When I meet Peter Parker, the scratch-wizard half of decks n double bass duo Fingathing, he is ironing T-shirts backstage at London’s famous Jazz Café. He’s not fazed by household chores in such a prestigious venue, having just played a storming show in a tiny club in Aldershot the previous night. “We’ll play anywhere” he says laconically, “it’s all part of it. People in those kind of places appreciate it anyway cos a lot of other groups refuse to go places unless they get gold-plated water or whatever, which people in small towns can’t afford. We’re fine with cheap beer”.

For a group who’ve recently toured with DJ Shadow, and whose set-up and sound have marked them out as one of British hip-hop’s most unique acts, they are very laid-back. Especially when it comes to labelling themselves.

“We kinda have to not consider ourselves hip-hop. My background is super-straight hip-hop but if you start having these other ideas and listening to other stuff it kinda gets frowned upon. I think a lot of people don’t understand the nature of hip-hop at all. If you try anything different in that genre of music you just get leapt on by people going ’that’s not hip-hop’. I’m not really interested in any of that, I don’t really want to be involved, leave us out of it. Cos what we’re doing it’s completely going against a lot of grains, but it’s like, fuck it”

Fingathings - Sneak

Seeing them live, you can appreciate how people may find it difficult to categorise them. Parker, on decks seems at first glance to be your standard turntablist, but there is a creative, yet controlled, side to his scratching that comes from listening to the musical experimentation of Frank Zappa and the prog rock era, as well as hip-hop. “I like to be aware of not being too over-indulgent with the turntables. Well I am indulgent all the way through but not in such a fashion that it hurts your ears. I can’t listen to some other scratching DJs for more than 10 minutes. When you’re in the bedroom and practising it’s cool but sometimes these guys just go out on stage and carry on practising.

They’re not practising the idea of progression and build and ups and downs. With a pianist it’s the space you leave between the notes and the keys which is the important thing in the sound of music and it’s something I’ve always tried to think about.” Live, Parker uses only one deck, so when he cross-fades, it is to the sound of silence, which leaves more space for his finger-plucking, bow-wielding double bass partner, Sneak.

If Parker is the chatty, lanky, hip-hop side of Fingathing, then Sneak represents a more bohemian element. Softly spoken, with a Kangol-style hat adding a modern, skater edge to the traditional beret-wearing jazz musician, he flits between funky bass-lines and the cello. He is at the centre of the luxuriant melody running through the dreamy new single ‘Wasting Time’, and plays solo on their take on legendary jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, ‘Alright Charlie’. Yet like Parker there is a refreshing lack of pretension to him. “The music that we write makes us laugh”, he says, “you can’t take yourself too seriously and write introvertedly. At the end of the day what we do relies on our skills to pull it off and we could easily get anal about what we do technically and it might be much more challenging but it wouldn’t sound very good. A lot of jazz music rises to a level to where unless you’re a musician yourself you don’t understand it. If you’re a musician and you start to understand these things you can see they’re impressive but you also understand that it won’t mean anything to most people. It needs that accessibility for something to work across the board.”

Fingathings - Parker

Part of the reason for their accessibility is the range of styles that the pair bring to the Fingathing sound. They first met through the Manchester label, Grand Central Records, to whom they remained signed. Parker was spotted Mark Rae by (GC label boss) after he came second in his first appearance at the UK DMC championship finals. Rae asked him to join the live band he was putting together to back his recording outfit Rae and Christian. The classically trained Sneak was already in the band playing double bass. The two hit it off immediately and began jamming together during breaks in rehearsal. It is a mixture of their different backgrounds that makes their sound so unique. “It was a pure fusion of everything”, enthuses Parker, “I didn’t really listen to too much of the jazz, soul and blues side of things until I met Sneak and I started taking all these other interests. It’s like another world of music to me, and over the past six or seven years that’s how the sounds really fused. It all came together in these mad styles cos we’re into variety.” “Both of us are very open to most things”, agrees Sneak, “as long as something’s got something beautiful or human or an energy that’s obvious.”

Their two album releases so far, ‘The Main Event’ and ‘Superhero Music’, highlight the distinct lack of pretence about Fingathing. Chock full of monster movie samples, comic book references and wrestling imagery mixed with loose jazz rhythms and tempos, their records are fresh and fun to listen to, whilst remaining extremely good technically. But it is live where they can really show off.

The energy of their shows is immense, especially from two people physically hampered by their instruments. This is where the visuals, incorporating the oddball wrestler creations of comic artist Chris Drury, come into play. Parker calls Drury their unofficial third member and “one of the freshest artists I’ve ever seen”, and his bold style complements their music.

Alongside a blistering cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, they throw in a couple of new tracks, with Parker abandoning his decks to work with a sampler, which go down well with the enthusiastic crowd at the Jazz Café. They are working on new material, though it’s still someway off. “It’s all kind of a surprise”, Parker explains, “we’ve got ideas and we’re trying to work with people to get them rocking, but until we do that there’s not much point in saying anything. But we have got mad shit on the agenda.”

Like the previous record, ‘Superhero Music’ it’s unlikely to feature any guests. “We’ve got so much to do ourselves. To bring in someone you’ve got to need to fill in an area you don’t think you can satisfy”. “We wouldn’t have a guest on it just so we’ve got a big name on it”, adds Sneak. This is unusual for an act from the collaboration-happy Grand Central stable, whose whole ethos seems to involve the ‘Friends and Family’ that Fingathing were so much a part of. But Parker thinks, “them days are gone. We work on stage in our own little personal road trip of music.”

Fingathings - Chris

This highlights a crucial factor in Fingathing’s success -their supreme confidence in their own abilities, not just as musicians, but as trail blazers for a new kind of hip-hop. “With what we’re doing we haven’t got any shoes to step into”, says Parker, “we’re walking our own walk. There’s not really anyone else I know that’s doing what we’re doing. We can make a totally new audience of kids from a mad amount of different genres of music that like what we’re doing. If we can pull that off, which is happening completely naturally, we could end up with a really big fanbase”.

Tempering this self-conviction is a natural modesty and a desire to stay true to their personalities. They both love raw sounds and despair at the slick sheen of contemporary production techniques. Parker admits to having cut himself off from modern music. “A lot of hip-hop guys who’ve been in it for over ten years, I just don’t get the same feel and vibe off their tunes that I used to get ten years ago when they were hungry and skint. Now they’re rich and lazy and it comes through in the music. They’re not my heroes anymore”.

Fingathing’s ingenuous talent and appetite to make original music can potentially place them as the next superheroes of hip-hop. It would suit them to, as Parker puts it, “carry on kicking musical ass.”

words: Colm Larkin
photos: Zoe Haseman

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