06: Funk Me
Twelve"– a series of 12" crate digging
Twelve" - the series
I love a 12 inch single or EP. I’ve always loved them. They give us special tracks and then, if we’re lucky, we get amazing remixes too. The first ones I bought were in the eighties and nineties and were effectively bigger versions of 7 inches, but with better sound quality.
In the 2000s, I also bought a lot of house and dance music on 12 inch vinyl – and I found some truly awesome songs – some of them originals, some of them remixes. So this series takes a dip into my 12 inch ‘crate’. It’ll be a lucky dip (almost) and I hope there’ll be some finds that you’d like to follow up on - or you might remember some of these from back in your day!
Twelve"06 – Funk Me by Disciples of Sound
Sometimes the crate digging unearths something wonderful and well known - like last times 12” version of Bowie’s Wild is the Wind. At other times, it's something rarer, or less notable. One hit or two hit wonders are not necessarily the worse for that label, but they re hard to find out about and tell their story.
My story around this record is that in the early 2000s I was working in London, and staying there for a couple of nights a week. The experience was strange. Exciting sometimes to be near the British Library, the basement bookshops around Bloomsbury, the HMV shop in Oxford Street and the parks and squares that patchwork that area of the city; yet lonely too with plenty of time to walk and think… and search for records.
I was collecting House Music mainly. back then, and doing a little bit of DJing. Occasionally, it was a 12" of a song discovered on the radio; more often taking a chance on something in a record bin. In those days, you could still sometimes listen to a record on the shop phono unit with headphones, which helped to narrow down the piles of records that might have been stacked up ready for checking out.
I’m almost certain that this one - Funk Me, by Disciples of Sound – came from one of those forays into HMV on Oxford Street. I had other shops I went to, but they were more for compilations, or finding white label DJ versions of records. In HMV, at that time, you could guarantee a good selection of dance records and DJs were still playing on vinyl, so the choice was good.
It’s one of those songs that is simple as hell, but has something inherently likeable about it. In this case, the very cool guitar line on side A by Adam Hyde and the sleazy vocals by someone called Doctor Funkstick! Nothing complex, it’s just a four to the floor beat with the funk baked in. The whole thing is also very rude, but… hey….!
The Lushed to Funk Mix (on the B side) has a real Donna Summer, I Feel Love electronic vibe, which I really love…
As hinted at, there’s not much information about Disciples of Sound out there. The two producers who make up the outfit were Paul Read and Robert Passow, who also recorded as M.O.D.E, but I can’t find much more about them online. So not much story, but a couple of awesome and very funky House tracks revived from 2002.
There’s also a top song they produced with ‘Kid Lopez’ (nope, don’t know who they are either!) called Can’t Take No More which I’ve included as a bonus track below.1
Side A - Disciples of Sound Original Mix
Written and produced by Disciples of Sound. Live guitar by Adam Hyde. Live Saxaphone by Toots Webster. Vocals by Doctor Funkstick.
Side B - Remix - Disciples of Sound Lushed to Funk Mix
Bonus track: When I was searching around for more information about Disciples of Sound, I came across this 8 minute 36 seconds banger: Can’t Take No More from 2005 on YouTube. Time for a dance round your handbag at the kitchen disco. I haven’t got a copy of this record, unfortunately, but it’s a stone cold classic: