‘If everyone’s going left, I’m going right’
Bill Curtis tells DAVE FREAK why The Fatback Band were ahead of the curve
WITH such UK top 40 hits as (Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop, (Do The) Spanish Hustle and Double Dutch, New York street funk outfit The Fatback Band were ahead of the pack during the 1970s-80s, predicting so many new musical genres and trends, including (on King Tim III (Personality Jock) from 1979), rap.
“Yes, yes I was ahead of the pack people just didn’t understand my music, they were just catching up with what I was doing,” smiles founder member, drummer Bill ‘Fatback’ Curtis, though he’s quick to stress he wasn’t scouring the local neighbourhoods and clubs looking to capitalise on emerging fads. “I wasn’t particularly going out, looking out on the street to see what the trend was – I marched to my own music and my own beat.”
As he notes, it was often others who jumped on his innovations.
“When I was in the studio, I made the first house beat, [but] I wasn’t in there to make a house beat, I just made a beat, and it turns out that [disc] jockeys and them started calling it a house beat. It was the same thing with The Bus Stop – I didn’t start out to make a line-dance,” he says, referring to the disco dance that became associated with the track. “I just made a tune, a record,
The Bus Stop. But I had seen people in Chicago, and places, doing that dance, because I got the line-dance from the groove in the early-40s, from The Griffin Brothers, and I remember that – two-to-the-front, two-to-the-back. That’s where I got that from.
“But I didn’t start out to set no trend, we just went in to make music the way we felt.”
Curtis learned his trade playing drums in the US Army, and at small clubs and bars in New York after leaving the service, before touring and performing with Paul ‘King Of The Hucklebuck’ Williams, King Curtis Band, Bill Doggett and Clyde McPhatter. Later part of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre house band, he backed Marvin Gaye and other soul stars, before launching his own Fatback Band – inspired by Bill’s own funk-charged ‘Fatback’ style of percussion playing that fused a New Orleans groove with calypso.
“I used to play a lot of calypso music in New York, cabaret music, and I incorporated that kinda of calypso music, but I put a backbeat to it – the two-and-four to the backbeat, and the one-and-three on the foot – and that’s what created that sound, that Fatback beat sound,” Bill explains.
By 1975, The Fatback Band were making serious waves in the UK with tracks such as Yum Yum (Gimme Some), Wicki-Wacky and Do The Bus Stop, and their sound continued to evolve, through jazz, funk, soul and disco.
“I only played what I felt and what I wanted to play,” Bills says of the band’s evolution. “We weren’t bound to make commercial music, I didn’t have no pressure. The record company I was working for gave me the freedom to play anything I wanted to play and make any kind of music I wanted to make, and whatever we wanted to do was all right by them – and that’s what we did.
“I’ll tell you the type of person I am,” he continues. “If everybody’s going left, I’m gonna go right, I’m going to tell you that right away. So that’s what we did, we didn’t go left, we went right; and if they were going right, we went left.”
The band’s biggest hit came in 1987 with I Found Lovin’, which hit number seven in the UK charts. But it was third time lucky for the single, having previously failed to crack the UK top 40 twice – in 1984 and 1986.
“I think it was because it took the public so long to catch up with Fatback, to see what we were doing, because we were putting the funk in their face and they didn’t understand it,” reckons Bill on why the track took so long to make a serious impact.
Initially ignored by radio DJs because Fatback’s sound was “too ragged and funky” for the smoother playlists, home audiences were even slower to pick up on the track, which first appeared on 1983’s With Love album.
“It took longer in the States for I Found Lovin’ to take off than it did in the UK. It took off in the UK two years before it even hit the United States.”
Fifty years after Fatback’s debut album, Let’s Do It Again, and Bill’s still working hard, and brings the band to Mostly Jazz Funk and Soul Festival to headline Sunday’s lineup. But he has no specific plans for the landmark golden anniversary.
“All I want to say is that I thank God that I’m still here to celebrate.”
Mostly Jazz Funk and Soul Festival runs from Friday, July 8 to Sunday, July 10 at Moseley Park and Pool, Moseley, Birmingham. Acts appearing include The Specials and Nightmares On Wax (Fri); Horse Meat Disco and Oh My God! It’s The Church (Sat); and Earth Wind And Fire Experience, The Wailers and Lady Blackbird (Sun). For tickets and more see: mostlyjazz.co.uk