The Greyboy Allstars - What happened to Television

The Greyboy Allstars  are wall to wall purple shag pile funk. Funk isn’t my favourite flavour you understand. Most of the time I get a little ‘dats cool’ overloaded….the beat is cool, wow that bass line is funky, and then the flute or Hammond noodling will layer over the top of that and it’s just TOO cool for me. It’s all one step too far.

I’m reminded of a line from ‘King Bing’ by Baby Bird where he refers to jamiroquai as ‘bad jazz for dumb white folk’. YES! Nail, head – how are ya? But over the last year or so I’ve come back to funk through jazz. Grant Green, featured in the June 06 Edition of Borrowed Beats, who made me reconsider the genre.

And then I came across The Greyboy Allstars on KEXP (What a station!) And man, they rock! Funk. Whatever.
What happened to Television is a great album for people who don’t really like funk. Sure, we’re all rockin to Mark Ronson at the moment, but 3 tracks in the trick is pretty stale. What happened… on the other hand is a pure joy to listen to. There are some standards reworked here, ‘How Glad am I’ made famous by Aretha Franklin, and some brand new retro with ‘Knowledge Room’.
If you like funk you’ll love this album. If you don’t like funk, chances are you’ll still love this album.

WATCH: The Greyboys do their thang
LISTEN: SCIFidelity Podcast , or the KEXP live show.
READ: The band’s homepage or myspace
BUY: From SCIFidelity site

…there is no escaping the hype! (pic)

On the train to work this morning there were about 20 people with their noses in the latest book. It’s on the news, it’s all over the web and now it’s on Triplejaysus! Sorry, but who can pass on something as freaky as all this wizard malarkey?

As you know, I’ve been away for a month - and so there was no July Podcast. It wasn’t great timing to start a blog, to have an internet presence other than the podcast, and then dissappear for over 4 weeks. But it meant so much to come back to see all the emails asking for a July edition - albeit delayed. Unfortunately, I haven’t time to put together an edition that I’d be fully happy with. You’ll have to wait ’til August for that, but in the meantime, you might enjoy this: