Roots Music

It's probably an unfortunate state of affairs that the joy of growing food in your backyard is a mercilessly disregarded theme in today's music. Luckily, Formidable Vegetable Sound System, a spin-off of much-loved local electro-swing act Ensemble Formidable, is here to change that.

“It all started as a fortunate mishap, really,” frontman Charlie McGee explains. “We were at the World Solar Eclipse Festival, the Australian one, when the organisers had actually stuffed up the program and put [Ensemble Formidable] on the day before the band had arrived. So they asked if I could fill in on the headlining slot of the opening night. I was just like, 'Sure! I've got all these permaculture songs and a ukulele!' Those songs were originally designed as a teaching resource; it was something that I was building to take to schools and stuff. But I just went and hacked together some dodgy beats on my laptop and rounded up as many musos as I could, and just jumped on stage while coming up with the name Formidable Vegetable Sound System. From that, we just got offers to play in Europe, Canada, Glastonbury... we've just been rolling with it since then, not fully aware that it's actually happening.”

Dubbing themselves an “ecological infotainment” band, FVSS is now a regular on festival line-ups internationally. It's not totally left-field, with urban permaculture springing up all over the place and a select number of local heroes carrying the flag for sustainability. “I think it's going so well at the moment because there's a real call for it. I mean, I only ever meant these songs to be used in schools; that was my aim for it. And from that moment when we got up on stage, there was this feeling like, 'Hang on, this could potentially be something bigger'. It's pretty amazing to be able to go to all these different places and see people understanding and resonating with our message. I mean, we don't want to force anything on anyone; that's not what it's about. It's about informing people. And getting them dancing too, I guess.

“New Zealand went off,” McGee says of their most recent tour. “It was a combination of festivals and other pretty random shows. We did everything from German electronic music festivals to Victorian theatres in these little towns. This German festival, they'd shipped the entire thing over from Hamburg in shipping containers and set it up in a paddock in the middle of the north island. It was just bizarre, because half of the punters were just German ravers. I mean, we're a chilled-out dub group who play songs about vegetables, and here we are at this German electronic festival.”