Records, Funk And Musical Fusion

As the resident crate-digger in local neo-soul/funk outfit Up Up Away, Lachlan Stuckey spends a lot of time in obscure record stores. Record shopping in Hungary, he says, is awesome. "A lot of it is kind of untouched and there's lots of dusty little shops that are just crammed full of jazz records from the '50s and '60s that have been there for so long.

"We went to this crazy record store in this little apartment building; it was really just like a broom closet, it wasn't even really a real room. But the dude must have had like 10- or 20,000 records in there. There were records just stacked ten piles deep that we couldn't even get to and there was only like, two people that could walk into the store at once."

"There were records just stacked ten piles deep that we couldn't even get to and there was only like, two people that could walk into the store at once."

Back home in Melbourne, guitarist Stuckey and his band enjoy the enthusiastic support of soul/funk exponent, Northside Records main man, Triple R DJ and fellow wax obsessee, Chris Gill.

"Guys like Chris and DJ Manchild and those guys who have always supported the band, we've had so many conversations with them and their encyclopaedic knowledge of records is just gobsmacking. Dudes that know where everything came from and can see the link between every style of music that's happened in the last five decades. I think those guys put most of their effort into DJing but to apply that to making your own music would be a super, super interesting thing."

The band originally got together, says Stuckey, "Because our singer, Elle [Young], put the word out that she wanted to start a band doing some covers to try and make some cash just doing soul funk covers at gigs." That idea lasted for just one rehearsal. "We all got along really well and we're all into similar stuff and we started jamming and decided that we didn't want to play covers and that we could make better use of our quote unquote musical fusion, just to make our own music."

The wedding circuit's loss is the pub circuit's gain. Up Up Away released an EP early last year and did a residency at Evelyn Hotel, which is "kind of like a second home" to the band, says Stuckey. They'll be back there again to launch their new 7" Swells. At the time, Saskwatch and Hiatus Kaiyote were the band's main local inspirations. "They were the ones that inspired us to take a look at soul music in our own kind of way, I suppose," says Stuckey. But with a whole lot of different musical inspirations, the Up Up Away sound is constantly evolving.

"When we first started it was really just about raw soul funk, just '60s/'70s funk music. And since then it's changed a lot. I think we were just young kids at the time how were really affected by the James Brown and the Otis Redding and the Marvin Gaye that we were hearing, that we were digging up, but since then it's definitely gone in a more hip hop direction in a pretty subtle way. Just kind of using hip hop sounding grooves without presenting them as hip hop songs. We spend a lot of time listening to '70s African music and so I think we're going to try and work that stuff into the next set that we'll put together."