award. Freddy’s was also awarded ‘Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence at the b-Net NZ Music Awards 2006,


Mystic Soul Connection
Fat Freddy’s Drop is first and foremost a live band, no two Freddy’s gigs are the same as the midnight marauders improvise and jam mystic supernovas of future funk, fakes and freaky sidesteps.

Fitchie says “What's great about live performance is that it belongs to those in the audience on that night, it's a one off experience”.

Freddy’s hi-tek soul delivery is a specific flavor that trips through and fuses skanking urban Pacific roots, soul, dub, jazz and electronica, hypnotic and thunderous grooves.
“The three-strong horn section build on these solid foundations, with Dobie Blaze playing an array of vintage keyboards, before the annoyingly good-looking Joe Dukie adds his silky-voiced lyrics. They have the feel of a genuine spiritual collective, and the audience fed off the band’s intimacy with each other.
While songs regularly broke the 10-minute barrier, there was no pointless filler. Every note, every beat, every word, every harmony, is perfectly pitched, proving that behind their languid, laid-back image, lies hours and hours of hard work….Sweet as” Brixton Academy show, Record Collector, June 06
Winner of Best Live Act at the b-Net NZ Music Awards 2004, Freddy’s tour regularly, nationwide, to Australia and beyond. The bros have embarked on annual summer pilgrimages to the Northern Hemisphere since 2003, playing gigs and festivals across Europe and the UK.

The crew have also built strong international partnerships with London’s Kartel Creative and Berlin’s Sonar Kollektiv, Best Seven and Jazzanova.

Stand out gigs in 2006: the pimped out sunset session at Algarve Summer Festival, Portugal on the street in the heat for Sonar Festival, Barcelona, FFD in the spotlight for the sold out Brixton Music Academy, two smooth evenings at Caberet Sauvage, Paris and the blow out at Channel Plus TV. Back home, the RDU fish and chip birthday gig and the Red Bull Daylight savings showcase, Grey Lynn Park, Auckland.

Standouts in 2005: Hammersmith Palais, London, Shed 6 in Wellington, Christchurch Town Hall, live at the Worldwide Awards at Koko, Camden in December, Big Chill Festival, two sold out Freddy’s shows nights at Koko in September, a rawkus record release party at Café Moskau, Berlin and Popkomm Festival crowd at the Apollo Soul Festival at the lavish Theaterkasse Berliner Staatsoper. !

The Band That Eats Together
The seven-piece family of musicians emerged through a multitude of musical incarnations on the Wellington soundscape, graduating from funk jam bands, reggae soundsystems and jazz improvisation cliques to live techno experiments.

Fitchie AKA Mu, Freddy’s bandleader and ‘Master of Reality’. Armed with his MPC sampler, Fitchie is the technician at the core of the Freddy’s bouncing beats, bottom heavy bass lines and sublime samples.

Fitchie picked up Best Producer and Most Outstanding Musician at the b-Net NZ Music Awards 2005, and Best Producer at the b-Net’s in 2003.

Joe Dukie AKA Dallas Tamaira, lyricist and mystic singing sensation. His stage name/alter ego is drawn from his father Joe, also a singer, and his grandfather, a musician nicknamed Dukie after Duke Ellington.

Heavily influenced by Bill Withers, Dukie’s lyrics are soul deep and his vocals resonant and uplifting. Dukie was awarded Best Vocalist at the b-Net NZ Music Awards 2005.

The bootae shaking three-piece horn section are Freddy’s wall of sound on the frontline, featuring the intricate licks of Scott Tower on sax, Tony Chang AKA Toby Laing on trumpet and Ho Pepa AKA Joe Lindsay on trombone and ‘Bad Ho Jelly Roll’ dance moves. Notice to the ladies out there; Hopepa scored ‘Male Fox’ at the B-Net NZ Music Awards 2006.

The horn section players also perform for a raft of other respected NZ bands including Scribes of Ra, The Eggs, The Black Seeds, Opensouls and Tyra and the Tornadoes.

Holding down the FFD backline with Fitchie are Jetlag Johnson AKA Tehimana Kerr and Dobie Blaze AKA Iain Gordon. Jetlag plays the skank, roots and mind bending Jimi Hendrix riffs on electric and acoustic guitar, while Dobie Blaze is the keyboard collector who serves up funkadelic analogue keys juxtaposed with baby grand piano and Casio.

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!’

Dukie’s cartoon sketches bring the Freddy’s alter egos to life and links them closer to the bands namesake, Fat Freddy’s Cat, a character from US cult comic strip The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Too much Freddy’s!

The Drop
Freddy’s HQ is affectionately referred to as the beach, home to Fitchie’s studio and The Drop, the bands independent label. FFD Manager Nicole Duckworth is at the Drop helm, collaborating with the bros to expand FFD unorthodox business and ‘tribal’ philosophy worldwide

The beach studio is literally 6 feet from the surf, situated underground in the basement of a 19th Century Bath House in Lyall Bay, one of the oldest buildings in the capital city.

Life at The Drop exists on Island Time, the bros working at their own tempo, under few pressures from the outside world. Based On A True Story was recorded, engineered and mixed by Fitchie at the beach over 18 months with breaks for live gigs around the nation and summer tours to the UK and Europe.

The production process was pure organic Freddy’s, the ten tunes evolving almost entirely live on stage and the arrangements then recorded and fine-tuned by the seven players amid a myriad of guest artists in the studio. Fitchie escorted the final mix to San Francisco to master with George Horn at Fantasy Studio.

Making Records to Break Records
Flashback was the first single to drop from B.O.A.T.S, and the 12” vinyl debuted at #1 on the New Zealand alt charts in early 2005. The tune spent weeks in the b-Net Top 10 charts as well as sitting on Kiwi FM’s ‘A’ rotate for more than a month.

The 12” b-side featured a stripped back version of Midnight Marauders recorded live by the Freddy’s at the BBC Maida Vale studios in 2004. That session also featured Hope and Willow Tree and was nominated for Best Session at Gilles Petersons Worldwide Music Awards 2004. Another track, This Room, features amongst an all-star line up on Gilles Peterson’s The BBC Sessions Vol 1.

The second single from Based On A True Story was Wandering Eye, which made history as the most-played song on New Zealand radio.

The CD single featured The Italian Reprise from a live recording of the party anthem in Locorotondo, Italy, as well as the award winning Wandering Eye music video shot in a fish and chip shop in Grey Lynn and directed by Freddy’s cadet Mark Williams aka Slave

Keeping it real in 2006, Freddy’s have a nomination for the b-Net New Zealand Awards for Downbeat/Dub Track of 2006 for Ray Ray, another single from the album.

Midnight Marauders
Historically, the Freddy’s sound first made an impact on the international dance circuit in 2002, when Midnight Marauders was released on 12” vinyl under the guise of Joe Dukie & Fitchie.

Legend has it that Detroit born producer Recloose, who had relocated to Aotearoa, took a copy to Berlin and played the track to Sonar Kollektiv and Jazzanova.

From there, Daniel Best’s imprint Best Seven re-released the hypnotic track, and Jazzanova’s DJ’s were soon playing it in sets across Europe and the USA. The rest is history as caught the Freddy’s voodoo caught on.

Freddy’s officially released their band debut on wax in 2003, a 10” vinyl featuring Hope a song that Dukie scribed to inspire ‘positivity, spirituality and creativity’ for a new generation. The b-side dub trip was Bluey. The limited edition release gained cult status and a Hope re-print was released in 2006.

Midnight Marauders and the original HOPE both scaled to the number one spot on Gilles Peterson’s Top Twenty Worldwide picks in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

The band’s original live CD release is Live at the Matterhorn, a recording of the band at Wellington’s den of iniquity featuring four songs, spanning 80 minutes. It struck Gold sales in Aotearoa NZ purely through word of mouth and in 2006 was released by Kartel in the UK.

The vinyl vein continues to run deep in Freddy’s and recent vinyl releases include: Wandering Eye remix by Auckland hip hop producer, Submariner: Flashback remix by Berlin’s Jazzanova and Roady remix by The Nextmen from London.

In 2006 Freddy’s released the first in a new international remix series:
Part #1 featuring Cay's Crays remix by London’s Artificial Intelligence (described by dnb legends Fabio and Grooverider as "one of the biggest tunes of the summer") and Midnight Marauders remix by NZ’s Pylonz & Kinetix.

Part # 2 includes Cay's Crays remix by Digital Mystikz (DMZ) the bass-heavy premier dub-step crew from South London, and MO Beats, a version from Manchester roots reggae connection Blood & Fire vs. Deep Sound and a deep leftfield club mix from Kalbata aka Ariel Tagar from Tel Aviv.

DJ Vadim and One Self also put on their spin on Cays Cray’s in 2006, dropping an exclusive remix on 7” vinyl.



Moving Image
Jump on the tour bus, be a fly on the lid of the tequila bottle backstage and check what the Freddy’s get up to when they leave NZ without the whanau. This is rock & roll after all…

In November 2006, Fat Freddy’s Drop proudly released their debut DVD, Fantastic Voyages Vol 1.

The self-produced DVD features Ten True Stories, stealthily filmed during Freddy’s 2006 World Cup Tour, with old and new tracks and inspired Freddy jams driving the soundtrack.

The Attack of the Killer Sea Monsters music video section features Ray Ray, a seven-minute train odyssey contemplating a world without soul, as well as the award-winning Wandering Eye and Roady.

Dobie Blaze delivers his Shuk foodeo and the Hidden Gems features Midnight Marauders captured live in Portugal.

Fantastic Voyages Vol 1 is a Production of The Drop in conjunction with Slave & El Blazeo Production’s’.

On the first week of release, Fantastic Voyages sailed straight to Number 1 on the Official New Zealand Music Charts Top 10 Music DVDs, another independent record breaker in the life of Fat Freddy’s Drop.

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