Funk legends Fatback Band: ‘The US has cultural amnesia. Britain keeps our music alive’ | Music

‘We pioneered line dancing with Bus Stop, hip-hop with Personality Jock, and house with Goin’ to See My Baby,” says Bill Curtis. “But Fatback still don’t get the respect we deserve.”

As founder, drummer and CEO of Fatback Band, Curtis may be forgiven for his outlandish claims about the role the band from Queens, New York City, played in shaping popular music. But the thing is, he’s not bragging. Fatback’s influence is everywhere, from disco-funk to 50 years of hip-hop: their 1979 B-side King Tim III (Personality Jock) is the first rap record, predating Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight by several months.

Not that Curtis expresses any bitterness. Instead, when I meet him and fellow Fatback founding member, keyboardist Gerry Thomas, at a Travelodge in Hounslow, west London – the band have been playing a residency at London’s Jazz Cafe – I find both men full of good cheer. They first met in 1967 while in a band playing “weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties” in Queens, says Thomas. “This was before the DJ era, so we played the hits that people liked to dance to.”

Back then, Thomas was a rookie trumpeter while Curtis was an R&B veteran, having worked the chitlin’ circuit – venues for black Americans during mid-century racial segregation – as drummer for dozens of acts, including Jimmy Reed and Sam Cooke. Today they share a brotherly camaraderie: Thomas, 75, is full of energy and enthusiasm while Curtis, a remarkably well preserved 91, is droll and nonchalant.

“Bill’s unstoppable,” says Thomas with an admiring chuckle. Curtis raises an eyebrow and notes that he now plays percussion on stage as “drumming for Fatback is hard work”, but adds: “I’m from that school where you work till you drop.”

Hard work has been a constant in Curtis’s life, ever since he started out as a professional musician in his mid-teens playing with local blues outfits in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Although he grew up under Jim Crow-era apartheid, Curtis doesn’t recall those years as particularly onerous. “There was segregation but I had white neighbours,” he says, “and white friends.

“OK, once we got to high school, things were segregated – but that didn’t stop me doing what I wanted to do.”

Thomas grew up in the Bronx, “surrounded by all kinds of people”, and he didn’t experience racial discrimination until he went on the road as a musician. “One of the band went into a gas station’s restroom in the south, oblivious to the fact that it was for whites only,” he recalls, “and the owner pulled a shotgun on him. That woke us up.”

After completing his military service, Curtis settled in New York where he worked in the Apollo theatre’s house band: “We backed Marvin Gaye on his Apollo debut. He was very humble, really talented.” And he worked dates with many rising stars, drumming for Aretha Franklin’s first New York appearance, in Greenwich Village. While touring with Clyde McPhatter, he once stayed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. “I saw Martin Luther King speaking from his balcony and I waved at him and he waved back. Later that day, on the way to our gig, we heard the news of his murder on the radio.”

Determined to run his own operation, in the late 1960s Curtis set up House of Fatback, a booking agency and record label he ran from Queens until 1992. There you could hire a funk, jazz or steel pan band, alongside ordering soul food and go-go dancers for your party. The Fatback Band formed from musicians in its orbit. The loose-limbed street funk of their first three albums from 1972-74 turned heads, and would provide a blueprint for later developments in rap and house. “Bill would invite his friends to our recording sessions,” says Thomas, “and that’s why it sounds like a party is under way – because they were partying while we were playing.”

Curtis describes his distinctive drumming as “a mix of my style with a New Orleans beat I learned in the military and West Indian [steel pan] rhythms I heard when I shifted to New York”. Nicknamed Fatback – a word used in the US for the back fat of a pig – after a bandleader requested “gimme some of your greasy, fatback drums”, Curtis is one of popular music’s finest funky drummers. “We made raw music for dancers,” he replies when I ask how he developed his distinctive rhythms. “Too raw for most record labels.”

Signing to Spring Records, Fatback released the album Keep On Steppin’ in 1974, and the album’s huge beats, shuffling rhythms and chanted choruses broke Fatback beyond New York. Thomas, then playing with the Jimmy Castor Bunch, was taken to a club after a performance in Liverpool in 1975, where he witnessed Fatback’s song Wicky Wacky (from Keep On Steppin’) pack the dancefloor. Thomas mentioned he played on Wicky Wacky and was mobbed. “I called Bill and said: organise some dates in England, they love Fatback.” So began a relationship that continues to this day.

“We got in the van and played every pub, club and cowshed,” says Curtis, “and the people came to dance and have a good time. That built us a loyal following – Britain and Fatback, we got a good thing goin’ on!”

Fatback would score six UK Top 40 hits in the 70s and 80s, the biggest being (Do the) Spanish Hustle in 1976 and a rerelease of the anthemic I Found Lovin’ in 1987. Thomas says of Spanish Hustle: “I was exposed to lots of Puerto Rican music and I decided to fuse their sound with our sound.” British DJ Steve Walsh recorded a version of I Found Lovin’ in 1987 in which he sings (atrociously) while adding chants. Despite being released on a tiny label, it managed to reach No 9 in the charts. Walsh, then an embryonic superstar DJ, held club nights that regularly drew 5,000 people, but he died in 1988 due to complications after a car crash in Ibiza, Spain.

“Steve was a good guy,” says Curtis. “He used to tour with us, warm up the crowd before we came on. Back then the BBC didn’t play black music – DJs like Steve played our records. They introduced British audiences to Fatback.”

Indeed, Walsh was the foremost DJ for a soul/funk/jazz-funk underground which, like Fatback, was ignored by a rock-obsessed music press but developed into the UK’s biggest dance scene prior to rave. The youths who once flocked to Walsh’s nights continue to attend Fatback concerts, dancing to the Bus Stop and chanting to I Found Lovin’. “British audiences are the best,” says Curtis. “They’re loyal.”

“In the US there’s a form of cultural amnesia,” adds Thomas. “People forget, and embrace the new. Over here we get different generations of fans – they keep Fatback’s music alive.”

Being overlooked at home may irk these funk icons, but being sampled by Kendrick Lamar, Björk and many more artists demonstrates the high regard Fatback are still held in. “I wish everyone who sampled Fatback paid us,” says Curtis, “but plenty don’t.” Lawyers get called: “Beastie Boys were the first we went after. Dr Dre was another.”

Taking control of business means the band’s early albums on Perception Records will finally join their Spring LPs as reissues on Ace Records in the coming months, and Personality Jock features prominently on Dollar Bill Y’All, a new compilation of early NYC rap. “Being from the Bronx, I heard cats rapping on street corners so suggested we record with one,” says Thomas on how Fatback made the first rap record.

“We were in the studio finishing our new album but I didn’t hear a hit,” recalls Curtis, “and Gerry had this tune we’d recorded called Catch the Beat that he thought a rapper could rhyme over.” Harlem’s King Tim III stepped up with high-speed rap promising “we’re strong as an ox and tall as a tree / We can rock you so viciously”, but their label, Spring, wasn’t so sure about him. “Back then, black radio DJs liked to talk a lot – big personalities,” says Thomas, “and Spring said they’d hate Personality Jock. So it ended up a B-side.”

But one DJ from Los Angeles who warmed to it reportedly told Joe Robinson, who co-founded Sugarhill Records with his wife, Sylvia, “that Fatback have the new sound,” Curtis says. “Joe told Sylvia and they went out and found the Sugarhill Gang.” Curtis still appears aggrieved at missing out on a hit. “We were first but Spring messed up. I’ve been in this game a long time and it hurts when your label stands in the way of chart success.”

His frustration is understandable: Fatback released 16 albums and scored 26 US R&B chart hits without ever once touching the pop Top 40. Spring messing up with Personality Jock was part of a chain of record label mishaps that befell the band.

“We had Street Dance and Goin’ to See My Baby and Dance Girl all hitting at the same time, and then Perception Records declared bankruptcy. In 1983, our album Is This the Future? had just been released on Polydor and the president of promotion for R&B ups and dies, and that killed it. Then, in 1985, Fatback signed to [Atlantic Records subsidiary] Cotillion and we figured now we were with a label that was going to promote and get us out of there. Well, we just released So Delicious, then Atlantic shut down Cotillion Records and out goes Fatback.”

In 1993, Curtis put Fatback on ice, returning to North Carolina to care for his ailing mother, but he reformed the band in 2002. “I felt like I still had a few more hits in me,” he says, and the band have since played Glastonbury, Love Supreme and other leading festivals amid a completely different music scene. “When I was coming up, you only heard what the record company wanted you to hear,” Curtis says. “Now, you have so many alternatives for finding music, and now any musician can record and even distribute. The downside is everybody wants to be a musician – the field is so crowded with wannabes that the real thing can’t come through.”

But Fatback keep on coming nonetheless. “The last five or six years have been some of our best years,” he says, “people discovering us and our music.” Even at 91, he hopes they can tour the world before he finally retires. “We just keep doing what we do.”