Starfield Funk

It will shock you to know that I am an obsessive geeky type of chap; I know, I know, but it was time I outed myself as such. I am capable of getting ridiculously immersed and addicted to a certain type of PC game, particularly the type of sprawling role-playing open world experiences created by Bethesda Softworks – Fallout and Skyrim have swallowed months of my life.

Bethesda release Starfield on Friday, which promises a ‘NASA punk’ aesthetic take on space travel, exploration and adventure. I am in the process of pre-loading it now and have pre-emptively bid farewell to spouse, friends, family, pets, all semblance of personal hygiene and sleep.

I’ll send you a postcard from Alpha Centaurus 7.

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The latest trailer for Starfield featured a trope that I am not fond of, a slow orchestral cover of a tune, ‘Rocket Man’ in this case*. Which is why I found myself reaching for Space Funk: Afro Futurist Funk In Space 1976-84** thinking how this could and should be all so much cooler.

Released on Soul Jazz Records in 2019 Space Funk was another lunchtime impulse buy at Probe Records in Liverpool, propelled towards the airlock by a perfect trifecta of a great cover pic, a bonus 7″ record and some excellent fontage.

In appallingly gluttonous fashion I played it about twice and moved on to something else, however facing the very real prospect of aeons of space travelling I dug it out again, to dig it again if you will.

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That I am not the world’s foremost authority on Afro futurist electro funk in space 1976-84 may come as a shock to y’all; I probably only rank in the late teens.

Space Funk bundles up 15 tracks, 6 of which have computer, funk and/or space in the title. A little Discogs research shows just how rare some of these cuts are, a fair number of them being the only traceable release by these artists; unfairly in some cases.

The Space Funk milieu involves often sparse electronic beats, industrial quantities of voder use/abuse and spacey noises, I am a fan of all three tropes, whooshing space noises being my very favourite^.

As specified in K-Tel’s 3rd Law of Physics there are brilliant tracks here, a few bland cuts, one I described in my notes as sounding like ‘Flight of the Conchords taking the (space) piss’ and another I labelled as a ‘limp disk drive novelty record‘.

As we are all about the positives here at 1537, let’s just talk about the best stuff on Space Funk:

Leo: Fee Fi Fo Fum. Leo is a droid, this track is low-fi to the point where I question the inclusion of the ‘fi’ bit of that description. This needs to be played whilst exploring a semi-derelict freighter in an abandoned space port.

Juju & The Space Rangers: Plastic. This track is weirdly laid back and shrouded in polythene, as the song tells us ‘plastic is easy to see through’, incongruous shades of Zappa here. Contains some excellent space guitar, which is always a bonus.

Jamie Jupitor: Computer Power. A much funkier Kraftwerk-influenced cut, menacing vocals and a very bouncy echoing beat .

Ramsey 2C-3D: Fly Guy And The Unemployed. My fave and the longest track here, this is space bonkers. The 2C-3D model droid was definitely discontinued after this effort. There aren’t many tracks I own, space funk or otherwise, that combine a job interview and excellent sax in one long boogie.

7 Below Zero Band: Seven (We Are). A harder hitting guitar-led track with a hurricane of an opening and weirdly operatic motifs. In the unlikely event I ever score my own late night chat show this will be my theme tune.

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That is enough Space Funk for now, surely that’s sufficient to convince you that both the A’s in NASA stand for Afro? well, they should do. I thoroughly enjoyed this LP, this time around.

I do have a bone to pick with Soul Jazz Records though. The music is good, the cover is good and the LP pressing is noticeably good. Where they fall down terribly though is in not giving us any info, pictures, bios of the artists here, or even dates of the tracks.

If you compare this to the love and research that On The Dole Records or the Numero Group lavish on their archaeological compilations then this comes over as lacklustre in comparison. I for one would love to know what Rodney Stepp and Ernest Flipping II are up to now.

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The cover art on Space Funk was a selling point for me, hey Gil Scott-Heron it isn’t just ‘Whitey On The Moon’ these days. To use the same picture three times isn’t really trying though, how about a female blackstronaut too?

1196 Down.

*had it been ‘Space Is Deep’ or ‘Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)’ then I would have been all over it. I suspect however that Bethesda are trying to sell this game to people who don’t have the immense honour and pleasure of being me. Go figure.

**hereafter to be known as Space Funk, in order to preserve the world’s rapidly depleting stock of pixels.

^there are very few songs that couldn’t be improved by adding whooshing space noises to them, just imagine how much better ‘God Only Knows’ or ‘My Sweet Lord’ would be if they added alien landing noises to them.