A BIT OF HISTORY

THE BACKGROUND

Throughout the late 80s and early 90s The Greedy Beat Syndicate was one of the busiest funk/dance/acid rhythm sections around.

They locked down grooves for an astonishingly wide range of artists, never easily pigeon-holed. Take, for example, their mad acid work with Psychic TV guru Genesis P-Orridge at one end of the scale – with the smooth satin soul of PP Arnold and Pressure Point at the other. But more of all that later…

So who the hell are they anyway?

GBS members and London club regulars Matthew Best, Sean Maher and Anthony ‘Hugo’Longden worked through a gruelling apprenticeship on the punk/funk/soul/jazz/swing/R&B route writing and recording their own material, working as session players, and DJing.

Maher and Longden met when they were thrown together for a Figaro Club gig at The Fridge in Brixton. Maher had stepped into the breach with just two hours’ notice, and had to learn the set from an old tape machine while crammed into the back of a Triumph Toledo.

The pair hit it off instantly, and were still in place when the band became The Jumping Bealfontes, working the club circuit in support of the likes of Roman Holliday, The Chevalier Brothers, Richard Green and The Next Step, and Joboxers.

A radio one session with David ‘Kid’ Jensen opened doors to bigger and better things – but it also opened some cracks in the Belafontes’ line-up, and Maher and Longden were soon looking for a fresh challenge.

Bass player Longden had cut his teeth with west London funksters Standing Room Only, and had been looking to move away from the 50s swing style and into something harder, louder and, well… funkier. He found a willing accomplice in Maher, and within just three months Pressure Point had been formed, with Best taking his place on the drummer’s stool.

Best, whose credits at the time included such punk luminaries as the UK Subs and The Anti-Nowhere League as well as numerous demos for the Damned, completed what became one of the tightest funk units at a time when British crowds were craving Cameo, Jam and Lewis, Rick James, Rogers and Edwards…

Pressure Point featured several different vocalists, including Corinne Drewery, later of Swing Out Sister fame; Ingrid Mansfield-Allman (best known for chart-topping 1980 hit Southern Freeez); Angie Waithe and Lydia Gayle.

Gayle’s lilting vocals brought early success for Pressure Point with bossa classic Mellow Moods, voted People’s Choice on the weekly Gary Crowley within days of its release in 1985.

By 1987, PP Arnold had joined the line-up, recording an album with Pressure Point just ahead of her highly successful spell with The Beatmasters (Burn It Up) the following year. The album, This Is London, was produced by Steve James, son of classic funny man, Sid James of Carry On fame.

The LP featured a number of classically silky soul numbers, such as Dreaming, Stay, Mellow Moods, and Everything To Me.

At the height of their success, the Best-Maher-Longden team secretly formed The Greedy Beat Syndicate – a musical alter ego that spearheaded early use of the sampled sounds of the fledgling cut-up movement which snowballed into the trip-hop scene.

GBS unique take on the style was to play real instruments across a range of samples and loops, often developing well-known classic bass, guitar and drum lines themselves.

At that stage no-one had the faintest idea who or what GBS was – and they liked it that way.

Speaking in an interview at the time, Maher summed up the musical schizophrenia of those days.

“It was weird. One minute we were working in the studio with Pat Arnold and a big brass section producing pretty slick American-sounding soul and funk (if I say so myself!); the next we were sweating away in a bedroom surrounded by old albums and samplers from floor to ceiling.”

“It was liberating stuff – we could make things up as we went along much more easily with GBS, and we weren’t under the same kind of constraints – no record company or accountants breathing down our necks.”

“Nothing was off limits. We experimented with all sorts of different musical styles, and when we were asked to do a film score we even dabbled with bhangra – this was to come in very useful when we worked with Psychic TV and Genesis P Orridge later on.”

The first GBS album Stragglers From The Catastrophe (Captive But Safe) was an immediate success, though supply was always a headache – a factor that has made the early discs collectors’ items.

Study The Funk, released ahead of the album, was voted into the top three club singles of the 1980s by London-based City Limits magazine.

As the clubs picked up on the new phenomenon, GBS found itself in increasing demand, both as a unit and as individual session players, performing and writing for others, and even doing a bit of television and film work into the bargain.

Best had been working with Psychic TV for a number of years, touring in Europe, America and Japan with Genesis and Paula P Orridge during the Godstar incarnation of the band, and when he heard Gen was planning yet another shift in direction, he suggested bringing Longden and Maher into the mix.

A two year collaboration followed which married Gen’s anarchic experimental rock/punk with GBS’ slap bass/funk guitar/hard dance rhythms – it shouldn’t have worked. But somehow it did.

Tours in Europe and all over the UK followed, with Best, Maher and Longden being featured on the PTV Black video, among others; playing at Reading Festival, and in the bizarre surroundings of Tuppy Owens’ Sex Maniacs’ Ball.

With Gen’s departure from Britain, the PTV/GBS era came to a close, but collaborations with various members – Dan Black, Fred Gianelli (Turning Shrines) and Richard Schiessl (Sperm Records) have continued ever since.

More recently, GBS have turned their considerable talents sessions, television and film, providing the soundtrack for the ill-fated Norman Wisdom film Double X The Name of the Game, and the critically well received Guru In Seven.

Discography

To come.everything.

PHOTOS:

This is Matthew and Fred the Kookie Scientist from Psychic TV at Fabric in 2005.