The Two Great Men Behind Katchafire: Bob Marley And Dad

When Logan Bell answers the phone we can hear someone madly strumming an acoustic guitar in the background. "Dad's playing a bit!" he laughs, and yells over his shoulder: "I'm doing an interview in Australia at the moment Dad, she can hear you!"

The Bell family live in Hamilton, New Zealand, where Katchafire formed in 2000 between Logan, his brother Jordan and their Dad - Grenville Bell. "The mainstay is that the family has been there since the start - [Dad] pretty much moved out of home away from Mum and the comforts of home to live in an apartment where we could pretty much jam and make noise 'til all hours of the evening," he laughs. "We owe a lot to him... I can remember band practices when I was around eight or nine, and then that kinda stopped - I think Mum knocked it on the head because it probably wasn't bringing in enough money!" Little did she know that the small Bob Marley tribute band would, by 2016, become one of New Zealand's most prolific reggae supergroups.

"I was with a mate - my pakeha [white] mate - and he was drinking as well and he didn't get arrested."

The now eight-piece all-Maori collective taps into the mentality that drives Maori culture's strong identification with reggae and ska music. "Maori as Indigenous can identify a lot with reggae's messages. I think it's really geared towards Maori and identifies the struggle that other Indigenous have been through as well," Bell explains. "We're pretty Bob Marley-centric here... I definitely think he was part of a lot of people's inspiration - their rock, their support system, there's no one else talking about what they were going through in those times, and still present today."

While a lot of Katchafire's music is joyous - at times adhering to "authentic" reggae and at others pushing the boundaries of the genre - it's a style that goes hand in hand with a socio-political or religious undercurrent. Bell reminisces on 2006's Frisk Me Down - a track written during an arrest. "Being oppressed, being a Maori growing up was tough, you know? I was out with some friends and I got arrested for breaching a liquor ban I didn't even know there... I walked out of a club with a bottle and I was arrested about 50 meters down the road, and I was with a mate - my pakeha [white] mate - and he was drinking as well and he didn't get arrested. I spent a night in the cells... It pissed me off, raw motivation."

Their latest offering Burn It Down brings the good vibes in spades, recorded by Stephen Rev Maxwell from Jamaica while the band were spread over the globe. "That's the challenge of recording while trying to play 120 dates a year," Bell chuckles. "Our families have to share us with the rest of the world." And what's Dad up to these days? "He has earned his right to hang up the boots - he's retired - and now Mum gets to have him home all to herself while we go off all 'round the world. But he's still very much the chief of the band."