If there’s one album that crystalised and defined the burgeoning “Wellington sound” of the aughts, then 2005′s Based on a True Story by the “seven-headed soul monster” Fat Freddy’s Drop is it.
To call the record a hit is to undersell it. BoaTS was a phenomenon. It won awards here
What makes its success so unlikely is that BoaTS is not the sort of album typically embraced by the masses. Six of the album’s 10 songs casually saunter over the seven-minute mark. Perversely its biggest hit, the seductive pop-dub smash ‘Wandering Eye’, keeps its skank rolling for almost 10 minutes.
The record is far too relaxed and chill to ever be dubbed a challenging listen, but its staunchly exploratory musical wanderings and unhurried pacing would have undoubtedly made it an outlier in many CD collections around the country.
Despite that, the album pleasingly sailed straight on to the charts at No.1, going Gold in its first week thanks to a loyal and hungry grassroots following the band had built up over five years. However, its time at the top — initially at least — was to be shortlived. The following week BoaTS was sunk by System of a Down’s nu-metal aggression.
Back then the charts were far more volatile than they are now and the tussle for No.1 was particularly ferocious. System of a Down also only managed to hold the top spot for a week before being knocked off by the Soundgarden/Rage Against the Machine supergroup Audioslave.
They were toppled by hip-hop superstars The Black Eyed Peas a week later who in turn found themselves dispatched by soft rockers Coldplay the following week. Fat Freddy’s nadir was bottoming out at No.18 while the willfully annoying, pre-meme, CGI novelty act Crazy Frog spluttered into No.1 with an album of 80s covers sung in gibberish.
If the story had ended there it would still make BoaTS a notable local album and an unqualified success. But this was just the opening chapter of Fat Freddy’s story.
“I was doing radio shows on Radio Active when it was still a student station,” Chris “Mu” Faiumu, aka DJ Fitchie, told the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine in a 2021 interview where he discussed the formation of the group back in the late 90s. “Dallas [Tamaira] came up, he was an actor from Christchurch who was touring a play. Met him and hung out for a bit and worked out that singing and music was really what he wanted to be doing. I said, ‘Move up to Wellington and let’s get it on!” And that’s what he did.”
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The MPC became the foundation of the group’s sound, with everything else built on top of it, while the pair’s improvising methodology set the template for how Fat Freddy’s would not just write songs but also perform them.
“Live is such a big thing for us,” Faiumu told a student documentary crew in a short film in 2005. “It’s where the songwriting process starts.”
The duo began attracting other musos from Wellington’s thriving scene who were drawn by the exploratory freedom and musical magic being conjured up during epic jam sessions. The rotating cast of musicians gradually solidified into a seven-piece collective made up of trumpet, trombone, saxophone, keys and electric guitar. The members were still free to play in their other bands like The Black Seeds, Trinity Roots and Bongmaster.
Legend has it the band’s memorably unusual name came about after a gargantuan 42-hour jam session in which the musos tripped out on acid sold under the street name Fat Freddy’s. The LSD blotter sheet featured artwork of Fat Freddy’s Cat, a character from the American late 60s-early 70s counter-culture comics The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
The name stuck and Fat Freddy’s Drop quickly became the name on every Wellingtonian’s lips, as word spread about this group of skilled musicians blowing people’s minds with their unique blend of dub, reggae, jazz, electronica and soul that was seemingly being made up on the spot.
“Dukie and myself will write a real simple groove with a bassline and a beat, [then] put ourselves under pressure and go play a gig,” Faiumu told the student filmmakers. “We never rehearse anything really. The first gig it might be okay. The second gig it gets a bit better. Five gigs later of experimenting with this rhythm or this groove, eventually, it turns itself into a song.”
Having established a following they independently released their first EP, Live at the Matterhorn in 2001. Recorded live at the Cuba Mall bar where they regularly performed it contained only four songs but ran a whopping 72 minutes. Perfectly capturing the sonic journey that Fat Freddy’s took audiences on, it was a word-of-mouth success selling more than 10,000 copies without the backing of a major label.
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The group became favourites on the touring schedule and started to gain traction overseas, especially following the vinyl release of live set stape Midnight Marauders.
“It was picked up by a Detroit DJ, Recloose, who took it over to Germany, then it started getting noticed by people like [influential BBC DJ] Gilles Peterson,” trombonist Joe Lindsay told the UK’s Fault magazine, describing its 2003 release as a pivotal moment for the group.
“We planned a lot of gigs on the back of the interest it got. We’ve been back to Europe almost every year since then.”
Through it all the group kept refining their songs live, making it up as they went along within frameworks that gradually revealed themselves. The band approached recording their full-length debut album the same way, feeling their way through the songs as a group before leaving Faiumu to assemble and mix the tracks in his home studio. His production was influenced by a love of early UB40. Talking to Canvas he recalled the impact the British reggae group’s early material, particularly the track 1 in 10 Dub Version, had on him as a young music lover.
“It was the first time I’d ever heard delays and echoes. I was blown away. I’d never heard anything like that. I didn’t know what I was listening to but I knew it was cool,” he recalled. “It was purely to do with the production. The sparseness. It was the first time I’d ever heard a dub tune without verses and choruses. I’d mostly listened to music from the radio up until then.”
That influence is immediate and apparent on ‘Ernie’, the laidback, freewheeling opening track of BoaTS, and ‘Cay’s Crays’, the mellow ska-dub jam that follows it. But it was the Antipodean flavour drizzled over their roots on tracks like ‘Hope’, ‘Roady’ and so memorably on the pulsing hit ‘Wandering Eye’, that would see the nation’s eyes turning towards the group.
After hitting No.1 their trajectory had been all downhill when suddenly BoaTS leapt back up to No.5, as ‘Wandering Eye’ began trickling on to the airwaves spreading sunshine and irresistible good vibes every time it was spun.
With summer quickly approaching, its success floated the album back up to No.1. After bobbling around the Top 10 for a few weeks, BoaTS locked itself in as the album of the summer in the second week of the new year, reclaiming the No.1 spot and not budging for seven weeks.
The golden weather matched with Fat Freddy’s relaxed jazzy, dub-funk blend and the ubiquity of ‘Wandering Eye’ on TV and radio proved an unbeatable combo. All up, BoaTS would stay in the charts for a mammoth 111 weeks and win Album of the Year at the NZ Music Awards.
As a listening experience it seems impervious to the ravages of time. You could tell someone it was released yesterday and they’d believe you. It is timeless, not beholden to fickle trends or changing tastes, and as such can only be called a Viva Classic. In every respect, it is the sound of summer in Aotearoa.
And, like all the most beloved stories, Based on a True Story remains as compelling, powerful and magical as it did the first time you heard it.
