"
I suppose quite a few of you are gonna be sorta wondering what the hells going on and who the hell we are, em, but um, we're called Fingathing and we're from Manchester. My name's Peter Parker and I play, like, one turntable, and this dude over here is Sneaky, and he plays the double bass. And basically that's it. That's how we make our music."
As a youth, Peter Parker (real name: Dan Baxter) was into electro and hip-hop, spun and scratched on turntables.
He was a member of
Cutting Crew turntablist collective, alongside
Static and ex-DMC World Champion,
DJ Noize. As a solo turntablist he got as far as placing 3rd in a UK DMC DJ Championship, where
Mark Rae was a judge. The second half of the duo is
Sneaky (real name: Simon Houghton), a classically trained musician, with a formal education on cello and double bass. He went on to become involved in music clubs, playing as a backing musician, touring with the
Rae & Christian live band,
where Sneaky met Peter Park.
With their powers combined, they formed Fingathing, releasing their first track in 1999 as part of the 2CD
Central Heating 2 compilation on Mark Rae's
now defunct Grand Central Records label. They followed the track with the
2 Player EP in July 2000 (streaming tracks:
Head To Head,
Ffathead,
Parker Plays Pacaddict,
Drunken Master, and
Ffling), and the album
The Main Event in November 2000 (streaming tracks:
Check It Out,
Big Monsters Crush Cities,
Just Practise ft. Mr Scruff,
You Fly Me,
Slippin ft. Veba,
Crowd Pleasers ft. DJ Noize;
full album on Bandcamp).
"Don’t be afraid, this is not another undigestible DJ scratch album.... The Main Event is a primarily instrumental hip-hop album, each track featuring dizzying amounts of scratching and turntable tricks. Sneaky’s bass arrangements bring elements of complex theory as well as three-chord punk guitar to compliment the sharp production of every piece."
In June 2002, the duo released their second album,
Superhero Music (streaming tracks:
Ogre,
Drunken Master II,
Criminal Robots,
Wasting Time,
Haze,
Once Upon A Time In The East,
Superhero Music,
Spacecrumbs,
Don't Turn Around)
"The cutups have grown up in the two years since their debut, The Main Event, with inspiration coming more from the somber material of DJ Shadow than the crazed comic book shenanigans of fellow turntablist Kid Koala. As such, the classically trained Sneak is given much more room to demonstrate his skills with a double bass, while Parker's Technics trickery is kept from the comics in favor of a role that is best described as slick sample manipulation."
The duo caught the ear of DJ Shadow, and he invited them to
open for his UK tour (live video clip;
audio from a 32 minute live set, which is also the first link of this post).
Jump ahead another two years for the biggest album release of the duo's career so far.
Fingathing and the Big Red Nebula Band gets further distribution, thanks to Ninja Tune releasing the album in North America, and adding on
a second CD with 5 tracks taken from the prior two albums. Fingathing also have a solid concept behind the album:
"The latest concept is aliens. Not just any old aliens, but a bunch of musical cosmic beings who happen to excel at playing the exact kind of inter-planetary cinematic music that Fingathing are known for.
The duo 'met' them (bear with us on this) after being fired into the cosmos in steel coffins following the faking of their own deaths on their last LP. Obviously they then recorded an album with their new extra-terrestrial friends and brought the results back to the UK."
The
UK 1CD version is streaming on Bandcamp, and the whole Ninja Tune 2CD set is
streaming on MySpace, or you can hear a few tracks on Soundcloud (
Walk in Space,
ReAnimo,
Themes From The Big Red,
Rock The Whole Planet,
Cluster Buster,
SYNERGY, and the
hidden track from the end of Return to ERT).
And then Fingathing went (mostly) quiet, as the duo (sort of) split to do their own things. To keep things interesting, Sneaky released two limited-edition CDr mixes on their website in 2005:
the Biscuit Mix and
the Bloody Axe mix, and in 2006
Peter Parker released his Life after Death Mix in a similar fashion. Since then, Sneaky posted
the Biscuit mix and
Bloody Axe mix online with tracklists, and Pete's mix can be found, floating around the 'net. Also in 2006, Fingathing released one EP and three "bundles" on
Artists First, an online digital music store that has since converted into a ringtone shop.
In 2008, Sneaky debuted some tracks from his then-forthcoming album through an EP he released on Artists First.
Feel Like A King... Pluck A String, which he released on Big Chill the following year. Big Chill put the album in the new genre of
"wood hop, where real instruments and genuine virtuosity, collide lovingly with samples, production anarchy, DJ brainwaves, jazz chops and some ace collaborations. " The album, including bonus 12th track, is
streaming on Bandcamp, or you can hear the bonus-less version
on Soundcloud. In 2010, Sneaky
tried (but failed) to crowdfund a vinyl release of the
Feel Like A Remix LP (streaming on Soundcloud, and
MySpace).
Peter Parker created an alter-ego,
Parkertron, which is associated with
the "party band" The Real Dolls (
named for synthetic head and body replicas that are used when actors or actresses get blown up [in Hollywood movies], not
RealDoll life-size sex dolls (SFW, Wikipedia)). The group released
an EP in 2006, and Parkertron made
a mixtape in 2009 for a further taste of the Real Dolls style. Their
self-titled album from 2010 is streaming on Bandcamp.
In
March 2010, Peter Parker and Sneaky posted a new video, declaring that Fingathing is not dead. They posted
a few more short clips of the duo in action, or chatting about their progress. In December 2010,
Fingathing debuted some new tracks on a Groovement podcats interview/mix, with some expectations that their new album would be coming out in the following year. But in 2011, the only thing that they released was
the Man Made Monster single (
streaming on Soundcloud, and
available as a free download, if you provide your email address).
The slow progress may be because the group is currently unsigned and are on their own at the moment, "
like Bill Bixby in Incredible Hulk or Stallone in First Blood." (Related: the
Apocalypso EP --
4 of the 5 tracks are on Bandcamp, and the missing track is on MySpace:
When Things Catch Up feat. Buck 65)
Final fun: the silent 3rd member of Fingathing is
Chris "Cavetroll" Drury, the
graphic artist whose style is seen on
nearly everything Fingathing.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:44 PM on January 27, 2012 [2 favorites]