Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | April 24, 2014 | 27
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Music
Coco and the Butterfields
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OU may not yet have come across Coco and the Butterfields, but then, they are only just embarking on their first UK tour. Made up of five former buskers from Canterbury – Tom Twyman, Dulcima Showan, Jamie Smith, Micah Hyson and Rob Wicks – the band make merry, hippyish folk-pop and are pretty much designed for festival season. Travelling around in a crazy colourful van and investing in lots of feathery headdresses on stage, ELLA WALKER found out a bit more about them from frontman Tom, ahead of their Cambridge Junction gig. So Tom, what’s your sound like? We like to think it’s quite a unique sound. Unlike what people would ever have heard before, but it’s a combination of what you might class as stereotypical folk, or country, but we’ve also got bits of blues grass and hip-hop elements. Overall I think it makes quite a pop-y sound really. But it’s definitely a very happy sound.
ᔡ Coco and the Butterfields, Cambridge Junction, Monday, April 28 at 8pm. Tickets £10 from (01223) 511511 / junction.co.uk.
With the five of you starting out as individual buskers, has that meant a lot of big personalities vying to control the direction of the music? I think that [big personalities] was key to the band taking off as well as it has. Because everybody is so different in the band, it’s really helped make it extremely diverse. You’ve basically created your own genre: Fip Fok. How does that feel? People started saying that word ‘Fip Fok’ as a joke because they combined the words folk, pop and hip hop. It was never a planned thing. But it suits you? Yeah, it was basically a case of busking with a guitar, adding a violin and then a beatboxer over the top which makes it
really quite interesting, obviously there’s a banjo and a double bass and then on bigger shows we have brass as well, a trumpet and trombone, but it sort of just happened. It just sounds quite fun. What are your influences? As a band we try and stay as original as we can, we try not to get influenced by anyone other than each other. We don’t want our band to sound like anyone else. Who would you like to collaborate with then – if you could pick anyone? Jason Mraz, a lot of us are a big g fan of him, we’d love to collaborate with him m one day. It’d be quite cool ol to get Eminem to rap on n a track – that’s the dream collaboration. What do o you want people to take from your music? When they hey come and see us live, obviously ly you want them em
to have a very, very good time. But with regards to the music, whether you would class yourself as someone you enjoys hip hop or someone who enjoys grunge music or rock music or folk, come away feeling that you don’t have to necessarily put yourself into any specific category. Do you ever still get the urge to return to your roots and go busking? We try and do it whenever we can. Obviously we don’t get nearly as much time as before, but busking for us is where it all started and it’s the rawest form of p performing. It’s fantastic because you can attract attrac so much attention and it’s a really rea good feeling when somebody stops and you know they’ve ta taken the time out of what they the were doing to listen to you. It’s really, really good fun busking. buskin Can’t make it to see them C at the t Junction? They’re playing playin Cambridge Folk Festival this summer too. s