“No it’s not Steve Irwin’s animal sanctuary, it’s not Bindi-Land!” Devin quips. So what are you seeing there? “All the local favourites, I’m getting harassed by a couple of big chickens right now!”
At the time of chatting, they had already played two gigs in New Zealand, and Devin was very impressed with the shows in Kiwiland, and with both countries so far overall.
“Oh, they were awesome!” he enthuses, “really good turnout for both, the places were set up so nice, and they treated us like gold. The people have been very friendly, very receptive. We’ve only done a few smaller gigs here (in Australia) so far, we haven’t done some of the bigger venue gigs yet here, but from what we saw in New Zealand it was awesome, awesome response. Here so far has been great too, getting to meet people and hang out has been cool too.”
Being that it was their first ever tour to the lands Down Under, it begged the question of what people get from their live set, and the overriding vibe was that of a very fun show.
“Yeah, that definitely translates,” he agrees. “I mean we’re having fun doing it, and the music itself is fun and upbeat and always translates. The goal is to get people up off their butts and smiling and shaking their butts. That’s what we’re doing, you know what I mean!”
And so what are your general expectations of the country and crowds in return? “We know Australia’s pretty familiar with this stuff,” he responds. “It seems like, from what I’ve seen of the scene, there’s two schools. There’s the ‘heads’ that know the music and are into it and those that don’t, but get the vibe. And then of course there’s the top 40 crowd, which we hope not to see probably!” he laughs.
But there’s a lot of them yeah? “Yeah, true story,” he concedes, “but if we can convert a few of them, then it’s all worth it!” Devin has heard good things about Melbourne, and after hearing what an amazing venue The Espy is, he became even more animated about coming down here.
“Oh yeah, I’m excited!” he states. “From what I’ve heard, Melbourne has a pretty good music scene, and a lot of true ‘heads’, and they’ll be out in full force. We’ll do our job!”
At this point, Devin handed over to Rusty. The band actually supported James Brown several years ago, before Devin had started playing with them. Rusty was only too happy to relate this very memorable experience to Beat readers.
“Yeah, Frank and I opened for him when he played in Baltimore,” he recalls, “probably about a year and a half before he died. They called up to find some DJs in Baltimore, and the promoters up there said, ‘You gotta try All Good Funk Alliance’. Everyone else at the time was playing house, no one else was playing funk and hip hop. They had us open up for him, and they had us set up on the side stage, right over the J.B.’s (James Brown’s backing band) as they were playing. It was really cool. Five minutes before we went on they said, ‘No hip hop!’ But we did our set regardless, we played the hip hop stuff that we had.
“Afterwards they came up and totally loved us, and said, ‘We meant commercial hip hop’, so we got away with what we wanted to play and got a really good reception. We didn’t actually get to meet the man himself…he was straight in and straight out. But we got to meet the J.B.’s and hang out, so it was really cool. It was a great experience, it really boosted our career at the time.”
The guys have a very big 2013 planned for themselves, with a US tour happening upon their return from Australia in March, and many and varied musical projects on the go.
“This (Northern) summer we’ve got plenty on the DJ touring front,” he explains, “and we’re focusing on writing, we’re writing an album for a singer called Piper Davis. We’re constantly working on beats for that, getting our chops up for that, playing guitars and stuff that we didn’t do before. And we’re getting ready to do a new All Good Funk Alliance EP, probably end of March we’ll have something out. We had Afrikaa Bambaataa in town, and we got a bunch of vocals from him.
“We also have another side project called B-Team, which is more house oriented, so we have some stuff coming out from that. So we’re trying to keep busy on a few different fronts musically.”
Busy boys.
BY ROD WHITFIELD
