James Brown, SMALL CAMPFIRES and ELECTRIC HELICOPTERS
A Riverside Radio conversation with Andy Bungay
A radio conversation can occasionally reveal the connecting thread between things that seemed perfectly unrelated until somebody asked the right question.
When Andy Bungay invited me onto Riverside Radio South West London, we began with funk. From there, we travelled through Salzburg, James Brown, Miles Davis, Deep Purple, Joni Mitchell, collaboration, social media, work–life balance and, eventually, electric helicopters.
Which seems a reasonably accurate tour of my working life.
Underneath it all was a more interesting question: what keeps you making music after more than three decades?
The answer has very little to do with preserving a particular version of the past. It is about continuing to move the faders.
James Brown, Deep Purple and the mixing desk
Andy began by asking what I was aiming for with the Funkestra. Words such as purity and authenticity entered the conversation, which made the whole enterprise sound rather grander than it feels from this side of the bass.
The starting point has always been simpler: make music that interests me and is enjoyable to play.
As a bassist, funk made instinctive sense. James Brown had the bass lines, riffs, horns and rhythmic architecture that immediately caught my ear. Deep Purple had great riffs too, simply operating within a different musical framework. I have never felt a particular need to erect border controls between them.
Over the years, I have come to think of those influences as faders on a mixing desk. There is funk, jazz, fusion, soul, blues and rock. The Funkestra identity comes from how far each fader is pushed on any particular record.
On Dr Hypenstein, the bass is deliberately sitting in the middle of the proceedings. Elsewhere it returns to a more traditional supporting role. Sometimes the arranging comes forward; on another piece, the groove or improvisation takes over.
After thirty years, I would be rather worried if all the faders were still in exactly the same position.
From Salzburg to somewhere outside the mainstream
My route into this music was perhaps not the most obvious one.
I grew up in Salzburg, where Mozart is less a historical figure than part of the local infrastructure. I later spent five years studying at the Vienna Music Conservatory and slowly developed an appreciation for classical music. As a teenager, however, my ears were pointing elsewhere.
There is a family story that my parents met while dancing to James Brown’s “Sex Machine”, so perhaps some of this was settled before I arrived.
One of the first important records my father gave me was Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. When we were asked to bring music into school, I took it with me. Miles was on the cover holding his trumpet and looking impossibly cool. My classmates mostly regarded the record as evidence from another planet.
That was part of its appeal.
My friends and I actively searched for music that Austrian national radio was not playing. Somebody would arrive with a record or a VHS tape, and suddenly we were encountering Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra or Earth, Wind & Fire.
Music was discovered through other people’s collections. The records you chose became part of how you defined yourself.
Eventually, leaving Austria for places closer to the source of that music felt less like a dramatic escape than a logical next step.
The best work should still be ahead
The most important point in the conversation was probably the simplest:
I prefer to believe that my best work is still ahead of me.
I am deeply grateful for the catalogue and for everyone who has listened, bought records, streamed tracks or come to concerts. But creatively, I do not spend much time looking backwards.
Whether my best work really is still ahead is for somebody else to decide. The useful part is believing it.
That belief keeps me interested in the next composition, musician, session and slightly improbable project. It is far more productive than attempting to recreate something that worked twenty years ago.
Curiously, one of the things that helped me return to my own musical identity was spending almost two years inside somebody else’s music.
The Joni Mitchell Reimagined Project required me to put much of my own writing aside and engage with compositions of extraordinary depth. Working within somebody else’s architecture exercises different musical muscles. It interrupts your habits.
When I returned fully to my own writing, I felt much clearer about what I wanted it to be.
Sometimes you have to leave your own world for a while to find the most interesting route back into it.
Learning when not to arrange
Collaboration has also become more important to me as the years have gone on.
When you are younger, you are often determined to establish your own voice. You want to control every element because you are trying to announce: this is what I do.
The difficulty is that once you have established a voice, you also establish habits. You begin to repeat yourself.
Other musicians interrupt those habits.
I am trained as an arranger and, earlier in my career, had a tendency to arrange things rather thoroughly. This occasionally included writing detailed guitar parts for extremely accomplished guitarists.
Mike Outram would sometimes look at one of my carefully prepared parts, quietly turn the page over and then play something considerably better.
Message received.
Working with Mike, Tony Remy and many others taught me that bandleading is not about specifying every detail. The framework matters, but so does leaving enough space for somebody else to bring their own personality into the music.
When I look at the pieces that listeners have connected with most strongly, a surprising number grew out of collaboration. People introduce colours onto the canvas that I would not have chosen because I could not have imagined them.
Increasingly, I think that is where some of my best work happens.
Carter Arrington and The Exchange
Carter Arrington is a particularly good example.
I first met Carter through guitarist Pete Roth. During one of our early conversations, he mentioned that he had been playing in Austin with a nephew of Miles Davis.
Given the Sketches of Spain story, that got my attention fairly quickly.
Carter sent me some music, I invited him into a Masterlink Session, and the musical relationship developed into a friendship and continuing collaboration. He subsequently played numerous sessions, Funkestra dates and the Joni Mitchell projects.
That relationship has now grown into our collaborative album, The Exchange, and a forthcoming run of UK concerts.
There was no boardroom strategy behind any of this. We met, enjoyed talking about music, enjoyed playing together and kept going.
Quite a few worthwhile things seem to begin that way.
Lots of small campfires
Andy and I also talked about the supposed state of funk.
My feeling is that the music itself is healthy. What has changed is the way audiences gather around it.
I described today’s musical landscape as lots of increasingly small campfires.
There was a time when enormous sections of the population watched the same television programmes, listened to the same radio stations and therefore encountered many of the same artists. Today, it is possible to disappear very deeply into almost any musical interest imaginable.
Even professional musicians regularly recommend artists to me whom I have never heard of.
That fragmentation makes the old distinction between mainstream and niche increasingly unhelpful. Funk never disappeared. Occasionally, something such as Uptown Funk places it back in the centre of popular culture, but its musical vocabulary has been embedded in records for decades.
The health of the music and the health of the music business are not necessarily the same conversation.
Being noticed comes before being liked
For independent artists, the difficulty is no longer simply making and releasing the work. It is persuading somebody to stop long enough to notice that it exists.
You can make the record, shoot the video and give enormous care to every detail. None of that guarantees an audience.
Before somebody can like or dislike something, they must first encounter it.
That is why I am fairly relaxed about negative comments online. Occasionally, somebody says that we should not have recorded a particular song or that they dislike an interpretation. Unless the comment becomes abusive, I am rather pleased that the person cared enough to form an opinion.
Indifference is much harder to work with than disagreement.
Recognition begins when somebody stops long enough to respond.
A lesson from Bluey
Towards the end of the conversation, Andy mentioned Bluey and Incognito, which brought back an early memory.
I had seen Incognito when I was young and painstakingly transcribed a considerable amount of their music. I arrived at one of their concerts carrying my folder of transcriptions and somehow found my way backstage.
Bluey could easily have dismissed me as another over-enthusiastic young musician clutching a folder.
Instead, he was warm, interested and genuinely appreciative that somebody had spent so much time listening to his music.
I never consciously turned the encounter into a manifesto, but it stayed with me.
You cannot take an audience for granted.
Somebody who listens to a record, comes to a concert, writes a message or invites you onto a radio programme is giving you their time. That deserves gratitude.
A life organised around making things
Andy finally asked about work–life balance.
The short answer is that I do not really have one.
Music has never felt like a conventional job from which I then escape into my “real life”. It is closer to a life organised around making things.
Music remains at the centre, but the creative process now extends into artwork, photography, video editing, websites, social media and the thousand other tasks that accompany being independent.
Some of that is necessity. Some of it I genuinely enjoy.
I can become almost as absorbed in editing a thirty-second video as I can in arranging a piece of music. They are different activities, but the question behind them is the same:
How can this idea be represented well?
There will be more writing, recording, travelling and collaboration over the coming months. Judging by the end of our conversation, there may also be a composition involving electric planes.
Or electric helicopters.
The appropriate fader has yet to be located.
A big thank you to Andy Bungay for the invitation, for allowing the conversation to travel into some genuinely interesting territory and, most importantly, for continuing to give independent music space on Riverside Radio South West London.
You can hear the full programme and interview on Mixcloud.
About this article
This piece began as a transcript of my Riverside Radio conversation with Andy Bungay. I used an AI agent to help distil its central themes and shape the conversation into a first-person article, then reviewed and revised the result to ensure that it accurately reflects what I said, what I meant and how I would express it.